The will | profile

Two years ago, Hanif Kureishi suffered an accident in Rome. Minimal in appearance, perhaps even a little clumsy, but catastrophic in its consequences, as it developed into quadriplegia from which he recovered very slowly. As he says in his latest book, “A Pieces,” while watching a soccer game on St. Stephen’s Day, he felt a slight dizziness and stuck his head between his legs to wet it. He doesn’t remember anything else about that moment, except that minutes later he woke up with his body twisted and in a grotesque position, unable to move. He fell from the chair so badly that his neck was twisted, which led to the quadriplegia from which he has suffered ever since.

The slow passage of the days since that afternoon is reflected in the book, a kind of diary. “You sit down to dinner and the life you knew is over,” writes Jean Dion in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” or you sit in the living room with a beer in your hand and watch a game. It doesn’t matter. Recovering what is gone is the task that Kureishi sets himself, putting together fragments of his life with the detailed description of rehabilitation, whose dynamics are no greater than that of grass growth, but the same will to reach for the light.

Kureishi deals with his insomnia by displaying ideas one after another in his head, he says, until, through thoughts, he fills a board covered with notes, trying to find connections in the middle of the darkness to reach a framework, a conceptual pattern that makes the search valid. One night, he writes, work becomes complicated because his body is trapped between the bed and the wall and he won’t leave until dawn when the first nurse of the day visits.

Even worse, although it may seem difficult, happened to Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French publisher and writer, who suffered a stroke that left him completely paralyzed and even in this condition he managed to write a book, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon), which Julian Schnabel adapted into a film with Mathieu Amalric as the protagonist. Bauby could only communicate with the blink of an eye, the butterfly, the only muscle that responded in his entire body, which he describes as a diving suit. In his book, he points out that at some point during his hospital stay he realized that there were two other things besides the eye that were not paralyzed: imagination and memory. With the help of a speech therapist, he was able to construct, letter by letter, which he recognized on the fly, the words needed to lift his book.

The episodes of Kureishi’s life become more interesting to the extent that they are remembered between the reflections of a kind of kaleidoscope that represents the narrator’s clinical situation and the adventures of his life, such as the days in Hollywood with his girlfriend, when he was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette by Stephen Frears. They would have no interest if they had not arisen from the retrospective reflection of someone who chose a path there. Kureishi could have stayed in Los Angeles and written screenplays, but he decides to return to London to become a writer, able today to grow that book while taking an enema or looking at the image of the Virgin Mary that dominates the room. As in Frost’s poem, taking the least expected path made all the difference.

In Kureishi’s book, as well as in Bauby’s work, the desire to write predominates. The urge for life that, even if limited, lives on when the world we know suddenly ends.

*Author and journalist.