A Novelist Unleashed: Kureishi's New Book and the Roman Year Behind It

Hanif Kureishi's new book, Are You With Me Now?, was reviewed this week in the Guardian, and the notice opens not on the prose but on the author's recent biography. "Some months after returning home, after a grim year in hospitals in Rome and London," the review begins, "Hanif Kureishi begins to rebel." The sentence sets Rome at the threshold of the book: the city where his life was interrupted is also, in the reviewer's account, the place from which the writing now starts.

The Guardian's judgement is that the accident has not narrowed the work but sharpened it. The constraints of Kureishi's life after what the review calls a devastating accident, it argues, "infuse his writing with a new and thrilling immediacy", and the headline goes further, calling him "a novelist unleashed". The move is familiar in criticism — a writer confined to a room, and the room turning out to be an opening — but this review makes it as a claim about the page rather than about the man.

For a desk that reads Italy through foreign reviewers, the telling detail is which Rome is on offer. Not the Rome of the Biennale crowds or the terrace at dusk, but the Rome of wards and corridors, where a foreign visitor spends months as a patient rather than a tourist. It is the city Italians know and foreign correspondents seldom file: a capital whose hospitals admit the traveller who falls as readily as the resident who is ill.