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Kureishi Has Something To Tell Us

by Zoe Strimpel
Tue, 26 Feb 2008 at 9:35 PM

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London is basking in the pre-release droplets of what will surely be its biggest literary splash in months: Hanif Kureishi's "Something to Tell You" on March 6, a book which critics are calling his best since 1990's "The Buddha of Suburbia." The Telegraph calls it "a big book in every way" and "hugely enjoyable," while Time Out calls it "a vital, teeming, panoramic, immersive novel." The book centers on Jamal, a fifty-something psychoanalyst, and his teenage son, Rafi. Despite the upright morality of his profession, or at least the seeming responsibility of it, Jamal, we learn, has an awful secret: He is responsible for the death of a former girlfriend's sexually abusive father. The secret haunts him. "Something to Tell You " is typically sex-obsessed; Mr. Kureishi proved himself a master in this area with "Intimacy," his autobiographical novella about a man who leaves his partner and their young children for another woman. "I've always been promiscuous," Jamal says at one point, and indeed, he often walks into rooms containing women who cannot unzip him fast enough.

Mr. Kureishi also triumphs in the way in which he seems to be bridging the gap between the lofty "literary" world and accessible popular fiction. "Something to Tell You" will be sold in Tesco, Britain's largest supermarket chain. "'Literary fiction ...'" Mr. Kureishi groans to Time Out, in one of several spirited interviews he has so far given. "If you hear those words, you might as well cut your [expletive] throat." Sounds like we're in for a treat.

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