Intimacy: A Novel - Hardcover

Kureishi, Hanif

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684852756 ISBN 13: 9780684852751

Publisher: Scribner, 1999

Synopsis

A prize-winning novelist offers a searing and unflinchingly honest potrayal of a failing marriage as Jay, a successful Londoner, decides to leave his wife, abandoning the children he loves, because of the deterioration of their marriage's intimacy. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

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

About the Author:

Hanif Kureishi studied philosophy at the University of London and began writing plays for the Royal Court when he was twenty-one. Kureishi's script for My Beautiful Laundrette earned him an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay. He also wrote the screenplays for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, London Kills Me (which he also directed), and My Son the Fanatic, adapted from the short story in his collection Love in a Blue Time. His novels The Buddha of Suburbia (winner of the Whitbread Prize) and The Black Album have been translated into fifteen languages. He lives in London.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0684852756
• ISBN 13: 9780684852751
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 118