topics: |  fiction | gender

Although on the whole this story is too self-obsessed to become a great
novel, I felt myself caught in the utter depravity of the protagonist, who
is leaving a wife and two doting children in the middle of the night,
merely to gain the freedom to explore the possibility of other women.

Like in "The Buddha of Suburbia", the protagonist, rooted in the Pakistani
muslim british experience, appears to be a somewhat disturbing social
misfit. The book holds interest because of his unrepentant depravity -
through episodes like how he is mixing laxative into his father's drink 
while he's recovering from an operation, till today's decision to leave 
the family for the freedom of a bohemian life.

The story is based on his real-life behaviour; the wife in question is
ex-partner Tracey Scoffield, e.g. see declamations by his sister.

Excerpts

It is the saddest night, for tomorrow I am leaving and not coming
back. - opening line.

my last night with a woman I have known for ten years, a woman I know
almost everything about, and want no more of. Soon we will be like
strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of
reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a
history. The first time she put her hand on my arm -- I wish I had
turned away. Why didn't I? The waste; the waste of time and feeling.
	 - p.1,2

If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the
new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity -- to others, to the past,
to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least
one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an
optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteering belief in the future -- a
declaration that things can not only be different but better.  - p.5

Victor, you see, can give women hope, if not satisfaction. - p.5

I love her enthusiasm for [the children]. When we really talk, it is
about them, something they have said or done, as if they are a passion
no one else can understand. - p. 6

[Susan is railing against her colleagues at work]
I am compelled to share her feelings, though I don't know the
people. As she talks I see why I leave the bathroom door open. I can't
be in a room with her for too long without feeloing that there is
something I must do to stop her being so angry. But I never know what
I should do, and soon I feel as if she is shoving me against the wall
and battering me. - p.7

[Susan with the 3-year old son]
I watch her caressing his hair, kissing his dimpled fingers and
rubbing his stomach. He giggles and squirms. What a quality of
innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed. Who could
violate it without damaging himself? - p.8

He had worked too hard to enjoy sufficiently his teenage freedom the
first time. - p.13

It is a cruel story as most children's stories are. - p.14

Skirts, like theater curtains later, quickened my curiosity. I wanted
to know what was under them. There was waiting, but there was
possibility. The skirt was a transitional object; both a thing in
itself and a means of getting somewhere else. This became my paradigm
of important knowledge. The world is a skirt I want to lift up. - p.15

But now, when I am certain that I am able to speak to women without
being afraid of wanting them, I am not sure that I can touch someone
as I used to -- frivolously. After certain age sex can never be
casual. I couldn't ask for so little.
To lay your hand on another's body, to put your mouth against
another's -- what a commitment that is! To choose someone is to
uncover a whole life. And it is to invite them to uncover you! - p.17

'I never understood all the fuss you straights make about infidelity,'
he'd say. 'It's only fucking.' [from a gay friend, p.17]

Every few months something new and shiny arrive: a car, a fridge, a
washing machine, a telephone. And for a time each new thing amazed
us. We touched and stared at it for at least a fortnight.
. . . we thought that things would be enough. -p.18

Tonight I want to be only as mad as I choose; not more mad than that,
please. - p.19

Happiness excludes me . . .  An atmosphere of generalized depression
and mid-temperature gloom makes me feel at home. If you are drawn to
unhappiness you will never lack a friend. - p.31

Why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume
it is the only way to live, as if everybody else is inadequate? Why
can't they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity? - p.32

You remind me of someone who reads only ever the first chapter of a
book. You never discover what happens next. . .

But marriage is a battle, a terrible journey, a season in hell and a
reason for living. You need to be equipped in all areas, not just the
sexual. - p. 33

People don't want you to have too much pleasure; they think it is bad
for you. . . How unsettling is desire! That devil never sleeps or
keeps still. Desire is naughty and doesn't conform to our ideals,
which is why we have such a need of them. Desire is the original
anarchist and undercover agent  . . . just when we think we've got
desire under control it lets us down or fills us up with hope. Desire
makes me laugh because it makes fools of us all. Still rather a fool
than a fascist. - p.34

Often I made the mistake, when young, of starting a book at the
beginning and reading through to the end. - p. 36

[In the yoga class there were] many attractive women, in bright
leotards and all taking up adventurous positions reflected in the
polished mirrors. In such circumstances I found infinite
desirelessness a strain to bring on. As our souls lifted into nirvana
on a collective 'ooommm' my penis would press against my shorts as if
to say, 'Don't forget that always I am here too!'
Sexual release is the most mysticism most people can manage. - p.40

I never found a way to be pleasurably idle with Susan. She has a busy
mind. One might want to admire anyone who lives with vigour and
spirit. But there is desperation in her activity . . . - p.41

There are few more exquisite instruments than a fountain pen as it
glides over good paper, like a finger over young skin. - p.48

When I think of how my wife and I stayed together all those barren and
arduous nights and years, I cannot understand it at all. Perhaps it
was a kind of mad idealism. . . It was blind, foolish obedience and
submission. - p.49

our feelings are weapons that could kill, and words are their bullets
- p. 52

My children hunt through their toy boxes, chucking aside the
once-cherished to drag out what they need to keep themselves
interested. I am the same with books, music, pictures, newspapers. Can
we do this with people? - p. 52

we live in a selfish age . . . Thatcherism of the soul. In love, these
days, it is a free market . . . there is no sexual and social
security. - p. 52

