Book review: Collected Stories, Hanif Kureishi

Collected Stories
Hanif Kureishi
Faber & Faber,
Rs 850, 671 pages
(Published in the Business Standard, July 13, 2010)



For a generation of Americans, John Updike was the writer they came of age with, and then followed into the plains and plateaus of middle age. Hanif Kureishi, for a certain generation of British Asians, has become their Updike, the uber-cool, edgier version who understood the rebellious years and then hung around long enough to chronicle the slow, unglamorous but not unrewarding slump into middle age.

A few decades ago, it would have been blasphemy to compare Kureishi with someone as mainstream, as firmly establishment, as Updike. This was the man who began his career writing pornography, who blew our minds with My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and The Buddha of Suburbia. Kureishi wasn’t just the guru of the new multicultural, globalised novel, he was its bad-ass, strutting, swaggering poster boy. “At the deepest level, people are madder than they want to believe,” he writes in Something To Tell You, and it’s this insight that he brought to his explorations of relationships, the new melting pot of Britain, marriages, intimacy, love, desire and fanaticism.

“The cruelest thing you can do to Kerouac is to re-read him at thirty-eight,” Kureishi wrote in The Buddha of Suburbia, but it’s not a dictum that applies to his own work, especially the stories included in this compendium. Collected Stories covers the writing years from 1997 to 2007 and includes work from Love in a Blue Time, Midnight All Day, The Body and eight new stories. This is late Kureishi, the mellowed, autumnal observer of love and decay rather than the impassioned rebel of the early years. The cruelest thing you could do to Kureishi would be to read these stories before you turn thirty-eight.

“I used to like talking about sex,” says the narrator of Blue, Blue Pictures of You. “All of life, I imagined — from politics to aesthetics — merged in passionate human conjunctions… . I did, at one time, consider collecting a ‘book of desire’, an anthology of outlandish, melancholy and droll stories about the subject.” What a book this would have been, if Kureishi had brought himself to write it; but instead, Kureishi country turns out to be a more familiar, if still complex, world. The stories from Love in a Blue Time have dated better than Midnight All Day, and while The Body retains something of the force of Kureishi’s grand talent for subversion, its speculations about the future of desire, and a race of “wax immortals” who possess new bodies, have been overtaken not just by science fiction but by avatars, robots and other modern paraphernalia.

In his short stories, Kureishi allows himself an intimacy and an openness that can be absent from his longer fiction, where he is always an observer of desire, of break-ups, love and its fault lines — rarely a participant. There is nostalgia here, and regret mixed in with the rebellion: this is the territory of middle-age, populated by therapists (perhaps the ultimate inaccessible lovers of our time), the ebbing of desire, and the frustrations of apparently fulfilled desire. If rebellion has failed — or, more accurately, remains the domain of the young — there is always art, and political engagement; but both are as transgressive, and as elusive, and as unsatisfactory, as desire.

The stories that work best are his earlier work: the classic My Son The Fanatic remains a stark exploration of the gulf between those who are capable of faith, and the fanaticism of deep, implacable belief, and those who are helplessly wedded to reason. Perhaps the best of the most recent work is the brutal Weddings and Beheadings, where the narrator films beheadings “common in this war-torn city, which is my childhood home”. It’s a short story, just three pages long, but it is essential reading for anyone interested in our culture of the violence of media voyeurism: “To make it work on television, it helps to get a clear view of the victim’s eyes just before they cover them.”

Taken as a whole, Collected Stories is not a monumental work. Too many of the stories here have not dated well, or remain fixed to a particular place and a particular time; the London of Kureishi’s youth, so startlingly different and emblematic of the shifting politics of Britain, has been replaced by other Londons, other Britains. And far more than his novels or his films, his short stories expose the very limited range of Kureishi’s writing. But you’ll still read this for his insights, for their precision and wry wisdom: “We are unerring in our choice of lovers, particularly when we require the wrong person. There is an instinct, magnet or aerial, which seeks the unsuitable. The wrong person is, of course, right for something — to punish, bully or humiliate us, let us down, leave us for dead…”

For those of us who have aged and greyed almost alongside Kureishi, or at any rate, in his energetic, angry, peripatetic wake, Collected Stories will still be an essential addition to the bookshelves, despite its limitations. We need Kureishi’s worn gaze, and his cynical but heartfelt reminder: “Thank God, even now I am capable still of rebelling against myself.”

Jaipur Literature Festival: final notes

-The Hanif Kureishi-Amitava Kumar session was a classic example of how matching the right moderator to the right writer can pay off massive dividends. The JLF had a little trouble with this, with Chetan Bhagat asking Anjum Hassan daft, condescending questions about how it felt to move from "the dressing table to the writing table". It was clearly the Teen Deviyan and One Idiot panel.

Amitava, in contrast, had done his homework and knew exactly when to push Kureishi a little and when to step back. But the audience provided the best moments. He was asked: “As a Muslim, do you consider yourself an aberration?”

