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.”

The BS Column: The return of the short story

(Published in the Business Standard, August 04, 2009)
"For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” Hemingway’s finest short story was written for a $10 bet, has never been bettered and hints at an entire universe of love, loss and grief in its three two-word sentences.

Most short stories occupy a more generous compass, but as with the Hemingway classic, there has often been a suggestion that divides the short story writers from the other kind: short stories are what you do for fun, real writing is more serious. This means that you, the reader, are often shortchanged—as is evident from this year’s Booker longlist. The reports in India focused on the absence of subcontinental writers from the longlist, but the bigger question is why the Booker would continue to ignore short stories as a genre.

To offer just one example of what’s missing, consider Kazuo Ishiguro, who has been shortlisted (and won) in the past for several of his novels, but who is absent from the Booker longlist in a year when his collection of music-themed short stories, Nocturnes, has been widely acclaimed.

In my brief stint in publishing, I quickly learned that literary agents and publishing houses abroad won’t look at short stories, no matter how promising. It’s a circular argument. While it’s easier to publish short story collections in India than in more fiercely competitive markets, many publishing houses still remain wary of commissioning short stories, because of the traditionally low sales for this form of writing.

There are exceptions—writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and more recently, Palash Krishna Mehrotra made their debuts with acclaimed collections of short stories, but they remain outliers. In the US, where the once-formidable magazine market for short stories has crumbled, most agents will advise their authors to concentrate on writing the far more publishable novel, rather than the hard-to-place short story collection.

This has an often bizarre effect on a writer’s work, pushing many who are temperamentally short story writers at heart to attempt a form that they never quite settle into. Some writers, like Rana Dasgupta with Tokyo Cancelled, Banana Yoshimoto with Asleep or David Mitchell with Cloud Atlas, have created a hybrid between the short story and the novel, where a running thematic link, or characters who play cameo roles in successive stories, provide a sense of novelistic connection.

It’s far more common to “discover” a writer’s short stories only after s/he has made their bones as a novelist—so Aravind Adiga’s short stories, which predate White Tiger, were released only after the success of the novel, or Junot Diaz’s early collection, Drown, emerged in non-US markets only after The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has come out. Readers will, of necessity, be reading out of chronological order, but at least they’ll get to see the breadth of a writer’s work.

There are signs that the three-to-four decade-long obsession with the novel at the expense of the short story might be changing. Some of this has to do with the power and clout exercised by better-established writers; some of this has to do with the influence of major prizes, such as the Man Booker International and the Pulitzer. And, I hope, some of this may have to do with the changing tastes of the reading public; if publishing is faced with a growing demand for short stories, the industry can no longer hide behind the excuse that “short stories don’t sell”.

Earlier in 2009, the Man Booker International forced a re-examination of the importance of the short story when it handed the award to Alice Munro. Over four decades, Munro has published 16 collections of short fiction, and for years, criticism of her writing centred around the fact that she was “only” a short story writer, and had never attempted anything more ambitious.

The novelist Jane Smiley, one of the judges, put Munro’s achievements into perspective in her speech: “…The surface of Alice Munro’s works, its simplicity and quiet appearance, is a deceptive thing, that beneath that surface is a store of insight, a body of observation, and a world of wisdom that is close to addictive, a set of thoughts that we do not want to miss about characters and events that we feel a need to understand.”


In closing, here are a few suggestions. John Updike’s My Father’s Tears examines the world, 9/11, marriages and relationships from the perspective of the elderly and the ageing. Chimamanda Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck takes you into the world of a man in jail, the politics of a writing workshop and allows you to see America from the perspective of its newest arrivals. Kurt Vonnegut’s unpublished, often viciously funny early work is out in October, captured in Look at the Birdie. And Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness offers nine stories that deal with disfigurement and the loss of children, among other things. That heap of novels can wait for a while.




(Links: My Father's Tears, by John Updike, in the New Yorker.
Cell One, by Chimamanda Adichie, in the New Yorker.
Dimension, by Alice Munro, in the New Yorker.
The Guardian Summer Short Story Special--Dave Eggers, William Boyd, David Mitchell and a host of others.)