Published on January 5, 2025 at 2:37 p.m. / Modified on January 5, 2025 at 2:41 p.m.
8 mins. reading
“The day after Christmas, in Rome, when I returned from a pleasant walk to the Piazza del Popolo which then took me to the Villa Borghese, I had a fall.” When he published this first note on the Substack platform, he did not spare his effects. In this story distilled day by day and reworked for the work published today, it all begins with the catastrophe as the epicenter, ground zero around which the life before will be reread. Hanif Kureishi was already a writer of radical otherness. In his first novel, he was able to immerse us in the head of a British teenager with Pakistani origins. In the first screenplay he wrote for Stephen Frears, My Beautiful Laundrettehe made us experience the reality of a homosexual with multiple identities.
Today, in Shattered, it allows us to feel what a human experience means when we cannot scratch ourselves and when we no longer even think about making love, when the body becomes exclusively a field of medical intervention and the experiences which precede the accident are always tinged with deep nostalgia. Before he fell, Hanif Kureishi was already hilarious – it was the ridiculous person he was tracking down in tragedy. Nothing has changed. While his body is still, it is the distance that seems to save him.
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