Hanif Kureishi’s ordeal becomes a book

“I’m in hospital. I can’t move my arms and legs. I can’t scratch my nose, I can’t make phone calls, I can’t feed myself. As you can imagine, it’s humiliating, demeaning and a burden to others.” Thus begin the first dramatic chronicles of the British writer and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, 70 years old on December 5, relating to his ordeal that began on December 26, 2022, when he collapsed in an apartment in Rome after a “pleasant walk” in Piazza del Popolo and Villa Borghese.

Kureishi collected the diaries of his illness in the book entitled “Shattered” (literally broken, destroyed), created together with his son Carlo, who recorded and transcribed his speeches, and Simon Prosser, editorial director of Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of the Penguin group Random House who published it today in the UK. The Italian translation will be released by Bompiani on 6 November with the title “In frantumi”. During 2025, Kureishi’s new work will appear in the USA (in February for Ecco Press), then in Germany, France, Spain and other countries.

“I had just watched Mo Salah (Liverpool player) score a goal against Aston Villa and had taken a sip of beer when I felt dizzy…. I woke up a few minutes later in a pool of blood.” That Boxing Day two years ago Kureishi was on the brink of death. After that fall, the author of “The Buddha of the Suburbs” and the screenplay for the film “My Beautiful Launderette” (1985) by director Stephen Frears can no longer walk, write or wash; he cannot do anything without the help of others.

His odyssey began first in hospital, then in a rehabilitation centre, with the hope of returning to the house in London, which will welcome him a year later, transformed to adapt to him, who in turn adapts with difficulty , anger, humor, courage to his new here and now. “Many people say that when you’re at the point of death, your whole life flashes before your eyes, but I didn’t think about the past so much as the future, about everything that had been taken from me, about all the things I wanted to do,” says Kureishi. The future, as it becomes present, is the subject of this book, a series of dispatches from the hospital bed and after returning home, dictated to his loved ones and then patiently edited, which return Kureishi’s voice. as we heard her in her novels: fierce, ironic, honest. The result is the diary of a shattered existence, punctuated by care and illuminated by the presence of others, family, old and new friends, doctors, nurses, sick companions. An existence to be lived in another way, to be reinvented every day without giving up, because “I don’t want to let go: I want to do something with all this”.

Some well-known colleagues were able to preview the book. Salman Rushdie said: “Hanif Kureishi has long been one of the most exciting, irreverent and influential voices of his generation. In this beautiful and moving memoir he confronts personal calamity with wit, no-nonsense honesty and literary grace. With an extraordinary result: Zadie Smith noted, “Many things fall apart in this unsentimental account of a devastating fall, but some things remain perfectly intact. Hanif’s humor, talent, curiosity, clarity and ferocity are all there. I really liked it.”

There is no shortage of irony in the observations offered by “Shattered”. “I have to say that being paralyzed is a great way to meet new people,” Kureishi said in a commentary recorded and transcribed in a Rome hospital. His mood decreases at other times when he declares himself: “I don’t want to live like this, it sucks and I get tired of asking Isabella to do so many things for me.” Kureishi refers to the Italian publicist Isabella D’Amico, his patient companion, owner with Valeria Frasca of an important communications agency.

According to Kureishi’s chronicles, the return home generated anxiety and nervousness, with him returning to the “world of the healthy” in his condition as a “disabled man”: “I fear what others look like or what they will think when they see me. I am terrified of my fantasies about the healthy, busy life they enjoy with their fit bodies. I will never be like them again. I will have to learn how to live the way I am now, but no, I want to, and this is an internal struggle, I don’t want to lose myself”.