- Paperback: 100 pages
- Publisher: Faber And Faber Ltd.; 1st Edition edition (Aug 1 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0571194370
- ISBN-13: 978-0571194377
- Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 12.8 x 1.4 cm
- Shipping Weight: 222 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #587,611 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Hanif Kureishi's fourth novel made many reviewers uneasy on its first appearance in the U.K., because it cuts so painfully near to the bone. If a novelist's first duty is to tell the truth, then the author has done his duty with unflinching courage. Intimacy gives us the thoughts and memories of a middle-aged writer on the night before he walks out on his wife and two young sons for of a younger woman. A very modern man, without political convictions or religious beliefs, he vaguely hopes to find fulfillment in sexual love. No one is spared Kureishi's cold, penetrating gaze or lacerating pen. "She thinks she's feminist, but she's just bad-tempered," the unnamed narrator says of his abandoned wife. A male friend advises him, "Marriage is a battle, a terrible journey, a season in hell, and a reason for living."
At the heart of Intimacy is this terrible paradox: "You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them." Male readers will wince with recognition at the narrator's hatred of entrapment and domesticity, and his implacable urge towards freedom, escape, even loneliness. Female readers may find it a truly horrific revelation. Kureishi is only telling it like it is, in staccato sentences of pinpoint accuracy. By far the author's best yet: a brilliant, devastating work. --Christopher Hart, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
"I have been trying to convince myself that leaving someone isn't the worst thing you can do to them," says Jay, the middle-aged narrator of this relentlessly honest account of one man's preparations to abandon his two young sons and their mother. Jay and Susan lead comfortable lives in contemporary London: efficient, ambitious Susan works in publishing and reads cookbooks in bed, and withdrawn but steady Jay is a successful movie and TV scriptwriter. Jay no longer loves Susan, however, and an affair with Nina, a quixotic young hippie, leads the minor-league Casanova to conclude that he deserves the freedom to explore "the possibilities of intimacy" rather than endure the quiet stasis of his life with Susan. But Jay's desire for emotional independence is complicated by his love for his two sons, and he spends the night before his departure considering the unsatisfying examples of two friends: serious-minded professor Asif, who believes that marriage should require work, and Victor, who left his wife for a youthful, liberated existence only to find himself eating alone in his convenience flat. British author Kureishi (My Beautiful Launderette; The Buddha of Suburbia) once again jumps into the quagmire of contemporary mores with this treatise on the feckless nature of intimacy, both sexual and emotional. This book's particularly male solipsism proved controversial when it was published in England last year. But Kureishi's spare, direct prose balances his sometimes cruel detachment?especially in regard to Susan?with a ruthless investigation of Jay's flaws. Ultimately, Kureishi's refusal to let Jay escape unscathed from the emotional ravages of his actions transforms the story from a shop-worn tale of sexual infidelity to a devastating and insightful portrait of how?for better or for worse?betrayal can become a form of self-renewal. First serial to the New Yorker.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most helpful customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but only half the story on men,
By
This review is from: Intimacy (Paperback)
"Intimacy" is rightly valued for its dispassionate presentation of the duplicity and selfishness of men in love. Intimacy is both the goal and destroyer of monogamy, Kureishi seems to being saying, and he certainly pulls no punches when it comes to explaining why. Men always want someone else. Blame nature, blame nurture, blame contemporary social demands incompatible with six hundred millennia of evolutionary development. Whatever the case, we seem to be programmed to break women's hearts and to ruin our own happiness in the process. Kureishi gives an agonizingly candid insight into the machinations of male ego and self-justification. My problem with it is that many happily married men would probably say, "Speak for yourself, Hanif." And rightly so. What of the men who live perfectly happy lives devoted to their wives and children? It doesn't mean they aren't attracted to other women, it doesn't mean they don't ever think of straying. It just means they don't go through with it. Are they all repressed? Are they all kidding themselves? Do they secretly hate their wives and resent their children? Or have they learned that the infantile fantasy of endlessly variable sexual experience is precisely that, and therefore not worth pursuing? Kureishi doesn't seem to allow that such men might exist. He tells only half the story on men, and so this tragi-comic articulation of male infidelity comes very close to celebrating it as natural, inevitable and therefore of little consequence. I'm not taking the moral high ground here. I'm just acknowledging what Kureishi refuses to: that some men aren't cheating dogs. My only other quibble is that this novel is too long, even at 120 pages. It wouldn't seem that way if I hadn't previously read an exquisitely edited extract, published as a short story in The New Yorker, which said everything the novel says, but better. It was less totalizing, less cockily assured of its own position - and therefore closer to the truth. (It's still available in "The Art Of The Story", edited by Daniel Halpern - a collection well worth a look.)
5.0 out of 5 stars
The book speaks,
By
This review is from: Intimacy (Paperback)
Hanif Kureishi's Intimacy is a book I have been waiting for in years to help me speak the indecipherable feelings inside my heart. This novella contains a very simple plot - a man who has decided to leave his wife in the next morning because he does not love her anymore. Just because he does not love her anymore? There are times for each of us, as a lover and reader, to break up with someone for some reasons, or no reasons. But the feelings cannot be simply described. Despite this, we can all find it all inside the book. Intimacy is about the internal thinking of the departing husband. It is a page turner with brilliantly-written lines. How many of us need to "defer the deferral" to break up? When we are dumped, we decide to remain in solitude - "if one can live with loneliness, we don't need friends anymore". Intimacy is a must-read for those who are (going to be) out of love.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stellar.,
By A Customer
This review is from: INTIMACY: A NOVEL (Hardcover)
This slim volume is likely one of the best books I've ever read, on par with Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal," Camus' "The Stranger," and reflective and insightful not unlike some of Paul Auster's work, most notably his early essay, "The Invention of Solitude." Kureishi was attacked by outraged feminists at the time of it's original publication, but it's as honest an account of masculinity as I have ever read. Even my wife -- normally a fan of genre fiction -- read "Intimacy" and loved it. Throughout most of Kureishi's writing, there is a blue melancholy and a wry, self-deprecating wit. There is much of that here, but there is also anger. .....If you saw the film "Intimacy," which was based on this book, just know the two are very different. The film actually took from a several of his short stories....Lastly, if you're a Kureishi fan and are travelling to Europe any time soon, check out the bookstores there. There are several of his works available in English-language bookstores (especially in Paris) that are unavailable here.
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