Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
What's new? - not a lot., 30 May 2008
Sadly this seems to me an oh-too familiar depiction of Kureishi characters, bohemiam intellectuals, disparate deadbeats, immigrant maunderings, and all else in between; throw in some sexual deviancy of the bum variety toking on an ample supply of drugs, a few philosophical qoutes, long-winded expostion that completely loses the reader in terms on interest, and one wonders what really is the point? From the slide of Gabriel's Gift it's hard to see a way back for Kureishi - this from a fan who's read it all, and will probably stop from here on in; or, perhaps, read his old stuff, it'll amount to the same either way. To write well about one's heritage, culture, set in a postmodernist melting pot, one needs more than wowee! strange characters laboriously described via a psychological A-Z of deviancy and psychosis. One needs to be able to write as well as Philip Roth or Saul Bellow; Kureishi will be the first to admit he could and never will live up to either. The question is, what he will live up to if not the same old glories regurgitated.
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10 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Sex and high culture, 17 Mar 2008
A great fan of Hanif Kureishi, I found this latest book deeply disappointing. Unbelievable characters, stilted dialogue. In real life the protagonist - Jamal, the psychoanalyst - would be barred from his profession. A mix of high culture and graphic sex, Alan Hollinghurst for straights.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Dull, pseudish book with gratingly unrealistic dialogue and little plot, 22 Feb 2009
What a disappointment! This book has nothing like the delicious, irreverent freshness of Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia. Instead it's more like living through the mid-life crisis of an irritating pseud with a self-conscious penchant for talking about coolness and sex.
Oh, wait - that's actually the story line.
The novel follows the life of Jamal Khan, a London psychoanalyst, as he comes to terms with his first love and the series of unfortunate events that follow. The plot shifts between middle-aged Jamal (urgh) and young Jamal, who's slightly easier to like. Middle-aged Jamal and his coterie of friends and relatives, who all happen to speak in exactly the same irritatingly unrealistic manner, are hard to like. Even his adolescent son, Rafi, has got the same wearing way of speaking. And, strangely, so do all the bits in between the dialogue - the authorial narrative is equally grating. I offer an example of some typical dialogue for your delectation:
"Miriam sat beside Henry, opened the box and unwrapped some grass. She offered it to his nose - a nose which had travelled the length and breadth of France in search of wine, with actor pals resilient enough to enjoy his monologues. 'Against death and authoritarianism there is only one thing,' he said once. 'Love?' I suggested. 'Culture, I was going to say,' he said. 'Far more important. Any clown can fall in love or have sex. But to write a play, paint a Rothko, or discover the unconscious - aren't these extraordinary feats of the imagination, the only negation of the human desire to murder?' Now he swooned and his chins wobbled over the simplest thing."
Suffice to say that I didn't warm to any of the characters, I found the dialogue unrealistic and deeply irritating, and the plot wasn't up to much either - once you've found out the main twist, the rest is really window-dressing. Any kind of surprise or anticipation sort of tails off towards the end and it's quite easy to guess the plot twists before the main characters have twigged.
For me, the novel's one saving grace was its illuminating, funny and sometimes tender look at the fetish scene. This was really a sideline to the main plot but I found it the most interesting part of the book. These little vignettes showed an appreciation for the comic side of fetish, but didn't shy away from asking more serious questions about love, sex and identity. Yes, perhaps it's an indication that the fetish scene is getting gentrified. But 'the scene' gets looked at with intelligence and humour, perhaps one of its first starring appearances in a Faber & Faber novel!
On balance? A truly awful book, with few redeeming moments - but a fun look at the fetish scene if you can manage to make it through the rest.
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