Kuresihi

Hanif Kureishi - Unpublished Works, including Strangers When We Meet


Gabriel's Gift by Hanif Kureishi

A Review by Stephanie Zacharek
Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - Gabriel's Gift by Hanif Kureishi, reviewed by Salon.com
http://www.powells.com/review/2002_01_04.html

In the late '60s and early '70s, Britain, like the United States, was peopled with kids who didn't want to grow up — which might have been all right, if only they hadn't spawned. That's the gentle dark joke at the heart of Hanif Kureishi's Gabriel's Gift, a gingery novel about a bright, self-possessed 15-year-old boy who's reeling from the marital breakup of his parents, a hugely talented but washed-up guitarist and a former costume designer to rock royalty. The parents, having fallen away from the world of bohemian privilege, can't handle the bleak reality of paying rent and doing the work of getting along with one another. The son, Gabriel, has more sense than either of them but zero authority: Even boho parents — or maybe especially boho parents — cling to the hoary Old Testament decrees that parents must always be the rulers of the universe.

But that makes Gabriel's Gift sound heavier and nastier than it is: Kureishi has always been something of a hip humanist, the kind of writer who's more interested in his characters' spikes and smudges than in anything so dull as perfection or even predictability, and he brings that to bear here. Everyone has to adjust to the inhospitable adult world eventually, but there's always a secret part of us that refuses to grow up. Gabriel's Gift is a coming-of-age story that suggests that no one ever really comes of age: It's simply too heartbreaking.

Reading the signs of the time

By Anna Millar
Bookreview

SECRETS are my currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close and yet placed far away." That this is the reader's introduction to Jamal, the narrator, in Hanif Kureishi's latest social work, Something To Tell You, is little surprise.

His skill for capturing the social climate doesn't desert him in his snapshot of Seventies suburbia. "Sometimes people asked if I were 'Mediterranean', otherwise, there were few Asian people where we lived," explains the young Jamal. "Most whites considered Asians to be 'inferior', less intelligent, less everything good."