‘A ll day, all night the body intervenes,” wrote Virginia Woolf in On Being Ill. It “blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body.
” On Boxing Day 2022, in Rome with his Italian partner Isabella, Hanif Kureishi felt dizzy while sitting at the table. He fainted, landing on his neck and becoming tetraplegic as a result. He spent 2023 in Italian and English hospitals, being prodded, rearranged and invaded while sending dispatches to his fans (dictated to Isabella and to his son, Carlo) via his popular Substack .
“I will never go home again. I have no home now, no centre. I am a stranger to myself.
I don’t know who I am any more. Someone new is emerging.” Now, those dispatches have been collected, edited, and expanded into a memoir .
In print and on screen, Kureishi is the author of many irreverent, funny stories about sex, drugs and coming of age. In The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), which won the Whitbread award for best first novel, he wrote unabashedly about the sexual ambitions and discoveries of a mixed race kid in London at the tail end of the 70s. Given the diet of shame most children of immigrants were fed back then, Buddha was groundbreaking.
Nothing was too shocking for Kureishi, and that was what made his writing so exciting. Shattered immediately reassures us that his raw, e.
