Hanif Kureishi Books

This is the screenplay of one of the more important movies of 1980s - introducing two important themes connected with minorities: racism and homophobia. Kureishi managed to weave them into a single and gripping plot. Reading the screenplay, however, as screenplays always do, is like licking sweets through a glass-pane. The added value of this volume are essays of Kureishi on related themes. The real thing is the movie, so go ahead and see it.

Though the surroundings is against this homo-couple - economic situation, racial backround, family and friends - their love lives, great..good reading, even or just because of the film is known

a compelling love story set against a backdrop of violent race relations in the apocalyptic urban wasteland of modern London.

Peter Chaudhry

The protagonist of Hanif Kureishi's delightful novel is Gabriel, a fifteen-year-old London schoolboy trying to come to terms with a new life, after the equilibrium of his family home has been shattered bt the ousting of his father.

Fending for himself, as well as providing emotional support to his confused (and confusing) parents, Gabriel is forced to grow up quickly. The only support he can draw upon is from his remembered twin brother, Archie, and from his own 'gift', which is accompanied by sensations that urge him inti areas of life requiring the utmost courage and faith. A chance visit to seventies rock star Lester Jones crystallizes the turbulent emotions inside Gabriel, and helps him to recognize and engage with his gift.
--- from book's back cover

As a huge fan of Hanif K, I was looking forward to this book, and it's very well done. The opening chapter basically consists of the most in-depth interview with Hanif that I've ever read, and it's absolutely fascinating. Consider this: 'To try to fit in with (the world) would prevent you from writing anything. For example, does the world want a film about a gay Nazi running a launderette? The work creates the market rather than the other way around, as with, for example, postcolonial writing where the works create the interest and the label comes later. When you imagine a mixed-race Asian living in the South London suburbs, you can't ask if anyone *wants* to read about him because no one *has* previously written about him, so you can't know.'

Nahem Yousaf's discussion of TBOS is equally interesting, and he writes brilliantly about the BBC television adaptation, too. If you haven't seen that yet, please try to get hold of it on video! All in all, this is an excellent little book. Recommended.

My Son the fanatic is a short story of an immigrant from Pakistan. The underlying theme of this novel is the struggle of the asian immigrants face in an alien society which refuses to accept them, treat them as equals and the ways in which they deal with the alienation. There is a sharp contrast in the way Pervez and his son Farid deal with the sense of belonging and being a part of society.

With all the compromises and loses Pervez suffers in his migration; he appears to take them as a part of his experience and adventure of life; to him it seems to be worth the price. He mentions how better his life has been in comparison to having stayed back. He refuses to acknowledge the cold behavior of the local British.

His son Farid on the other hand seems to have considerable anger and is not disillusioned by the British cold behavior. He finds the society constraining, limiting and degrading and feels to be a victim in his country. Having been excluded he is tempted to exclude others. He finds comfort with his own people and gets attached towards Islam. Having been brought up in secular Britan , he would turn the to a form of belief that denies him the pleasure of society in which he lived. Having devoted his life to pleasure: the pleasure of sex, music, alcohol and friends; he detracts and spends time in abstinence; for in abstinence he felt strong.

Hanif in his short novel has touched the conflicts a lot of asian families feel having migrated to a foreign country. He has outlined the characters brilliantly and this is most certainly a very entertaining novel to read.

I don't like the story so much, because social stories are not my taste, a little bit action must be. But save for my personal taste the story isn't so bad. It's a theme which exists all over the world. It's an easy-to-understand story. So if you want to read a short and interestering story, i can prefer it to you.

It is an interesting shortstory. It is a story about a father son conflict, about intolerant parents who try to force their will by exerting violence on someone.A big problem in this story is the contrast between western civilisation and the Islamic world and their religion. I think this story is a good example for problems like different religions, intolerance, growing up, family problems, conflicts, etc. An extreme situation is shown to learn from it and to draw attention to the problems of the readers. In my opinion it could be very helpful not to do the same mistake as Parvez, the father in the story, did.

I find the story boring. The theme isn't interesting for young people. I can identify me with the father-son conflikt, but the reasons why the problems are become i don't understand. The religion than problem between father and son i know,but a so intolerant attitude i don't understand.

I think that the story is a mixture of a lot of ideas and feelings and very difficult to explain or to interpret.The relationships between the characters are intricate.The conflict between father and son only exist, because none of them is able to talk about their ideas. Parvez, the father uses his son to brag and doesn't want to accept the right situation. The son, Ali, is religious and doesn't want to accept the life-style of his father.He wants to live like his ancestors in Pakistan, but when Parvez wants to talk, Ali isn't interested. Although they have a different behaviour, I think that their heart is the same.

