Hanif Kureishi

Oh my… but this was so profoundly awful on every level that I can hardly believe I read it, let alone that for some unfathomable and criminal reason, it was once placed on the 1001 list.

Badly written with flat characters who say and do entirely predictable things, this has a plot that, if Kureishi could actually write, might not be half bad. But he can’t write and the novel thus turns out wholly bad.

Gabriel’s parents separate and his father, a failed musician, attempts to salvage show more something for his future by reconnecting with Lester Jones, a famous rock musician he once played with in the 1970s. This results in Gabriel receiving a gift of a drawing from Lester. To protect his possession from his money-grubbing relatives, Gabriel duplicates the drawing and passes his own copies off as originals to more than one member of the cast. This ploy soon lands him in a dilemma, and this is where a good writer would have tied the plot in farcical knots. Kureishi’s simple attempt unravels at the first step with no surprises, and in the end everything resolves itself as if he was writing a screenplay for Disney.

Waste. Of. Time.

The eponymous Gabriel is supposedly 15, but you wouldn’t know it from some of the situations Kureishi puts him in:

At work [his mother] was like a woman he used to know.

This must mean he’s experienced enough to not only know a range of women but to have moved on from a few of them and achieved some kind of history with the opposite sex. More experienced than I was at 15 that’s for sure.

Not only does this 15-year-old understand avant gardism without any context or explanation, he dedicates his life to it:

‘At night even the most conservative of us becomes an avant gardist,’ his mother had said.
Gabriel was very interested in this. ‘I want to be an avant gardist all the time,’ he said.

The banality doesn’t stop there. I could have quoted swathes of the text for badly constructed writing that defines contrivance, but instead, I’ll just give one example of when Gabriel is sketching a pair of his boots alone in his room late one night:

In the centre of the page was a boot-shaped hole. As he turned the page, the boots were sucked back onto it, and everything returned to normal.
Or did it?

I expected the next line to read “duh duuuuuuuhhhhhh” and to hear 1950s gothic horror film music at this point, but everything just carried on as normal.

Or did it?

Actually, yeah, it did. I couldn’t wait for it to end. He writes so badly that at times I thought I was reading the first draft he’d put together when he’d had aspirations of being a writer at primary school. I honestly don’t think anyone would be worse off not having read this. show less

It was great to revisit this book and discuss it with my book group. It's as much about class and social mobility as about race and sexuality, but there is plenty of all these things. Karim is a great character, young and reckless, open to everything that comes his way. In fact all the characters are larger than life and leap off the page.
It's set pretty locally to where I live which adds to the fun, though its probably a bit less grim and racist round here these days.
It's really evocative show more of the music, permissiveness and chaos of 1970s London alongside the gritty grey reality of the suburbs. show less

"Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love"

'Intimacy' is about adult dissatisfaction and takes the form of the narrator's, Jay, extended meditation on the disintegration of his marriage. The book opens with the line ''It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back.'' and Jay goes on to explain why he is abandoning Susan, his wife, and their two young sons, aged 5 and 3 and goes on to expound his views on monogamy, parenthood, unhappiness show more and, of course, intimacy.

Jay is a screenwriter living in a comfortable house in London with his family but he has come dissatisfied with his life and in particular Susan who is the complete antithesis of his girlfriend, Nina, who wears ''cheap, light, hippie clothes'' and would ''go any distance for a rave.''

Jay seeks counsel from two friends who represent polarising philosophies. Victor, a divorcee, living in a shabby apartment, a hectic social life and a string of sexual conquests. Asif, a married man who adores his wife and children and despite marital differences wouldn't dream of abandoning it. It is a cot at Victor's place that Jay will move on to.

There is a certain humour in Jay's ruminations but sadly I found him shallow and charmless. For all his obsessive thinking, he understands very little. He is a misogynist who seems incapable of realising that it his own behaviour that has caused the rift in his marriage, making both himself and Susan unhappy in the process. In the end I felt whether or not Jay left Susan became irrelevant. ''I have been trying to convince myself that leaving someone isn't the worst thing you can do to them,'' he says. In Jay's case, it would probably be the best she would be far better off in the long run without him.

"Love cannot be measured by its duration."

So what did I make of the book? Frankly not much. Like Jay it felt shallow, self-indulgent and insubstantial. I felt that the author wanted to shock and titillate rather than be what the blurb seems to suggest, "the most astute and painful dissection of male sexual restlessness". On the plus side my copy was only 155 pages long which I was swiftly able to get through. I suspect that this is something of a marmite book, you will either love or hate it, but personally I cannot understand quite why this book is on the 1001 list because I am sure that there are far better books of a similar vein out there. show less

In the early 70's, South London, we meet teenager Karim, the son of an English mother and Indian father, Haroon, whom Karim nicknames both "God" and "Buddha of Suburbia" after Haroon begins leading groups of middle-class English suburbanites in his brand of living room Eastern mysticism. That the woman who is encouraging Haroon in the new career is also seducing him away from his family is obviously to Karim, who wants his family to survive but who also is entranced by both the woman and her show more handsome teenage son and wants to see what will unfold.
Over the next few years the reader follows Karim as he drops out of college, lies to his parents, gets brutally truthful at times, and has various crushes and encounters with both men and women, and makes good on his pronounced desire to be an actor. There's an awful lot of graphic sex, and some hilarious scenes, especially with Changez, a physically repulsive and lazy man who Karim's uncle was tricked into bringing over from Bombay to marry his daughter and help with the family business. That everyone else loathes Changez just makes him more interesting to the contrary Karim. show less