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Something to Tell You

by Hanif Kureishi

ISBN13: 9781416572107
ISBN10: 1416572104
Condition: Standard
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"In Something to Tell You, Hanif Kureishi sets up interesting cultural and structural tensions that unfortunately fail to deliver, resulting in an estranging narrative. Initially, the book holds great promise, as Jamal Khan — a successful middle-aged psychotherapist living and working in London — narrates the most intimate details of his life and intrigues the reader with an unexpected revelation: "I live every day with a murder. A real one. Killer, me. There; I've told you. It's out." Jamal is a man with a marked interest in secrets — both his patients' and his own — and he reveals plenty of them as the novel progresses, yet it becomes increasingly difficult to remain invested in him and the other characters. Ultimately, the novel flounders in a world of stilted expression and blurry morality."Charlotte Kelly, Rain Taxi (read the entire Rain Taxi review)

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

The stunningly original, iconoclastic, award-winning author of The Buddha of Suburbia returns with his finest, most exuberant novel.

In the early 1980s Hanif Kureishi emerged as one of the most compelling new voices in film and fiction. His movies My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and his novel The Buddha of Suburbia captivated audiences and inspired other artists. In Something to Tell You, he travels back to those days of hedonism, activism and glorious creativity. And he explores the lives of that generation now, in a very different London.

Jamal is middle-aged, though reluctant to admit it. He has an ex-wife, a son he adores, a thriving career as a psychoanalyst and vast reserves of unsatisfied desire. "Secrets are my currency," he says. "I deal in them for a living." And he has some of his own. He is haunted by Ajita, his first love, whom he hasn't seen in decades, and by an act of violence he has never confessed.

With great empathy and agility, Kureishi has created an array of unforgettable characters — a hilarious and eccentric theater director, a covey of charming and defiant outcasts and an ebullient sister who thrives on the fringe. All wrestle with their own limits as human beings; all are plagued by the past until they find it within themselves to forgive.

Comic, wise and unfailingly tender, Something to Tell You is Kureishi's best work to date, brilliant and exhilarating.

Review:

"Prolific screenwriter, playwright and novelist Kureishi has a gift for smart, sparkling prose and expertly crafted characters, and it is on full display in his latest, the funny and heartbreaking story of Jamal Khan, a successful middle-aged London psychoanalyst dogged by a crushing secret and a long-burning torch for his first love. Jamal's son, Rafi, and ex-wife, Josephine, are still very much involved in Jamal's life, but nobody knows that Jamal is still profoundly in love with his high school girlfriend, Ajita, or that his connection to her is soiled by his complicity in a long-ago violent crime. As an analyst, he knows just how haunting the past can be ('Secrets are my currency,' he informs the reader), and he makes a convincing and often comedic case that madness is an ordinary, unsurprising part of contemporary life. The father-son relationship is especially brilliant, and Kureishi is adept as ever in balancing humor and his piercing insight into the human condition. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

A good piece of advice to authors of first-person novels comes from John Dowell, the hapless narrator of Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier." Trying to decide how best to tell his story, Dowell settles on a tried-and-true approach. "So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage," he tells us, "with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars."

Early on in Hanif Kureishi's new novel, "Something to Tell You," his narrator, a half-Pakistani, half-English psychoanalyst named Jamal Khan, lays out his own version of what I have come to call "The Dowell Directive": "I've always preferred listening," he declares. "Tahir, my first analyst, would say: people speak because there are things they don't want to hear; they listen because there are things they don't want to say. Not that I thought I had a talent for listening then, or realized you could make a profession of it. I was just worse at talking. I spoke all the time, of course, but only to myself. This was safe."

"Something to Tell You," despite its title, is essentially 376 pages of Jamal talking to himself. He has quite a story to tell. It involves, among other elements, a derailed love affair, a murder and a stolen Ingres drawing. Yet there's no sense, as in "The Good Soldier," of anyone sitting at the other side of the fireplace, and indeed, the unfolding of the story hinges on the paradoxical assumption that no one will ever read it.

