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3.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but only half the story on men, April 18 2004
"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.)
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The book speaks, Feb 25 2004
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.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Stellar., April 18 2003
By A Customer
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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