Candid and frequently affecting ... Not a catalog of constant woes. Mr. Kureishi blends in thoughts and meditations on a variety of topics ... As with the best of his fiction, Mr. Kureishi suffuses his memoir with humor.
The entries are astute, nostalgic, gentle, angry, grateful, even angrier, even more grateful, scatological, always emotional, always biting ... The burning immediacy of each entry is unmistakable ... Kureishi’s style, his obsessions, his language—they’re all here in this extraordinary work ... The book cannot help making you ask: What will happen next? ... All of this Kureishi portrays with offhand precision and humor ... The sense of vulnerability is crushing, but it is also one of the characteristics Kureishi reveals about himself that makes him so likable here, and the writing so intimate. The tone is remarkable: even the self-pity has no self-pity ... Full of humor but also driven by a distinctive sympathy and a very precise and intricate propriety.
His memoir is good but modestly so. It contains a great deal of black comedy but its most impressive emotion is regret — for things undone and unsaid earlier in his life ... Remorse runs through this memoir’s veins like tracer dye. Kureishi stares hard at himself ... We confront the bare wood beneath the bark of Kureishi’s best earlier writing. But he is good and bracing company on the page. His book is never boring. He offers frank lessons in resilience, about blowing the sparks that are still visible, about ringing the bells that still can ring.
Its tone is freewheeling and informal. Kureishi’s meditations are wide-ranging ... Free-associative, and some of its chains of association are more compelling than others ... Art should 'frighten, if not alarm.' I am glad this book does.
A diary, a memoir and sometimes even a creative writing handbook, thoughts on literature and how to tell a story never being far from Kureishi’s mind. Some entries are elegantly shaped, others closer to a catalogue of scattered thoughts. Occasionally they are banal ... That Kureishi has written at all throughout this ordeal is both remarkable – despair, which he has clearly often felt in the past two years, is not a spur to productivity – and obvious: it is the way he engages with the world and has been for much of his nearly 70 years on the planet. That Shattered is a book he could not have written without this calamity befalling him must be of scant comfort, yet these dispatches from its front line are extraordinary.
Raw, earnest humour ... Mired in loss and pain, with his perspective still narrowed, Kureishi’s preoccupations are primarily nostalgic and scattered, and he knows it ... Kureishi’s fans will find Shattered wildly inspiring; his singular voice, his bawdy humour, his efforts to create meaning, all so characteristic and moving.
Enthralling ... Ruthlessly candid ... For all its misery, his ordeal seems to have given him a new access to compassion, forcing him to notice an entire category of people – those who are disabled – who were previously all but invisible to him.
Bracing candour ... Amusing ... The prose has a flinty, telegrammatic terseness that conveys an acute sense of crisis, of a catastrophe being processed in real time ... The book ends on a note of tentative optimism.
Bracingly candid, frequently funny but pretty harrowing too ... It’s brave of Kureishi and his publishers not to cop out and strike a note of false optimism. They make the reader sit with the unvarnished and unromantic reality of his condition.
In a series of reflective, chucklesome, and sometimes brooding 'dispatches' from his hospital bed in Rome and later in London, Kureishi narrates his consequential year of recovery after the Christmas 2022 fall and spinal injury that resulted in tetraplegia.
