Review by Booklist Review
Creativity, contemplation, and catastrophe converge when novelist and screenwriter Kureishi (The Nothing, 2018) has an accident in Rome. A dizzy spell while sitting in a chair is followed by a fall that causes a severe neck injury resulting in paralysis. Surgery and extensive rehabilitation therapy ensue. He spends about a year as a patient in five different hospitals before returning home. His goal is to be able to stand up. Kureishi experiences a torrent of emotions-- anger, fright, self-pity, shame, helplessness and hopelessness, even envy. Although his body is "broken," Kureishi almost incongruously asserts, "Since I became a vegetable, I have never been so busy." His narrative is regularly interrupted by common hospital occurrences--an enema, an injection of a blood thinner, an early morning body wash. Kureishi recounts friendships with fellow patients, the toll on his family, and the kindness of "overly optimistic" health care professionals. He ponders identity, disability, and sexuality, and analyzes the act of writing, deciding that "fear is the engine of art." An admirable account of an arduous journey traversing a dreadful injury, metamorphosis, healing, and acceptance.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this raw but uneven account, Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia) presents diary entries that others transcribed for him while he was recovering from a debilitating fall. The author was at his girlfriend's Rome apartment in 2022 when a dizzy spell left him in a "grotesquely twisted position" on the floor, leading the 67-year-old to believe he was dying. "It wasn't the past but the future I thought I about," he writes. "Everything I was being robbed of, all the things I wanted to do." As Kureishi recouped in the hospital from the spinal injury he sustained in his fall, the existential reckonings continued. His diary entries ricochet between his fears that he'll never return home, reflections on his career, and memories of his childhood as the son of a Pakistani immigrant with his own thwarted literary ambitions. Angry, needy, and desperate for company, Kureishi finds occasional silver linings in more time with his busy sons and new opportunities to practice vulnerability. The author's rambling thoughts are by turns insightful and irritating; breakthroughs about the value of family brush up against tiresome name-dropping and crude "finger up my arse" descriptions of life in rehab. Inconsistency mars this otherwise pointed and moving narrative about the loss of bodily autonomy. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Feb.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
After the fall. In 2022, Kureishi, then 68, collapsed at his partner's apartment in Italy, partially breaking his neck and suffering spinal nerve damage and resulting tetraplegia, a near-complete paralysis of his hands, arms, and legs. Dictating verbal diary entries to his partner, Isabella, from his hospital bed in Italy, then in West London, the celebrated British Pakistani playwright (My Beautiful Laundrette,The Buddha of Suburbia) details his struggle to heal and thrive despite immense pain, frustration, and a missing sense of time, as well as the toll this crushing ordeal would have on his relationship with Isabella: "We will have to find a new way of loving each other," he admits. Enhancing these provocative entries are the author's ruminations and pointed perspectives on his life, career, family, childhood, sex, Isabella (whom he proposes to while incapacitated), and his friendship with Salman Rushdie, "one of the bravest men I know." He also considers the fascist nature of Italian government and how it affects the precarious lives of young queer and nonbinary individuals. Psychologically processing his life-altering condition is one thing, but Kureishi must also contend with his arduous, agonizing, and helpless physical condition and the ensuing rehabilitation suddenly thrust upon him. Yet despite feeling "battered and broken," the ever-resilient author manages to inject levity and revelatory catharsis into his daunting "new reality." He contemplates how becoming paralyzed affords him the opportunity to meet and empathize with new people, and he ponders the possibilities of somehow achieving some type of modified sexual pleasure again. The memoir is also cautionary for readers who mistakenly believe they are blessed with hardship immunity: "There isn't a family on the planet that will evade catastrophe or disaster." Kureishi harrowingly reminds us that it takes just one fall to upend an entire lifetime, forever. Refashioning his life after an accident--with grace, dignity, and black humor. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
