Intimacy Pb [Paperback]

Hanif Kureishi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 7, 1998

A novel by the author of "The Buddha of Suburbia" and "My Beautiful Laundrette" which analyzes the agonies and joys of being connected to another person. Jay, who is leaving his partner and their two sons, reflects on the vicissitudes of his relationship with Susan.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Hanif Kureishi's fourth novel made many reviewers uneasy on its first appearance in the U.K., because it cuts so painfully near to the bone. If a novelist's first duty is to tell the truth, then the author 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 for of a younger woman. A very modern man, without political convictions or religious beliefs, he vaguely hopes to find fulfillment 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," the unnamed narrator 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 Intimacy 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, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

"I have been trying to convince myself that leaving someone isn't the worst thing you can do to them," says Jay, the middle-aged narrator of this relentlessly honest account of one man's preparations to abandon his two young sons and their mother. Jay and Susan lead comfortable lives in contemporary London: efficient, ambitious Susan works in publishing and reads cookbooks in bed, and withdrawn but steady Jay is a successful movie and TV scriptwriter. Jay no longer loves Susan, however, and an affair with Nina, a quixotic young hippie, leads the minor-league Casanova to conclude that he deserves the freedom to explore "the possibilities of intimacy" rather than endure the quiet stasis of his life with Susan. But Jay's desire for emotional independence is complicated by his love for his two sons, and he spends the night before his departure considering the unsatisfying examples of two friends: serious-minded professor Asif, who believes that marriage should require work, and Victor, who left his wife for a youthful, liberated existence only to find himself eating alone in his convenience flat. British author Kureishi (My Beautiful Launderette; The Buddha of Suburbia) once again jumps into the quagmire of contemporary mores with this treatise on the feckless nature of intimacy, both sexual and emotional. This book's particularly male solipsism proved controversial when it was published in England last year. But Kureishi's spare, direct prose balances his sometimes cruel detachment?especially in regard to Susan?with a ruthless investigation of Jay's flaws. Ultimately, Kureishi's refusal to let Jay escape unscathed from the emotional ravages of his actions transforms the story from a shop-worn tale of sexual infidelity to a devastating and insightful portrait of how?for better or for worse?betrayal can become a form of self-renewal. First serial to the New Yorker.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Faber and Faber (September 7, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571196365
• ISBN-13: 978-0571196364
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,388,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Houdini making things smug before his escape, June 17, 2005

By 

Elisabeth Harvor "(elisabeth-harvor.com)" (Ottawa, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Intimacy: A Novel (Hardcover)

I can still so clearly remember the afternoon I first read the Hanif Kureishi story that became INTIMACY---in the New Yorker in 1997 or 1998---and how I was so elated by it that I phoned an editor friend in another city who, like me, was a single mother whose children were officially grown up (but still trying to grow up) just as we were two women who were officially grown up (but still trying to grow up) and although we both belonged to a category of readers who should despise this book (women who've sometimes had a rough time in their relationships with sexually charismatic men) we just couldn't stop talking about it and singing its praises. But we didn't have to want a man like this in our lives (not any more, we didn't) to value that kind of man's incarnation as a character in an extraordinary novel.

It's true that when INTIMACY was first published in Britain, it ignited a firestorm in both Kureishi's family and in the press, with one of its many critics denouncing it as "this short, odious book." And it's also true that INTIMACY'S narrator, Jay (a scriptwriter) is wilful, childish, narcissistic and wild. And, yes, odious too; he even does the occasional parent-teacher interview in his "latest favourite suit, on acid" and even though he's the father of very young children he keeps Ecstasy, LSD, and an old bottle of amyl nitrate in the fridge. But he's also a man who is tender, introspective, witty, and exuberantly honest. Herein lies the book's reckless charm and elating momentum.

INTIMACY also joins a long line of 20th-century novels that tell the story of men leaving home, beginning with the husband in John Updike's Too Far to Go, a man who, before leaving his wife and children, repairs hinges and latches: "a Houdini making things snug before his escape..."

In novels by Richard Stern and Bernard Malamud and any number of other male writers on the theme of men who are also ambivalently on the run, the women being left behind are dark-haired, enduring, and sexually withholding, while the mistresses are fair-haired, adoring, and quick to offer sexual comfort. These blondes travel with a vast array of cosmetic and herbal supplies; in the case of Jay's mistress Nina--a shrewdly wistful phantom forever kept off-stage in her pale, hippie clothes--it's a bag stocked with nipple cream, tapes of the sound of the sea, postcards of cats, packets of camomile tea, and other bits of the equipment so vital to "mobile girls."