. . . a bus ride to the end of the route with one of my sons. - p. 57

Is it too much to want a tender and complete intimacy? - p.59

It is my yearning for more life that has done this, and we are yearning
creatures, a bag of insistent wants. Sense says one needn't follow every
impulse, pursuing every woman one fancies. But one can, I guess, run after
some of them, never knowing in advance what glory one might find. - p.61

I recalled Casanova's advice that it is easier to pick up two women
at once than one on her own. - p. 65

love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold back,
nothing interesting happens. - p. 71

I select [a photograph] of my eldest boy a few days old.  I am bathing
him in the hospital, his head lying in my hand.  My face is grave with
concentration... It was Karen I was seeing then.  I waved goodbye to Susan in
the hosp, picked up the champagne her father had left us, and drank it in bed
with Karen.  Susan mentioned it the other day.
   "I will never forget that you left the hospital without kissing me.  Our
first child, and you didn't kiss me.  Still, at least you love the
children. When you go away."
   "Go away?"
   "Travel.  The children ask for you all the time.  The first thing they say
in the morning is, "Is Daddy coming home today?"
   I put the photograph in my pocket. 94

---

Review of a film by German writer Peter Handke, "The left-handed woman" -
	http://www.goethe.de/uk/mon/archiv/eliteratur/elinkshaendigefrau.htm

It seems to be a postmodern trend to treat human situations with
coldness - the numbness that comes perhaps from an overload of change,
arising from technology - and our inability to keep up with it. . .
See also the other book where a marriage is voluntarily terminated
without good reason (Kureishi) . . .

      the film focuses on Marianne who suddenly, without apparent
      reason, asks for a separation from her husband to lead her own
      life. Influenced by Wim Wenders, the film was surrounded in
      controversy at its German release, primarily due to the
      film's sense of coldness and sterility.


This lack of emotion seems to be key in avant-garde European fiction - as
in Bernhard Shlink's The reader.  the film
sounds artistically powerful but rather depressing - certainly what i
found in Kureishi.  Even Schlink is so subdued in his style that the
overall effect is that of a very cold observer - the emotions come out
much more through the facts than through the descriptions:

      The remote coldness with which the author seems to treat his
      figures in the texts is certainly also to be found in the
      film. Emotions are not discussed or described and they are
      hardly conveyed through gestures or mimicry. The figures'
      emotions are reflected much more strongly in their factual
      actions and not least in the very quiet, almost uniform passage
      of time. "What I am really striving to attain is monotony in its
      most intensive form," explained Handke. Monotony not in the
      sense of boredom, but as a form of ascetic concentration on
      elementary processes.

Other reviews

[Laura Miller, from salon.com

    Hanif Kureishi once wrote well-populated books and screenplays that
thrummed with the vitality of life in contemporary London -- multiracial,
polysexual and politically raucous, with characters chasing after everything
from money and sex to spiritual enlightenment, ironclad fundamentalism and
even true love. His screenplays -- "My Beautiful Laundrette," "Sammy and
Rosie Get Laid" -- and novels -- "The Buddha of Suburbia," "The Black Album"
-- were fetching and lively, the work of a writer endlessly engaged in and
amused by his world and undaunted by its myriad contradictions.

Now Kureishi mostly writes about himself. His recent collection of short
stories, "Love in a Blue Time," and the slim, patently autobiographical novel
"Intimacy" brood over midlife crises of a depressingly generic nature. In
"Intimacy," Jay -- a writer who, like Kureishi, was once nominated for an
Academy Award -- prepares to leave Susan, the mother of his two small sons,
whom he's lived with for six years. Their relationship has degenerated into a
loveless routine, the two partners playing roles straight out of a pop
psychologist's case study. He's a romantic, boyish fuck-up; she's a scold. He
relies on her "humdrum dexterity and ability to cope" while secretly
resenting her for making him feel weak. She criticizes him constantly, then
blames him for being emotionally remote. Without a doubt, their union is
toxic and doomed. The night before he plans to move in with a divorced pal,
Jay wanders the house, marinating in self-pity and guilt, occasionally
mustering flashes of the opportunistic defiance of his much-mourned
youth. ("Desire is naughty and doesn't conform to our ideals ... Desire is
the original anarchist and undercover agent.")

Meandering and formless, "Intimacy" has the honest immediacy of an
extended journal entry. It is surely an accurate portrait of the interior of
a perpetual child, a man who has convinced himself that his fear of life's
depths is actually a passion for its summits. But this sort of thing -- like
a note left by a suicide -- can be crushing to read unless the author
suggests some dawning of insight or perspective, and it's not even clear
what, exactly, Kureishi believes about Jay's dilemma. He has Jay describe the
youth culture he grew up in and still misses as "the apotheosis of the
defiantly shallow"; he has a friend of Jay's observe, "You remind me of
someone who only ever reads the first chapter of a book. You never discover
what happens next." But none of these insights seem to stick.

As his hero heads out the door filled with puppyish hopes about Nina, the
fuzzily idealized club girl he hopes will restore him, Kureishi ends on a
note of uplift. The problem is, it seems painfully obvious that once Nina
comes into clearer focus she'll be deemed just as unsatisfactory as Susan. So
much frantic self-contemplation and so little self-knowledge make for a
dispiriting tale -- doubly so when it comes from the same pen that wrote the
saucily picaresque novel "The Buddha of Suburbia." Kureishi's admirers will
just have to repeat the hopeful mantra that parents of teenagers and families
of befuddled middle-aged men everywhere intone: It's only a phase.