Shattered: A Memoir
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.
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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.
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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.
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