Love in a Blue Time (Paperback)

by Hanif Kureishi (Author) "When the phone rings, who would you most like it to be?..." (more)
Key Phrases: Little Billy, Big Billy, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal
This collection of ten short stories by the author of the highly acclaimed My Beautiful Laundrette and other screenplays shares a common theme: a non-Westerner's sense of alienation from mainstream Western society. In some, the characters are Pakistani immigrants enduring subtle or overt racism in lower-class London. Most often, however, the narrator is a moderately successful writer living in London who indulges in drugs, meaningless sex, and exploitative relationships. Kureishi seems to extend his range in one story by getting inside the character of a streetwise young woman who goes to Pakistan to visit her wealthy father, yet the narrator turns out to be that same male persona manipulating the character. Even when touched by success, the characters are morally hollow and treat each other to petty cruelties and easy betrayals. These stories are sexually explicit, sometimes scatological, cynical, and very disturbing, yet they are not without considerable insight into human nature.?Reba Leiding, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst., Troy, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews
An ebulliently realistic collection from savvy British screenwriter and novelist Kureishi (The Black Album, 1995, etc.). It's refreshing to read a writer of such alert and unaffected skill. Unlike American minimalists, Kureishi looks outward and into the lives of others, coming back with fiction that is large, rugged, and true. And his canny imagination avoids sentimental missteps. In ``The Flies,'' for instance, chronicling an infestation of insects in the life of a young couple, he writes with a mordant flair for the parable and grotesque that recalls Kafka: ``At night he begins to dream of ragged bullet-shaped holes chewed in fetid fabric, and of creamy white eggs hatching in darkness. In his mind he hears the amplified rustle of gnawing, chewing, devouring.'' Kureishi is above all a social observer, offering shrewd reports on a generation of urban Brits who've survived their youth and don't know what's supposed to happen next: career, money, marriage, or the more vertiginous and splendid pleasures of liberty prolonged. Avoiding moral judgment, he can sympathize with all concerned--while sporadically tweaking them, as he does particularly well in ``The Tale of the Turd,'' in which a 44-year-old ne'er-do-well goes to dinner at the home of his 18- year-old girlfriend's all too respectable parents. Existentially uneasy, he winds up in the loo, mid-supper, with one big problem to face: ``I glance at the turd and notice little teeth in its velvet head, and a little mouth opening.'' After semi-mortal combat with this unwanted guest, he throws it out the window: ``On, on, one goes, despite everything, not knowing why or how.'' Kureishi's characters do mostly choose to go on, even when they've run out of drugs, money, lodging, and friends. The charm of their jaunty style of perseverance is not small. Some find a moment's redemption or two in Kureishi's ever more apt evocations of sex, earthily unromantic and serenely accurate. Roguish intelligence is everywhere here. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Faber and Faber (May 6, 2003)
• ISBN-10: 057119222X
• ISBN-13: 978-0571192229
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,411,580 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Uneven, but when it's good, it's very good, June 10, 2000

By	Stephen O. Murray "Stephen O. Murray" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Love in a Blue Time: Short Stories (Paperback)

Hanif Kureishi is a gifted but sometimes very self-indulgent writer. He is especially good at writing about lost love-starved Brits. (Money in Kureishi's tales has much of the abstractness that money has for me. In contrast, drugs are something he knows!)

"The flies" is a failure attempting to write a Kafkaesque parable. Not just a failure, but unreadable. But I found "Nightlight" incisive as well as evocative. "My son the fanatic" and "D'accord, baby" are also splendid social comedies (not really so far from Austen, except in graphicness and being set in a multiracial England). The title story seems to me a London version of "True West" (without ties of blood). And "With your tongue stuck down my throat" is hilarious.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent, entertaining but unevern story collection., February 8, 1999

By	[e-mail] (a suburb in Northern California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love in a Blue Time (Hardcover)

I was excited and refreshed to read the first(title)story in this collection. It was smart, hip, insightful and moved at a rate that was fun after slogging through a lot of modern "literary" fiction. Unfortunately the later stories in the collection were darker, slower and in the case of "Flies"-too self-consciously symbolic("The Turd" seemed too outrageous to take the symbolism seriously). As a guy in late middle age who has long since left drugged-out, lost friends it was refreshing to relive the hilarity, pain and eventual insanity of that wonderfully self-centered life-without-limits.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Solid Introduction to Kureishi's World, May 16, 2001

By	A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Love in a Blue Time: Short Stories (Paperback)

For those (like me) familiar with Kureishi only via his film work, the stories here will not surprise, as they exhibit his usual sensitive approach to the themes of cross-cultural difficulties and men completely adrift in their middle-age. The ten stories--most in the 5-15 page range with three 40+ pagers mixed in--are fairly mixed in quality, there are a few failures, but what is good is exceedingly good. In the cross-cultural difficulties category are three workmanlike, but unremarkable stories: "We're Not Jews," "With Your Tongue Down My Throat," and "My Son the Fanatic." The latter offers an excellent example of how a somewhat offhand short story can be turned into a quite compelling and powerful film. The other seven stories all deal in one way or another with men struggling to come to terms with marriage, responsibility, commitment, and sheer growing up--or more often, not struggling but trying to simply avoid it all. Two of these, "The Flies" and "The Tale of the Turd" wander off into Gogolish territory to no great effect. Kureishi's writing is inarguably strong, and he's able to make his characters come alive with a minimum of words, and often with a fair dose of humor. But while it's fun to read the stories just to enjoy good writing, too many of these men start to feel like they're living under the same desperate cloud, which gets tiresome.