The novel opens in London during the Blair years. Jamal has a successful practice but is estranged from his hypochondriac wife, Josephine. His son, Rafi, an aficionado of gangsta rap, shuffles between his parents and hopes vaguely that they will reconcile; his garrulous best friend, Henry, a theater director, lives in a state of chronic outrage at Blair's alliance with Bush in Iraq; and his sister, Miriam — multiply tattooed, pierced and Rabelaisian in her proportions — supports her brood of children, dogs, cats and hangers-on by selling drugs and engaging in petty graft. As the narrative picks up speed, Jamal discovers that Henry and Miriam have just entered into an improbable love affair with the assistance of some fetish gear and sex toys.

Even as the doings of his friends and family enthrall Jamal, however, he is haunted by the past, and as he proceeds to describe his quotidian London life — a life, one might note, that often sounds more like that of a successful British novelist and screenwriter than a practicing psychoanalyst — he finds himself drawn back to his student days, when he shared a house with his best friends, Valentin and Wolf, and was in love with Ajita, the beautiful and unhappy daughter of an immigrant Indian factory owner. Ajita, he learns, is keeping back a very dark secret, a secret that eventually will compel Jamal to make a series of deadly choices.

"Something to Tell You," which really gathers momentum only in its last third, can be dramatic, moving and very funny. Kureishi crafts terrific dialogue for these eccentric and troubled characters. But the novel suffers from his decision to write it as a monologue without a listener. Spared the necessity of holding anyone's attention, Kureishi often interrupts his storytelling to give long disquisitions on Freud and his disciples. He quotes from other writers. He name-drops and has an irritating habit of shoehorning large swaths of back story into the middle of scenes, thus diluting their dramatic impact. Kureishi's prose is replete with usage errors and can be, on occasion, embarrassing. ("If jealousy was the vindaloo of love, I'd imagined her tongue burning, and such a fire forcing her to spill her truth.")

And yet "Something to Tell You," even when it drove me up the wall, also charmed me. For all its longueurs, the novel is replete with passages of great pathos and humor. (I won't forget the episode of the copulating cats.) Of these, perhaps the most memorable is Kureishi's paean to Tavistock Square, where a bus loaded with a terrorist bomb blew up in 2005: "That beautiful London square ... was where Dickens wrote "Bleak House," and Woolf "Three Guineas"; where Lenin stayed, and the Hogarth Press published James Strachey's Freud translations in the basement of number 52. There is also a plaque to commemorate conscientious objectors in the First World War, as well as another for the victims of Hiroshima, along with a statue of Gandhi."

Like the city it mourns and celebrates, "Something to Tell You" is unruly and intermittently beautiful. This is the novel as urban sprawl.

Reviewed by David Leavitt, whose most recent novel is 'The Indian Clerk', Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

Review:

"A wickedly funny exploration of guilt, loss, love and the very thin line that separates sanity from insanity. Kureishi's characters are often mad, bad or dangerous to know and all the more delicious for it. This novel, like its other subject, London, bursts at the seams with energy, high — in equal measure — on anxiety and a lust for life."-- Monica Ali, author of Brick Lane

Synopsis:

The stunningly iconoclastic, award-winning author of "The Buddha of Suburbia"returns with his finest, most ambitious novel to date.

About the Author

Hanif Kureishi won the prestigious Whitbread Prize and was twice nominated for Oscars for best original screenplay (My Beautiful Laundrette and Venus, which starred Peter O'Toole). He also received the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.

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Product Details

ISBN:: 9781416572107
Author:: Kureishi, Hanif
Publisher:: Scribner Book Company
Subject:: Literary
Subject:: Psychoanalysts
Subject:: Midlife crisis
Subject:: London (england)
Subject:: Psychological fiction
Edition Description:: Scribner Hardco
Publication Date:: August 2008
Binding:: Hardcover
Grade Level:: General/trade
Language:: English
Pages:: 375
Dimensions:: 9 x 6 in

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