Kurieshi had a great and creative idea on his hands when he decide to write about transfering from an old body to a new. Unfortunately, the story sluggishly moves from one scene to the next, and the minor characters never really get developed. And the sex -- yes if you're going to inhabit the 25-year-old body of an "Italian footballer" as the main character does, you're going to revisit some of the enjoyments of youth, but there's a lot of other things Kurieshi neglects about what if might feel like to inhabit a new body. Seems like Kureishi had to fullfill some contract obligations and needed to whip out a story on demand. Great idea, not enough time spent developing it.

I agree with the reviewer's take on this book: a really interesting premise and it starts off great, but then it shoots off in a bunch of strange directions. Not horrible but not great; I was expecting much more.

Reads like late Ballard (not a good thing). The characters are thin and obvious, and the retreat was handled far more expertly by Lorrie Moore in her story, "Terrible Mother." The penultimate scene is how he should have ended this novella. But as it is, he ends it on a curiously tyro note and here we are.

Mr Kureishi's collection of stories opens with "The Body" in which the protagonist, Adam, is an ageing professor of literature and writer. His wife Margot claims that men tend to get "particularly band-tempered, pompous and demanding" when they reach a certain age. Furthermore, one of his students nearly offends Adam when he states that he now looks anything like his picture on the back of his books. All this happens as Adam meets one of his admirers, Ralph, at a party. Ralph explains to Adam that some old - and rich - people are now having their living brains removed and transplanted into the bodies of young dead people. He assures him that the operation has already been performed successfully hundreds of times, as was the case on himself. Finally convinced by the numerous women eyeing Ralph at the party, Adam decides to undergo the operation and selects from a broad variety of dead corpses at the clinic the body of an athletic and very handsome young Italian footballer, settling for a "short term body rental" of six months. The outcome of the operation is successful and so begins for Adam - now Leo - a very surprising new life indeed.
Mr Kureishi's short stories are witty, incisive and funny. He is a keen observer of the human condition and he treats subjects like love, parenthood and the problem of happiness very skilfully.

Adam is a sixtyish writer who has achieved sucess, but is now in failing health. He decides to pursue a most unusual offer--the chance to have his brain (his personality, really) transplanted into a young healthy body. Never mind where this body comes from or how it got that way. He is assured that lots of "in" people are doing this now, becoming "newbodies," with a whole new chance at life, youth, sex, and time.

Good deal? Maybe not. Maybe not so good if you can't take your status with you, if you can't take your friends with you, or your wife, or your relationships. Maybe not if somebody wants your new young body enough to kill you for it, and there's no way to get back to your own.

Yes, the concept is preposterous. It isn't science fiction, as there is no attempt to bring in any science. However it is a concept that has occurred to most of us at one time or another. What if we could live again, be young again, with all the wisdom we've acquired by aging? Would you do it? Would I? Might be fun for a while, but there would be a price to pay. Maybe more than I would be prepared to pay.

Author Hanif Kureishi does a wonderful job with the concept, writing in an elegant, literary style that is simply a delight to read. This is not a book you should over analyze, just enjoy it and let it stimulate your thinking. Yes, the premise is absurd, but the book works. I enjoyed it immensely and I recommend it highly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

It is difficult to tell why Hanif Kureishi did not come up with anything new but decided to replay the themes of his most successful novel The Buddha of Suburbia. However, he did when he shouldn't have. This is a nice novel but there is so little inside that you may pass it by and never miss it. If you don't know Kureish yet - get Buddha. Gabriel's a mistake.

Hanif Kureishi's fiction is one of my minor addictions. I love his irreverent wit and the mastery of his dialogue. He is a truly gifted observer and listener. Kureishi is an interesting author because he vacillates between the self-assurance of the satirical writer and the vulnerability that is part of being human. He used to rage against the very people by whom he wanted to be loved - as if they could never love him enough. In this sense, "Intimacy" is his most instructive and illuminating book.
Gabriel's Gift is, in some ways, a re-run of his first novel, "The Buddha of Suburbia", this time with a happy end for the characters. Kureishi seems to have mellowed a lot since his earlier writings, but this change has not yet translated into a new style of writing or into new ideas. Gabriel's Gift is a book that gave me the sense of the author wanting to explore his roots as an artist in order to get somewhere, but he did not quite know where (which, of course, is not the hallmark of a great novel). But then again, Hanif Kureishi is always in search of himself. It is one of his strengths. Sometimes he delivers great writing along the way, at other times he does not.

