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Amazon.co.uk Review
Hanif Kureishi's latest novel made many reviewers uneasy on its first appearance, because it cuts so painfully near to the bone. If a novelist's first duty is to tell the truth, then Kureishi has done his duty with unflinching courage. Intimacy gives us the thoughts and memories of a middle-aged writer on the night before he walks out on his wife and two young sons, in favour of a younger woman. A very modern man, without political convictions or religious beliefs, he vaguely hopes to find fulfilment in sexual love. No-one is spared Kureishi's cold, penetrating gaze or lacerating pen. "She thinks she's feminist, but she's just bad- tempered," he says of his abandoned wife. A male friend advises him, "Marriage is a battle, a terrible journey, a season in hell and a reason for living."
At the heart of the novel is this terrible paradox: "You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them." Male readers will wince with recognition at the narrator's hatred of entrapment and domesticity, and his implacable urge towards freedom, escape, even loneliness. Female readers may find it a truly horrific revelation. Kureishi is only telling it like it is, in staccato sentences of pinpoint accuracy. By far the author's best yet: a brilliant, devastating work. --Christopher Hart
Book Description
An unsettling and emotionally charged look at the end of a relationship, from the acclaimed author of The Buddha of Suburbia.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A powerful work.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Intimacy (Paperback)
I think those reviewers who gave this book a low rating because it was introverted and pretentious are missing the point. It seems to me that the point of the book is not an objective critical examination, but a stream of conciousness work in which Kureishi communicates how he feels. I think it is a very brave work. He makes no effort to gain sympathy from the reader and he makes no apologies. His direction is one of 'this is the way I feel and that is all'. As for the pretention, well, as an aspiring writer myself I do not think it is pretentious at all. The complex emotions involved require complex writing. Kureishi is not afraid to do something different and aim for a style that he feels captures the tone of the novel best, and that is what is so important as a writer.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Uncomfortable intimacies,
By A Customer
This review is from: Intimacy (Paperback)
That INTIMACY observes the tragic unities of time and place is indicative of its ambition. Kureishi uses the end of a relationship not only to discuss the tension between sexual and domestic intimacy, but also to examine the intimacy shared by narrator and reader: ironically we are able to do for the taciturn Jay what no one can do for him in life - listen while "the inner storm of [his] intolerable thoughts blows itself out". Indeed, the novel's chief success is to force on us the complicity this intimacy brings with it. This is an exceptionally well written book. The restraint and elegance of Jay's voice is punctured only by his vulgar treatment of sex, which itself suggests that lust is his fatal flaw. The problem with INTIMACY, however, is that the protagonist is simply too cruel, too cowardly, and too vain for us to sympathize with his vacillation over whether or not he should abandon his children and their mother. This maybe because Kureishi intends us to focus on the internal 'tragedy' of Jay's existential isolation; but if this is the case, Jay's contemptible efforts to yoke his unhappiness to his generation's disillusionment ("If Marx had been our begetter...Freud was our new father, as we turned inwards") and to elevate his lust to the level of a philosophical tenet loom to large. The same is true of the supporting cast, given that it never develops beyond a projection of Jay's psyche. His lover Nina is a gently pornographic fantasy, his cohabitee Susan an emblem of uxorial "competence"; similarly, his freinds Asif and Victor merely exemplify his crudely polarized view of life as a choice between suburban incarceration and hedonistic abandon ("My kingdom for a come"). Because of this INTIMACY leaves you feeling numbed, rather than moved.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Intense Book,
By A Customer
This review is from: Intimacy (Paperback)
Kureshi's portrait of the end of a relationship is stunningly honest and engrossing. One can see why he can be accused of selfishness but such honesty makes for an uncomfortable and unsettling read. Thoroughly recommended
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