Customer Reviews

Something to Tell You: A Novel

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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.

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.

This was not an easy read but it has enough depth and detail to warrant the patience required to finish it. This is a novel that feels very autobiographical and as such has a deep sense of longing for that centrist existense that is denied to us through the act of living. If things are going well for the main character Jamal Khan, then count on it becoming upset. Whether it's his past, which is not as far away as he'd hoped, or dealing with the changing standards of his own sexuality as he accepts his middle age, he has a lot on his plate.
Jamal is a psychoanalyst and one of those who runs with the popular, artistic and elite crowd among London's movers and shakers. He's a minor success but also a peripheral inhabitant of these socially elite. His best friend is a playwright and director named Henry. Henry has a reputation for genius in the theater but now sees his career coming to an end and has a serious mid-life crisis.
Through Henry's friendship Jamal has earned a place among London's artistsic and social elite. This gives him the opportunity to have wealthy clients to offset his expenses and exercise his desire to help the poorer ones.
The one thing that gives me pause here is the way Jamal's attitude towards others or himself is both pragmatic and problematic. He sees the logical problems of human consience and emotional desire. He notes how history shapes us. However, there is no idealogy that allows us to move beyond those influences. Acceptance helps but it is not a cure. I actually like this perspective but I think many would see it as an excuse to remaining flawed and revel in it. The character (and author's) take on the myth of what passes for normal was particularly insightful.
So what we discover as this story unfolds is that the characters are always influenced by their own actions. An incident that is built upon and realized in this story is the central binding concept that we are what we've done, even the huge mistakes that are otherwise considered out of charcater. We cannot move past it but we can resolve to accept it and therefore endeavor to learn from it. Jamal's sister, Miriam is someone who has a hard time moving beyond anything, using her life's mistakes to shore up her fortress until that becomes so unwieldy that it finally collapses with the unexpected onset of a romantic interest in her messy life.
The past that Jamal has tried so hard to insulate himself from only continues to stay one step behind him, whether it's the lust/love he still harbors for his ex-wife, the son who is feeling more neglected and is acting it out, or his long lost love and the one terrible night when he decided to confront her problem.
My reservations with this story is not it's content, though it is more complex than it has to be, a kind writing style that often has more in common with that dreaded stream of consciousness than it does with well paced prose. No, my problem is that the overlapping nature of all the players seems to be an effort at layering the story. It's a heady balancing act. On most levels I understand the need to write it this way but the back and forth timelines are annoying and often thrown in without much effort at determining the context. It also would have helped to set this solidly in a time period. As written devices go this has a way of grounding the reader and making them more personallly involved. On the other hand, based upon the way this was written, the author did not allow himself much wiggle room to introduce such a timeline. A strong argument could be made for such a timeline's inclusion being seen as pure artifice.
I enjoyed the book and will likely read his work again. The perspective of life in London for a Pakistani transplant is also engaging. As, what was once white Western Europe gives way to a more mixed, ethinically diverse culture, we're seeing the grand reshuffling of the world. Voices like those of Hanif Kureishi will make that transition easier to understand and appreciate.

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.

Jamal Khan, the central figure and narrator, of Hanif Kureishi's colorful and highly literate new novel, "Something to Tell You," leads a cast of the most interesting, if neurotic, self-indulgent, self-pitying characters in recent serious fiction.

The novel is based on the recollections of the middle-aged Khan, an Anglo-Indian psychoanalyst, of his life as a quiet, rather confused son of an Indian Muslim father and middle-class English mother and the brother of a neo-hippy, earth-mother sister. He eventually finds professional solace and success as a shrink to some of London's most prominent and least prominent mentally-challenged citizens. While his professional life is stellar, Dr. Khan's personal life has frequently been a sex-driven shambles.

Largely driven by a "busy Id", he seriously louses up the great passion of his life and eventually loses a wife that he once was obsessed with. His one constant, unwavering love is the one that he jealously guards for his twelve-year old son, Rafi.

The story is ultimately an agonizing--for the protagonist, Khan--attempt to find some balance between sex and love in a life littered with obsessions, dysfunctional family relationships, professional success and A-list recognition, and personal failure. This is equally the story of arrested-development, excess and lack of personal restraint. Not surprisingly, these are exactly the qualities that make this novel wildly interesting, hilarious and even lovable. Reading the book is roughly akin to watching several simultaneous trainwrecks in progress at different times stretching from the early 1960s to 2005 when major-league terrorism visited Britiain again.

This is a great read, with wonderful use of language, marvelous characters and non-linear story-telling.

Frankly, I don't know if I would have bothered to finish this book if it weren't for two things: Kureishi's mostly fine prior work, and the fact that it was the only book to read on a flight from the US to Romania.