"Soon we will be like strangers," Jay tells us, speaking of Susan, the mother of his children. But no, they can never be that. "Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history." Jay also fears dying--he's invited to more funerals than dinner parties--and so has little use for women who are also too quickly growing older, as he makes clear when he ironically asks what's wrong with maturity. "Think of the conversations I could have--about literature and bitterness--with a forty-year-old!"

Susan belongs in this age range, but in spite of his making her his muse by turning her (via metaphor) into a blank page--she's at the bottom of the stairs in her white T-shirt and white slippers, looking "so white I could write on her"--his evocations of her can also convey his love for her, as in the following scene when he's moved by her enthusiasm as she kisses their children: "When we really talk, it is about them, something they have said or done, as if they are a passion no one else can share or understand."

During his last night with his family, Jay experiences the outside world as both ominous and alluring. But mostly ominous: "Outside, the dark leaves on the trees flap in the wind like hundreds of long green tongues, the branches knocking at me." He dreads leaving his sons, two "fierce and ebullient" little boys who are never named--this is one of Kureishi's many brilliant strokes--two wild boys who careen through the novel, adding to both its anguish and its comedy.

Jay says of the three-year-old, "I wonder when I will sleep beside him again, if ever. He has a vicious kick and a tendency, at unexpected moments, to vomit in my hair. But he can pat and stroke my face like a lover. His affectionate words and little voice are God's breath to me." This has a parent's narcissism in it, true, but it's also incredibly tender. And yet in the incredibly skilfully abridged version of INTIMACY that appeared in The New Yorker, a few lines down from this adoring tribute Jay is on the threshold of his front door, the fresh wind sweeping through him as one of the more compelling of his inner voices commands, "Go. You must go."

This is where the novel should have ended, on page 92. It would have been a novella then, but it would have been the right thing to keep it emotionally and lyrically dynamic. Instead it goes on for another twenty-six pages, and the line that follows the powerful "Go. You must go," is almost criminally banal: "I am kicking over the traces." Along with a few other lacklustre passages, this is one of the relatively few disappointments in what is otherwise a vivid and fearless novel.

At times it's also as if the war between Jay's id and his superego has triggered a war in the syntax, which is sometimes formal and Victorian, sometimes the Kiplingesque English of Jay's father, sometimes London street slang.

But whatever its deficiencies, INTIMACY is an important and weirdly thrilling book, reminding us (as we occasionally do need reminding) how honourable that OTHER war is: the war between what's most worthy and what's most alive.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bitingly real, a sad account on the human nature of desire, May 14, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Intimacy: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is a superbly written book, which portrays the thoughts and feelings of a middle-aged man who has exhausted his 10 year relationship with his wife.

Anyone who reads this book for the explicit purpose of searching for answers in their own troubled relationships is not going to hit upon any big revelation or come to a closure of some sort.

While this book may open some people's eyes as to "what men really want" (in my opinion, many women may feel the same way as the protagonist in the story), it is more importantly a tale on the condition of human nature. What everyone should realize is that human nature forever desires what it cannot have, and no person who lets his/her mind run amok like this will ever truly find "ideal" happiness. A person's life is not made up entirely of long stretches of happiness; in times of boredom and listlessness, one should realize and value what he/she possesses and be content with it. A good marriage is not defined by love alone; there is trust, responsibility and all those other un-exciting descriptions that must be there for two people to co-exist peacefully. We all desire to be loved and understood, but in the end, every man dies alone. Happiness is internal and understanding yourself is the hardest thing of all!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The slow erosion of love, January 24, 2000

By 

tamazin (Hong Kong) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Intimacy: A Novel (Hardcover)

Not exactly the happiest book I've ever read but certainly one of the best examples of dealing with separation. The chronicle of the slow demise of Jay's love for his lover cuts deeply into the heart strings because anyone who has been in a long term relationship can recognise and understand exactly what he is thinking. Torn between the nedd to find personal fulfillment or duty he opts for the personal fulfillment whilst many of us though wanting that, spend our lives on the duty side because we cannot bear the emotional strength it would take to leave He loves his sons dearly and is a good father but cannot stay because he can no longer bear to be shackled to a relationship with his partner in which he feels there is no longer even tolerance let alone love. It is a situation which he feels is robbing him of his very self and he opts to leave without a warning. The slow realisation that he maybe never loved her and never felt passion for her has left him exhausted and with an unbearable guilt and sadness that so much time has been wasted. Despite this he still manages to throw a selfish streak into it by admitting his passion for other women etc which does at least make you see him as not completely without fault. All in all it is an overwhelming book which pulls on your very emotional core just because it is so bitingly real. A must read for anyone who has gone through a break up without really understanding the reason why their partner left.