Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I Am Not, I Feel Certain, Finished With Love.", August 22, 2008
Jamal Khan, the narrator of Hanif Kureishi's outrageously wonderful latest novel SOMETHING TO TELL YOU is one of the most unusual protagonists you are likely to meet. Middle-aged with an expanding midriff, he is a psychoanalyst fond of quoting Freud, Dante, Proust, Faulkner, Updike, et al. with never enough money to support his estranged wife Josephine, his beloved twelve-year-old son Rafi or his own spending habits as he wears green Paul Smith loafers, among other luxuries. The son of a Pakistani father and English mother, he is haunted by his first love, a beautiful Indian woman, and at the same time guilt-ridden because of an unconfessed crime. It is no accident that he refers often to Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov.
Jamal is surrounded by a cast of characters that Kureishi draws with a myriad of details so that they come alive as complex human beings on every page. His sister Miriam, whose face is covered with what the writer calls "nuts and bolts" and whose body is full of tattoos, is a Muslim single mother of either five children by three different men or three children by five men-- Jamal cannot remember. Her new lover Henry is a theatre and film director and her brother's best friend. He is separated from his wife Valerie; their two children are Lisa, a social worker who eschews the material, having once lived in a tree and having thrown paint at McDonald's and, according to one character, probably has dirt between her toes; and Sam who is outraged when he catches his father and Miriam engaged in S/M sex. The beautiful Indian woman is Ajita, who harbors her own dark secret; her brother is Mustag who becomes a popular singer; their father is the owner of a factory in London. There are at least a half dozen more characters just as interesting in this almost four-hundred-page novel that teems with life. London, from the 1970's to the present, particularly the area around West London, becomes a character in itself. Mick Jagger even makes an appearance.
Although there is a lot of sex here in at times a most comical story-- about any variety you can think of from sex clubs, houses of prostitution, orgies, male-female sex, male-male, female-female, you name it-- this novel ultimately is about things most serious: the cancerous effect of guilt, missed opportunities, the dynamics between parents and children, racial prejudice, extremism from both the left and right, the consequences of terrorism,but also hope and the wonder of love and its longevity. Jamal on the subject: "I am not, I feel certain, finished with love, either in its benign or its disorderly form, nor it with me."
Kureishi writes beautifully with such phrases as a "stoned Lady Bracknell," a "Gioconda smile," a "springy Salome," and "the latest supermodel of hysteria [as in Freud], Princess Diana." One of the passages that rises to poetry is Jamal's description of his love for his son: "When he was little, I kissed Rafi continuously, licked his stomach, stuck my tongue in his ear, tickled him, squeezed him until he gasped, laughing at his beard of saliva, his bib looking like an Elizabethan ruff. I loved the intimacy: the boy's wet mouth, the smell of his hair, as I'd loved those of various women."
Finally SOMETHING TO TELL YOU is one fantastic story that you will race through; if there is any justice, it certainly will make the next Booker Prize list.
|
|
|
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Coming of Age at Any Age, September 21, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
What makes this book so special is that our hero thought he'd come of age in the 80's, but had to reach the present day to fully realize his maturity. Kureish's proficiency in language honed through his wonderful screenplays is evident in dialogue that jumps off the page, including the observations by Jamal, the narrator, some of which are hilariously funny. (e.g., "There are few people who when they are old wish they'd led a more virtuous life; most people wish they'd sinned more; they also wish they'd taken better care of their teeth.) So many characters are so vividly portrayed making this one of those books that you hope to find a sequel several years down the road, to find out what happened to these people and how their lives continued to evolve. Not only Jamal, the central character, comes of age, but all those around him, even his own son who deserves a storyline all his own. Not to mention his sister, Miriam, who, although I'm glad we don't live next door to each other, I would welcome as a friend.
|
|
|
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Kureishi matures and his subjects with him..., September 15, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
With "Something To Tell You" Hanif Kureishi returns to the soul-searching of the British citizen of mixed, Pakistani-English, descent. While "The Buddha of Suburbia" tackled the problems of adolescence in an immigrant environment in the 1970s, here the main character, Jamal Khan, is a middle-aged, middle-class man who reveals his deepest secrets.
Jamal is a successful psychoanalyst, struggling with his relationships, his desires and his past. The narrative is in form of his monologue, interchanging between present and memories, starting in Jamal's childhood.
Jamal provides background information about other main characters: his rebel sister, Miriam, his film director friend, Henry, his friends from college times - Val and Wolf, his soon-to-be ex-wife, Josephine, and his son, Rafi, and, most importantly, on his first love, Ajita, who haunts him and is a reason for his introspective. Ajita, a beautiful, but pained daughter of an Indian factory owner, reveals to Jamal her most intimate secrets - and after his intervention disappears from his life. Since then, Jamal dreams of meeting her again, at the same time dreading the thought of the encounter.
Kureishi's prose, although fresh and original, is dense, full of meaning, requiring attention - skimming through some paragraphs can result in losing track and getting discouraged. There are also sometimes sudden jumps of narrative changing focus from one paragraph to another, anchoring on one word, which leads to the reminiscences connected with it; his memories flow exactly like a monologue at the shrink (an interesting, purposefully devised stylistic maneuver). The story of Jamal's life is told directly, with his own words, but also with what he withholds (and what is still lurking in his unconscious, with sex at the central place), and with the language he uses - there is a lot of intellectual meandering, erudite references to Freud, Lacan and other titans of psychoanalysis. On the other hand, I liked his less bragging remarks of the life in London throughout the times he describes (the "present" is 2005, when the London bombings took place), which really give the picture of the variety of lifestyles and classes. There whole narrative is a little messy in a postmodern way - a lot of important, weighty subject are just touched and put on a big pile from which they are more or less randomly selected - maybe it is really like the unconscious? Jamal's character is interesting and very well constructed - I liked reading about him, but I am not sure if I liked him - he seems unpleasant, despite his efforts to please the people he likes. Maybe it is because he is so lost, but tries to appear self-confident and nonchalant. The whole novel is complex, I guess like anyone's life - outer and inner - and prompted me to think about myself in an analytical way, but because of this complexity it is difficult to describe all that is important there without rambling...
The novel is crafty, the introduction of crucial events is gradual, so there is always enough suspense to keep the reader excited and read till the end. Is Jamal really a murderer, like he claims in the opening paragraphs? Will he meet Ajita again, and if so, what will come out of it?
Of course, in such a novel, one sees traces of others - the obvious one is Woody Allen (because of psychoanalysis and type of humor). I found there also some echoes of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, if you like those writers plus the Asian-immigrant flavor, this might be a good pick for you.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Aravind Adiga
by Stieg Larsson
by Joseph O'Neill
by Roberto Bolano
by Philip Roth
See all Editorial Reviews
