From Amazon.com
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lives in contemporary London: efficient, ambitious Susan works in publishing and reads cookbooks in bed, and withdrawn but steady Jay is a successful movie and TV scriptwriter.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.