Hanif’s response, “That’s a great question. Hmmm... am I an aberration? All my life I have fought against authoritarian systems, and any religion is an authoritarian system. I don’t think of myself as a Muslim.”

And then an old gentleman asked the Question of the Festival: “Mr Kureishi, my grandson was circumcised. It was very painful for him. Do you remember your circumcision? Did you feel the pain too?”

"Thank you," said Kureishi. "It’s been a long time since anyone took such an interest in my genitals.”

-My favourite audience reaction to the fest? Provided by a glamorous young fashionista in a Paris kitsch outfit and a truly gorgeous hat, who was seen exiting the Baithak tent at great speed. "Is everything all right, darling?" an equally glamorous editor asks. The fashionista grips editor's shoulder. "Darling!" she says. "They're talking about books in there!"

-Censorship works in strange ways. I'm chatting with a bunch of schoolgirls at the Full Circle bookshop. One of them buys the Tranquebar anthology of erotica, edited by Ruchir Joshi and Sister Jesme's autobiography. As we're talking, she brings out a Stephen King hardback from her rucksack, and slips the cover over Sister Jesme's book. "My parents won't let me read that," she says. I look at the erotica book. "Oh, that's all right," she explains. "The other one is anti-religion, so...."

-Local substitutes have a strange and sublime feel to them, too. By day four, the festival's running out of the Kinley and Bisleri bottles--as an aside, there has to be a better alternative to the plastic glasses, even paper cups would be less wasteful--and raiding local suppliers. "Roy!" booms an authorial voice as I reach for a glass of water. "Are you sure you want to drink that?" I look at the canister: pure, filtered water that rejoices in the brand name of PeeMee.

-"I have an idea for a book..." "Ma'am, is that Ravi Singh? (Penguin's head honcho) I want to show him my first three chapters..." "So I'm writing this really great novel, I have 30,000 words down..." There's a lot of hustling happening on the sidelines (and Ravi Singh, you owe me for steering the demented writer with the 1,200-page poetry saga about a suffering man who owns a cement factory but dreams of being a poet away from you) and as I see the book ideas, partial synopses and excerpts being thrust upon wary editors, I remember a quiet aside from Roddy Doyle: "I have never asked for an advance for a book that I haven't completed." Words to live by.

-Leaving on Republic Day; at the Clarkes Amer hotel, there's an oddly touching flag-hoisting ceremony on the lawns attended by everyone from the managerial and housekeeping staff down to the darwans. It's quite sweet, right up to the moment where we salute the flag--and a local band breaks into a very familiar song. Not Jana Gana Mana, but All Izz Well from 3 Idiots.

Book review: Something To Tell You

(I don't review books published in India for reasons of conflict of interest, and enjoyed the break for a while. When this came my way, though, I realised how much I'd missed it.)






Something To Tell You
Hanif Kureishi
Faber & Faber,
Rs 495, 345 pages
ISBN 978-0-571-23874-3


There's a certain kind of writer who should be allowed to grow old only if he promises to do it disgracefully. Many of Hanif Kureishi's fans would argue that he belongs to this group, and perhaps some of the disappointment that a faithful Kureishi reader feels when reading Something To Tell You stems from the fact that this is such a neatly wrapped, conventional, sedate novel.

Something To Tell You could be seen as the bookend to Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia. It features a similar laundry list of characters, ranging from the eccentric to the forceful to the lost, drifting through the landscape of Britain's suburbia. Many of Kureishi's characters are either deeply seductive or determinedly mundane, caught in political causes or domestic dramas that are large enough to encompass and engulf their lives. In this novel, Kureishi's sixth, he stirs so much into the mix that what emerges is a thick soup where no particular ingredient stands out.

The central character is Jamal Khan, psychoanalyst: "Like a car mechanic on his back, I work with the underneath or understory: fantasies, wishes, lies, dreams, nightmares—the world beneath the world, the true words beneath the false… At the deepest level people are madder than they want to believe." It's promising stuff, but the story unfolds in predictable ways. Jamal has his own secret, one so dark that when he unburdened himself to his own analyst, the experience was classically cathartic, unleashing floods of shit and vomit in the aftermath of the session.

As Jamal, now middle-aged, looks back to the world of 1970s suburbia, where his personal tragedy is set, Something To Tell You flashes into beguiling life every so often. Jamal may be the quintessential dull character made interesting by circumstance, but many of the people who surround him are fascinating—Kureishi has a master's eye for speech, dialogue and the quirks of the individual, and there's much to hold the reader's attention. There's Jamal's tattooed-and-pierced sister Miriam, a cameo appearance by Karim from The Buddha of Suburbia, and another by Omar Ali, now 'Lord' Ali, from My Beautiful Laundrette. Karim discusses the negatives of being on Celebrity; Ali is now one of the smooth millionaires who mushroomed in Tony Blair's warmth. Jamal's London is as detailed as ever, from the unlimited menu of sexual possibilities to the children's school that comes recommended by Mick Jagger.