Problems abound. First of all, it's simply not a particularly interesting or intriguing story. I'll avoid spoilers, but quite a lot of this story - the ones with the greatest potential, in fact - seem entirely glued on to pages of pointless rambling.

Second, the main characters are substantially less interesting than their foils. Jamal, the protagonist, is a total bore. It's his story, but he's got little to say and there's not much reason why the reader really needs to hear him. A long-lost love of Jamal's appears far too late and is entirely underdeveloped - a great shame, as there was a lot of potential in her character, judging by all the build-up before her appearance.

Third, the "rock star" character is a pathetic caricature - totally unbelievable, as are many of the characters from Jamal's past who've all (it seems) gone on to spectacular fame / wealth / boorishness without even a hint of realism or restraint.

Lastly, the best parts of the book tell Mariam's story. She's the sister of Jamal, who's life has gone down an entirely different path than that of her brother. A mismatched romance between her and a friend of Jamal's doesn't entirely work, but it's affecting and it feels honest. Mariam, her hangers-on and her extended (though mostly ignored) brood are presented as much more deserving of their own tale than Jamal. I see comparisons between this book and Iain Banks' "The Crow Road," but where Banks' recent effort explored the personal growth of its lead character with humor and warmth and whose shocking murder mystery felt "right" (if unexpected), Kureishi's book falls flat on any sort of development and the "shock" ending fails entirely.

All this makes it tough to recommend.

Something to Tell You is the compelling and unexpectedly funny tale of an oversexed, neurotic, and confused middle-aged Anglo-Indian man. The protagonist is hyper-analytic--he's a Freudian analyst by profession. His professional skills bleed through to his everyday life, resulting in detached, detailed descriptions of himself feeling tortured with guilt that are simultaneously comical and sad. For example, at one point he describes himself losing his bowels while attempting to come to terms with his big secret: "My insides were on the outside; everyone could see me. It wasn't pretty and I had ruined my suit, but something had started."

The supporting characters are all very well developed and at times overshadow the protagonist. Still, it's nice to see such vibrant characters coming in and out of the story. Ultimately, the main character's problems are very interesting, and his journey to catharsis is memorable and unique.

Hanif Kureishi's novel 'Something to Tell You' rambles improbably to a conclusion with the buoyancy of a pricked balloon. How I survived the first 50 pages and continued to read is still a mystery to me. In this advance reader's edition, Kureishi is very chatty. He tells us what everybody is thinking, without making it interesting, more a laundry list of aimless thought. I think a good 40 pages could be edited out of this book, which would make it a tighter story. In a story with at least 15 major characters (Jamal Khan, Miriam, Josephine, Rafi, Ajita, Mustaq, Alan, Mule Woman, Henry, Valerie, Lisa, Karen, Wolf, Valentin & Bushy), Kuresishi takes quite a while to tell the story. This fuzziness is not only complicated by his unnecessary verbosity, but by his structural use of flashbacks which bounces the story between present and past, which for me was more disorienting than illuminating. Perhaps a matter of taste, but some of Kureishi's prose was disgusting. For example, on pp. 28-29 he spends time picturing what his son's future romantic encounters might be like.

The plot, once you uncover it, recounts an incident when Jamal's girlfriend Ajita is violated by her father. This causes Jamal & his friends Valentin & Wolf to act, the consequence being more serious than they had intended. Kureishi sets up tension whether this secret will be uncovered. Unfortunately, by the end of the novel, it fizzles. The amourous addictions of Jamal's sister Miriam & Henry as they go to fetish clubs and Wolf & Bushy's hanging out at the Cross Keys with pole dancers made this novel take one of the most beautiful parts of our human experience -- the ability to be intimate -- and made it into a sordid lust addiction.

To summarize, I didn't care for Kureishi's endless wordiness or the many meandering thoughts of his characters. His story concludes with a whimper rather than a bang. He brings up important issues like terrorism, racism, and sexism without making a strong point about them. The story seemed sleazy without much growth or development. Although the story did pick up after about the first 50 pages, I was more relieved to have finished the book than edified by having had the reading experience. Taxi!

Something to Tell You could be the mature adult companion to Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Jamal Khan, the protagonist, is old enough to know what and who are important to him. He has his reasons for living, his purpose in life; his son, his sister, his friends and his career as an analyst.

Jamal's burdens have been shouldered, his wild-oats sown, and if there is little excitement in his life, it is okay, he appreciates his quiet existence - and yet there remains within him the memory of his long lost love, and with it a last vestige of his youthful self and its idealism linger. Oh, and the terrible secret he has kept from her all these years.

