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Overview
This provocative collection of short stories charts the growth of a generation from the liberating irreverence of the late 1970s to the dilemmas of responsibility and fidelity of the 1990s. The stories resonate with Hanif Kureishi's dead-on observations of human passion and folly, his brilliant depiction of seedy locales and magical characters, and his original, wicked sense of humor.
Synopsis
This provocative collection of short stories charts the growth of a generation from the liberating irreverence of the late 1970s to the dilemmas of responsibility and fidelity of the 1990s. The stories resonate with Hanif Kureishi's dead-on observations of human passion and folly, his brilliant depiction of seedy locales and magical characters, and his original, wicked sense of humor.
Charles Taylor
Nobody can make you homesick for sleaze the way Hanif Kureishi can. Most of the characters in his fiction are first generation British or Asians recently transplanted to the U.K. The London they live in has almost nothing to do with tourist brochures or "Masterpiece Theatre." It's a dirty, smelly place, riven by racial tensions and the lack of money, dangerous and hard-hearted and almost impossibly vital.
Kureishi's last novel, The Black Album, was the most affectionate description of the pop kaleidoscope of London life since Colin MacInnes' Absolute Beginners. Would that his short stories had the same affection. Most of the tales in Love in a Blue Time seem cut from the same cloth as his screenplay for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. That is, cheaply ironic and far, far too satisfied with its own hip radicalism.
Love In a Blue Time isn't good, but you wouldn't mistake it for the work of a bad writer. Perhaps it's Kureishi's affinity for pop music that gives his work it's up-to-the-moment feel, its ability to get at the essence of an era through its fashions and attitudes that can make the work of other current British writers seem to be moldering on the shelf. Even when scoring easy points, he can sum up those who prospered in the Thatcher '80s in one paragraph: "He had lived through an age when men and women with energy and ruthlessness but without much ability or persistence excelled. And even though most of them had gone under, their ignorance had confused Roy, making him wonder whether the things he had striven to learn, and thought of as 'culture,' were irrelevant. Everything was supposed to be the same: commercials, Beethoven's late quartets, pop records, shopfronts, Freud, multi-coloured hair. Greatness, comparison, value, depth: gone, gone, gone. Anything could give some pleasure; he saw that. But not everything provided the sustenance of a deeper understanding."
Unfortunately, those last two lines pretty much sum up this collection. These short stories bring out Kureishi's worst quality, the way he sometimes settles for reducing character to a matter of a few nasty brushstrokes. Kureishi is the kind of guy who needs to commit to the all-night party to work up a real feel for the scene. He's too talented to drop in just to let go with a couple of bitchy remarks. -- Salon
Editorials
Charles Taylor
Nobody can make you homesick for sleaze the way Hanif Kureishi can. Most of the characters in his fiction are first generation British or Asians recently transplanted to the U.K. The London they live in has almost nothing to do with tourist brochures or "Masterpiece Theatre." It's a dirty, smelly place, riven by racial tensions and the lack of money, dangerous and hard-hearted and almost impossibly vital.
Kureishi's last novel, The Black Album, was the most affectionate description of the pop kaleidoscope of London life since Colin MacInnes' Absolute Beginners. Would that his short stories had the same affection. Most of the tales in Love in a Blue Time seem cut from the same cloth as his screenplay for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. That is, cheaply ironic and far, far too satisfied with its own hip radicalism.
Love In a Blue Time isn't good, but you wouldn't mistake it for the work of a bad writer. Perhaps it's Kureishi's affinity for pop music that gives his work it's up-to-the-moment feel, its ability to get at the essence of an era through its fashions and attitudes that can make the work of other current British writers seem to be moldering on the shelf. Even when scoring easy points, he can sum up those who prospered in the Thatcher '80s in one paragraph: "He had lived through an age when men and women with energy and ruthlessness but without much ability or persistence excelled. And even though most of them had gone under, their ignorance had confused Roy, making him wonder whether the things he had striven to learn, and thought of as 'culture,' were irrelevant. Everything was supposed to be the same: commercials, Beethoven's late quartets, pop records, shopfronts, Freud, multi-coloured hair. Greatness, comparison, value, depth: gone, gone, gone. Anything could give some pleasure; he saw that. But not everything provided the sustenance of a deeper understanding."
Unfortunately, those last two lines pretty much sum up this collection. These short stories bring out Kureishi's worst quality, the way he sometimes settles for reducing character to a matter of a few nasty brushstrokes. Kureishi is the kind of guy who needs to commit to the all-night party to work up a real feel for the scene. He's too talented to drop in just to let go with a couple of bitchy remarks. -- Salon
Publishers Weekly -
The characters in this collection of 10 storieschiefly Pakistanis transplanted to Englandare for the most part bitter, vengeful, petty, unfulfilled and vicious. They're unattractive to their fellow characters and to us. But screenwriter (My Beautiful Laundrette) and novelist (The Buddha of Suburbia) Kureishi's unadorned prose and fast plots compel a surprising amount of empathy for these small souls, along with satisfaction that we are not they. In the collection's sharpest piece, "D'Accord, Baby," moviemaker Bill discovers that his wife has slept with a French intellectual named Vincent, so he sets out to bed Vincent's daughter in an act of revenge. But after Bill satisfies her demands for rough sex, he leaves with the bittersweet revelation "that happiness was beyond him and everything was coming down, and that life could not be grasped but only lived." In the collection's longest, most cluttered story, "With Your Tongue Down My Throat," a young woman meets the half-sister who has garnered her father's devotion and then embarks on a wild Pakistani adventure that blows the lid off her sibling's demure facade. In these and the other stories, sordid behavior is never more than a page away, as the wry wit of Kureishi's mischievous fiction enlivens a series of airless, empty lives. (Nov.)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.Laura Miller
Kureishi has "the master's touch when it comes to making us feel we've been thrust into the thick of things."— The New York Times Book Review
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.