It's when Kureishi drags his attention back to the plot that Something To Tell You sags. Jamal's most important love was with an Indian girl, Ajita, who carries her own set of secrets—secrets rendered almost banal in the retrospective gaze of the therapist who has, almost literally, heard it all. But as a young man, what he learns sparks a tragedy; he and his friends confront Ajita's father. In the misadventure that follows, the man dies, leaving Jamal and his friends marked in very different ways.

In the aftermath of this death, which is laid securely at the doors of those who had organized protests against Ajita's father's factory, Jamal introduces a compelling interlude in Pakistan. He and his sister Miriam are reunited with a father who smells almost comfortingly of alcohol, and to the world of Karachi. Neither Karachi nor Pakistan are what he had imagined; instead of the spirituality Miriam expects to find in Karachi, she and Jamal discover a ruthlessly materialistic place: "Deprivation was the spur". His father is a trapped man, rare in Karachi for his integrity, but yearning not for Britain so much as for Bombay. There's a moment of genuine poignancy here; Jamal is at home in Britain in a way his father will never be in his own country.

But that moment passes as Kureishi returns us to the world of the couch and the closet, and introduces a new but ineffectual plot twist. As one of his friends attempts to shoulder his way back into Jamal's life, the now-respectable therapist has to decide what to do with this particular twist in the narrative. He is at peace with the past; the moment when the man he has inadvertently murdered "clung to me, his fingernails in my flesh" has passed. What he has to solve now is his friend's demand for redemption and reparation; the incident damaged his friend far more than it damaged him, and for a brief moment, the secure foundations of his comfortable therapist's life are rocked. But only briefly; Kureishi is unwilling to take this book into the messy, action-packed territory of the conventional thriller, and the threat peters out, leaving a kind of resolution in its wake.

Kureishi's preoccupation is with the stories we can and can't tell, with the narratives we suppress that may come back to haunt us, and yet as Something To Tell You limps to a desultory close, it resembles nothing more than a rambling session on the psychiatrist's couch. The vast and often amusing, sometimes tedious landscape of this novel is littered with the jargon of psychiatry—avoidance, catharsis, subliminal memories, the "spume and irruption" of the unconscious—but few of the profession's deeper insights. There are moments of illumination, as when Jamal remarks that "Listening is not only a kind of love, it is love." But as with many of the key insights and observations in this novel, it's left to lie there on the couch, never coming to life.

Kureishi might argue that this is the right shape for a novel of this decade, that indeed, the novel should be loosely constructed of random conversations, that it should introduce you to people who flit in and out of the narrative just as real people do in our lives, that it should be full of incident and trivia simultaneously, that it should avoid closure, since most people's lives have little closure in them. For the reader, though, Something To Tell You doesn't have nearly enough to say.

(For the Book Review, July 2008)

Hanif Kureishi

(For Time Out, Mumbai, February 2007)

When Hanif Kureishi visited Calcutta briefly in the late 1980s, we thought we knew all about him. My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, his two early films, were cult classics. His best work—The Black Album, The Buddha of Suburbia, Intimacy, My Son the Fanatic, The Body--was still ahead of him. But more than the work, we worshipped the man.

He was a smaller, slighter figure than we had expected: confronted with an audience of giggling, awed schoolgirls, he disappointed us by being more polite than profane. But he exuded rebelliousness, and a kind of glamour. He spoke of being called a "Paki", of race riots, and for the first time, many of us sensed a darker, more divisive world lying outside the placid borders of our own quiet, apolitical lives.

He spoke of knowing from his teens onward that he wanted to be a writer, of making films, and possibilities we hadn't admitted to ourselves began to open up for us. Asked by a greatly daring classmate what he thought about homosexuality, which was still seen in our Calcutta in Victorian terms, as the love that did not dare speak its name, he said insouciantly: "It's just two people in love, innit?" We gasped. And I sometimes wondered, years later when that generation of women allowed themselves a previously unthinkable freedom of choice, whether Kureishi's black-clad figure had much to do with this.

How many boundaries has Kureishi's work crossed? He experimented with drugs, explored his sexuality and wrote freely about the results. He explored what it meant to be a "Paki" in London; in later years, curious about his lack of faith, he spent time in London's mosques, exploring Islam, belief, fanaticism and belonging. He spared nothing, not even himself. When his marriage failed and he walked out on his wife and two sons, he wrote the controversial Intimacy, about a man whose marriage had failed and who walked out on his family. Unusually for a rebel, he found themes beyond rebelliousness, turning to the body, to relationships, to the ordinary conundrums of people's lives.

"In the end there is only one subject for an artist," he wrote in Something Given. "What is the nature of human experience? What is it to be alive, suffer and feel? What is it to love or need another person? To what extent can we know anyone else? Or ourselves? In other words, what it is to be a human being. These are questions that can never be answered satisfactorily but they have to be put again and again by each generation and by each person. The writer trades in dissatisfaction.."