The Karma Sutra of Brit Lit.... (The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kureishi)

Member Name: violentviolet

Product:	The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kureishi
Date:	19/12/00 (511 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very accessible, great fun

Disadvantages: See review...

You like your fiction the way you like your men - snazzy, sexy with a great sense of humour? Try Kureishi for size. Here's a novel for our times which charts the experience of growing up in suburban London -boredom, claustrophobia and the desperate search for an identity the vast majority of us experience in our teens. All this is hampered in Karim's case by the fact he's a bisexual 'Englishman born and bred' - with an Indian father who is masquerading as a Buddhist and having a less than secret affair. The plot is fast and furious - it is no surprise the book was adapted for the small screen as it has a real cinematic feel.

Although the tone of the novel is extremely entertaining - judging by this performance, Kureishi has certainly earned his status as one of Britain's foremost contemporary writers - the humour seems to have been used to depoliticise the novel's main issue: race. Mostly racist incidents are portrayed as being farcical rather than threatening or disturbing. Kureishi seems afraid of making his novel too overtly political for fear of alienating his mostly white readership. Like Meena Syal in Anita and Me, Kureishi is using humour as a way of sweetening the bitter pill of racial conflict.

I think this would be a great gift for someone you'd like to coax into reading more books as its very accessible - and saucy! Don't read it on the train though, not unless you want bewildered commuters to turn around and stare as you snort with laughter...

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