Words. Words are the key of the great literature. Words are in fact, the thing which makes art, however you look upon it. And there is no artistic masterpiece without words (at least when it comes down to literature).
This novel is almost completely written in dialogue. It's the dialogue between Gabriel and Rex, Gabriel and his mother, and Gabriel and every other character in book. But, there is nothing in this book beside that dialogue.
It's an endless parade of talking, words without emotion in them, whithout and sense of fear, exasperation, passion, just plain old worlds, full of clichés, which are supposed to make a statement about the outside world, and about the mothern ways of living in contradictio with old (60's, 70's) way of live. They try to be critique of media, of famous people, and poshy ladies in rich outfits. But they are not.
This kind of story was told many times before, each period has it's own, "manifesto" so to say, and many times it was better said by the authors who had more talent than Kureishi.
When I completed this book, I felt nothing. Just emptiness, which cannot fill the void inside of me that need to be fed...wiih words.
This book represent in what has realism in literature evolved during the 90's, and whatever is that called now, the fact stays: It wasn't succesful evolutionary proces.
I give this book 2 stars only for the idealistic traces of dark romantism of a lost child in a big town full of bad people. And only for that...

Society is still as dark and deceptive as ever but Gabriel, Kureishi's most recent teenage protagonist, has the gift to dispel its gloom. Gabriel's ill-suited parents have finally separated, he is bored, left to his own devices and well on his way to becoming a drug addict. But, instead of following all the easy paths to becoming a failure, he decides to take his parents' problems into his own hands. Although the story is unrealistically idealistic, it carries with it an unmistakable aura of hope, in the modern shape of fame. Fame is the gift and the fairy that can deliver anybody in style from all the difficulties of twentieth-first-century living. Once more Kureishi injects his characteristic comedy and light-heartedness into a serious subject without too much irreverence and with a little more hope. As a modern fairy-tale, 'Gabriel's Gift' is able to offer a nice dream with just enough kick in the backside to keep it real.

Since the mid-80s when Kureishi started to write I have been a close follower of his fiction work and screenplays. His main characters in his books whether in the Black Album, The Buddha of Suburbia and My Beautiful Laundrette are always at the crossroads. His characters live and mostly survive in a world accentuated by racial and sexual politics and loss and rediscovery of identity. Gabriel's Gift is a milestone in this career, more subtle in humour, more introspective yet lives up to an author's fame as a writer who knows how to use language.Gabriel's relationship with his Dad and his description of people who are lost in the meanders of the post-60s world is touching and powerful. Especially the first chapter of the book should be a standard text in literature and writing classes.

I was really looking forward to this book, as I like Mr. Kureishi's writing style. It started off promising, as an engrossing biography-type read, but ended up sounding like a term paper with the subject being 'How I became a writer'. If I was the professor grading it, I would have it given a B-. Kureishi began by examining his father's past, and then talked some about his father's relatives, and then when he felt that he ran out of that kind of material he talked about himself and his own friends. Not a good idea. I wanted to read more of the elder Kureishi's manuscripts, and learn more about him as a writer, albeit an unpublished one. It seemed like the son was critical of the father as a writer and I didn't like that, even if the son is the better, and more successful, writer. I can imagine that it would be difficult to write a book about one's parents, because all of one's judgments and pre-set opinions are already hard-wired in the brain. But if you've set your mind to do it you might as well do it right. And this book, while it isn't "wrong", didn't really go where I was hoping it would.

Kureishi aims at writing a story in which the characters confuse each other with sexual desire and also, most importantly, the true nature of love. And, honestly speaking, it is quite a hard plot to deal with, especially in drama. Owing to the limitation on not writing everything explicitly in words, the story depends on dialogues to tell the readers the chaotic romance within the story. The book I have read so far, which can successfully deal with such a difficult plot is however, a gay novel - Larry Kramer's Faggots. Sleep with me has a potentially good and intriguing plot; however, there are not enough actions to dramatise the chaos. In other words, the chaos are not chaotic enough. The story is there. It happens by itself. It fails to pull the readers into the core of the drama. Finally, when you close the book, you will realise that something has happened, but nothing's changed.

Why Bomb? Why Moslem?
This will irritate them. only few of them who did that. and millions of others are peaceful. Kureishi's works are sensational. But his works miss point of moderate Moslem (cf. dewi candraningrum soekirno's review).

As a Moslem, why Hanif do not explore the beautiful side of Islam as a religion. I really want to read it.

This is the screenplay of one of the more important movies of 1980s - introducing two important themes connected with minorities: racism and homophobia. Kureishi managed to weave them into a single and gripping plot. Reading the screenplay, however, as screenplays always do, is like licking sweets through a glass-pane. The real thing is the movie, so go ahead and see it.
P.S. If you still feel like reading it, try to get the 1996 edition which includes a number of Kureishi's essays on related themes.