The flashbacks to 70's and 80's London are alternately enjoyable and tedious. The first half of the book could be slow going, and most of it in the company of the corpulent Miriam, Jamal's sister, a self-righteous, tattooed, single-parent with lashings of in-your-face attitude, and her new paramour, Henry, an elitist theater director happily slumming with Miriam to show he can be one of the people. Kureishi intended them comically, and they are comic, but fat obnoxious people, especially ones with multiple tattoos and a taste for deviant group sex, might be better left slightly more peripheral.

That being said, a little over midway, Anjita, the beloved, returns to London and the story becomes more compelling.(So much so that last night I had to leave my apartment at midnight to get the book which I had inadvertently left at work because I could not sleep without first reading more of it.)

By the end, Jamal, bowing adieu to his youth, has crossed over into his maturity. Then, opening his newspaper and putting his feet up, he relaxes into the rest of his life. (As do the rest of the midlife crazed characters in the novel... by and by.) And so on we go.

I applauded Kureishi. His kindness toward his characters and their calm acceptance of traditional - ie. boring - midlife values of work and family after their various flights into midlife crisis. There is a great dignity manifest in this book along with the tattoos, the whores, and the leather deviant gear.

Kureishi holds up his aging characters, examines them closely; their silliness, their weaknesses and acts of bravery, lies and integrity; their tattoos, lumps, pot-bellies... noticing everything - including how short their lives will be now and then laughing with them, not at them, sets them back down, presumably to pat his children on the head and start work on a new book. There is great humanity in this author.

Being the same age as Jamal and having lived in Sammy and Rosie's London, I especially enjoyed Kureishi's survey of the evolution and melding of cultures; Muslim, English, Indian, counter, consumer, elitist, socialist and etc... in London over the last 25 years.

As a fan of Hanif Kureishi, I was delighted to see that he had written a new novel, Something to Tell You. While I often don't particularly like the characters Kureishi creates (I would find their lives too messy to deal with in 'real life'), they are always the sort of people I want to read about--bright, interesting, entertaining and troubled. And in Something to Tell You, once again, Kureishi delivers a wonderful tale with his usual worldly wisdom. If you enjoyed The Buddha of Suburbia, then chances are you will enjoy the marvelous Something To Tell You, for in some ways these two novels complement each other.

The narrator of Something to Tell You is Jamal Kahn a London-based, middle-aged Anglo-Indian psychoanalyst. Divorced and with a busy practice, Jamal spends his days listening to his patients' many problems, and even Jamal's relatives, friends and acquaintances feel free to bend Jamal's ear at any time of the day or night. Jamal, who spends his life listening to others, tells his story to the reader, reaching back into his past while exploring the nature of desire, guilt, and loss. Kureishi's characters are mainly middle-aged Londoners, coming to terms with aging and death, juggling those realities against the time left. While the renewal of desire and desirability is a huge issue for some of the characters, Jamal struggles with the ghosts of his past and long cherished dreams of what could have been.

Jamal's life is full of colourful characters--Jamal's mother has "discharged her duty and gone AWOL," and Jamal's exotic sister, Miriam and her lover, theater and film director Henry embark on an odyssey of the London sex club scene, much to the dismay of Henry's daughter. The fact that Henry is also Jamal's best friend complicates matters even further, and Jamal is expected to 'save' Henry from Miriam's corrupting clutches. But Jamal has problems of his own. His ex-wife Josephine and son, Rafi are steadily moving out of Jamal's life into new lives of their own. When the novel begins, Jamal's life is fairly sterile and uncomplicated, but as the story develops, he becomes increasingly mired in the relationships of his family and friends. Plus Jamal's past--incidents he'd much rather leave buried--float to the surface and cannot be avoided.

I loved this novel. Kureishi's amazing insight into human relationships seeps through on every page, and he's an experienced enough author to veer away from the trap of making the therapist/narrator the person who has all the answers. Jamal may be a therapist, but he's just as troubled as everyone else. The difference with Jamal, however, is that his problems are largely buried, so his life appears, at least on the surface, to be in control. The madness and mayhem of Miriam's chaotic household with her cabbie partner-in crime, Bushy, a dealer in contraband, is in complete contrast to Jamal's ordered existence. Jamal has a time and a place for passion, but unlike his sister, it's compartmentalized, tucked safely away from the other aspects of his life.

Kureishi's books and films (Rosie and Sammy get Laid, My Beautiful Laundrette) tend to be social commentaries of the shifting times. The Buddha of Suburbia, for example, is a stunning account of the 70s in Britain. Something to Tell You is also an account of a shifting Britain. With an unpopular war waging in Iraq, the tragedy of the London bombings of 2005, and a country run by a government running amok, Kureishi weaves in the troubled political times that contribute to his characters' sense of betrayal, loss, and confusion.