Hanif Kureishi's ‘Shattered’: A difficult patient’s notes on recovery

Kureishi’s latest book, Shattered, draws heavily on those posts, adding and editing the content to create a narrative thread of sorts. The result is an eclectic memoir, richly punctuated with advice on writing and living, while affording an intimate glimpse into one of the sharpest literary minds of our time.

For those who have devotedly followed Kureishi’s recovery online, the book doesn’t come bearing surprises. Yet, it’s really easy to get drawn into the conversational energy of his voice—whether he is bemoaning his sorry fate, unburdening his darkest thoughts, or making his trademark naughty observations, there is always a redeeming glint of that acerbic wit Kureishi is widely loved for.

Sample this aside: As a nurse tries to manually stimulate Kureishi’s bowel movement (warning: there’s a lot of ruminations on bodily functions), he remembers a scene from the past. “The last time a medical digit entered my backside was a few years ago," he writes, droll and forthright, as always. “As the nurse flipped me over she asked, ‘How long did it take you to write Midnight’s Children?’ I replied, ‘If I had indeed written that don’t you think I would have gone private?’"

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This confessional, no-holds-barred tone, alternating between miserable pain and caustic humour, keeps the reader hooked to the narrative like a voyeur. One wonders, though, what it must have been like for Kureishi’s family to record his candid thoughts on drugs, sex (including “an orgy" in Amsterdam), politics, writing, and psychoanalysis—day-in, day-out—for months. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the writer keeps returning to Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of the German writer Franz Kafka’s masterpiece, The Metamorphosis, who turns into a monstrous vermin one day. If, initially, Samsa evokes the pity and sympathy of his family, soon he begins to get on their nerves, becoming a liability for his parents and sisters, in whose hands he meets his cruel end.

Like Samsa, Kureishi suffers from spells of helpless rage, tempered by waves of despondency. He must resign himself to depending on the good graces of his close family to get through the worst indignities of his infirmity. Everyone’s patience is stretched thin. “It is tiring doing this work and there were tears and recriminations when I accused Isabella of going the full Bette Davis," he tells the reader. “She said I behaved as if I, Marcel Proust, had written Remembrance of Things Past on a toilet roll on which a rent boy had wiped his arse."

Apart from such daily scenes, which include more amicable interactions with fellow patients and swarms of visitors, Shattered is filled with Kureishi’s reflections on his life as a writer—an identity he feels he has been robbed of, since he became a “patient". Starting his career with the unlikely job of writing pornography (this leads to entertaining passages on good and bad sex writing), he went to work on screenplays for acclaimed films like My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Samie and Rosie Get Laid (1987), before making his foray into novels, stories, essays, plays and much more.

Kureishi acknowledges the shadow of his father, a sports journalist and failed novelist, behind his best work, such as the award-winning novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). There are insights into the writer’s abiding faith in psychoanalysis and the key role it plays in his life, including his 30-year relationship with his therapist. Most pertinently perhaps, Kureishi reveals how much of a tough time he’s had dealing with the changes that have befallen the material and intellectual circumstances of a writer’s life.

As a professional writer whose star rose in the 1980s and 1990s, Kureishi had the good fortune of making a living, for a long time, from sales of his books, plays and screenplays. He bought his first homes with his full-time writer’s income, raised a family, and was part of the heady euphoria of Britain’s turn to multiculturalism. He belonged to a generation that included literary celebrities like the late Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie—men who, like Kureishi, believed that “it is part of the writer’s job to be offensive, to blaspheme, to outrage, and even to insult".

It’s no surprise that Kureishi is unsympathetic to some of the current norms in the creative field, one of which pertains to the practice of employing “sensitivity readers" to ensure that books and movies don’t end up offending cultural sensibilities. “What would a ‘sensitivity reader’ have made of the work of D.H. Lawrence or William Burroughs?" Kureishi wonders. “I am relieved not to be a young writer today, working in this atmosphere of self-consciousness and trepidation, this North Korea of the mind."

It may be easy to dismiss such outbursts as the reaction of a writer who has failed to keep up with the exigencies of the present. Yet, these statements also reveal a rare vulnerability of a mind that has not only lived through decades of racism, Islamophobia and marginalisation by the sheer power of his pen, but also rooted for others like him to demand their place in the world, especially at a time when it was deeply unfashionable, not to mention aggressively hostile, to do so.

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In the final reckoning, Kureishi’s humanity shines through as he repeatedly salutes the stellar role played by immigrants and people of colour in running UK’s crumbling National Health Service. It is their selfless acts of service that ultimately helps one of the finest writers of our time overcome a dire roll of the dice and continue doing what he’s always done best—telling the stories of his time, our time.

Somak Ghoshal is an independent writer and editor.