Bin Your Body! (The Body - Hanif Kureishi)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	The Body - Hanif Kureishi
Date:	01/02/05 (156 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good ideas

Disadvantages: not always fully executed

´The Body and Seven Stories´is the first work of fiction I´ve read by Hanif Kureishi (born in 1954), a prolific writer of plays, screenplays (My Beautiful Laundrette) , fiction (The Buddha of Suburbia) and non-fiction for which he´s received numerous awards.

The first story is the longest with 126 pages, a novella rather, the other seven vary from 12 to 48 pages. The sheer length and the fact that its title is also the title of the book make the first story stand out, but is it also the best? Let´s have a look.

It´s told in the first person perspective by an ageing playwright, Adam, ´´I don´t feel particularly ill, but I am in my mid-sixties . . . My knees and back give me a lot of pain. I have haemorrhoids, an ulcer and cataracts. When I eat, it´s not unusual for me to spit out bits of tooth as I go.´´ He meets a young admirer who tells him he´s seen one of his early plays, but that´s impossible, he was a child when it was put on stage, or was he? He tells him that he´s really 70 years old but that his mind has been transplanted into a young and healthy body.

To cut a long story short: he persuades Adam to do the same who agrees more out of curiosity than the urge to be rejuvenated, he gives himself half a year for the experiment and then he´ll slip back into his ´half-dead old carcass.´

It´s not unusual for Adam and his wife to go on separate holidays, so he tells her that he needs a sabbatical and goes to the secret hospital where Newbodies are made out of Oldbodies. He´s asked to browse through the rows of dead young man – he´s declined the suggestion to try out being a young woman – and finds ´his guy´, ´stocky and as classically handsome as any sculpture in the British Museum, he was neither white nor dark but slightly toasted, with a fine, thick penis and heavy balls.´

Before the operation is to begin Adam tries to engage the physician in a discussion on the implications and the impact on society Newbodies who´re as old or even younger than their children might have. What is fascinating is that the story doesn´t come over as fantastic sci-fi, it´s told in a realistic, matter-of-fact way, the physician sees the making of Newbodies as a further step in a line with genetic engeneering, cloning, organ transplant and other medical advances and refuses to discuss philosophical, religious or sociological aspects and so the readers don´t get them, either.

They would be interesting, though; I´m not as old and decrepit as Adam yet, but not many years and diseases away from him, so the idea set me thinking: would I like a young and healthy body, if so, which age would I choose? What would that mean for the people around me (I´m a teacher, it wouldn´t be a good idea if I were too close to my pupils, would it?) Would I want to become a young man? Could the operation be repeated, would that mean immortality? Is immortality desirable at all? What if everyone underwent the operation what with too many people on this planet already?

The Body is a work of fiction and not a treatise, but I´m a bit disappointed about what the author has made of the fascinating subject. Adam decides to bum around Europe and we read extensive descriptions of where and how he tries out and practises his beautiful new member, I´ve got the impression that the author – a man! – has got carried away here. Yawn.

I went on reading, though, because I was really interested in the ending, will Adam be so happy as a Newbody that he doesn´t want to go back to his old life or will he get bored by people he doesn´t share much with intellectually and regarding his experience of life? The ending is surprising.

I like the following stories better, they´re well-observed, insightful glimpses of the problems modern people have in their relationship with relatives and friends. The personnel is British middle-class, the men work as, say, TV journalists or film directors (the author´s world), the women are nurses or aspiring therapists, they go to workshops and/or evening classes, people meet at parties, smoke, take drugs, drink excessively not in order to enjoy alcoholic drinks, but in order to get pissed as quickly as possible (The Observer, 2 January, 2005: ´One in 20 people in Britain is now dependant on alcohol and a similar number are at serious risk of liver disease´), singles and patchwork families are more common than traditional, stable partnerships, people cope better with their public social lives than with their private ones.

How to get along with an old widowed mother who´s always neglected her son but wants his attention in her old age, how to find the balance between traditional (Indian) values and modern (British) child raising, how to become accepted by a son who was ´an accident´, lives with his mother and hates his father? According to ´How to . . .´ books the protagonists make mistakes, horrible ones, but they care and in the end this is what counts; clumsy as their demonstrations of affection may be, they manage to reach the person in question.

This is what I´ve found in Kureishi´s stories, it´s possible that he was thinking of something different when writing them, but as we all know each reader reads his or her own book. ´The Body´ reads well and I can recommend it, in case you interpret the stories in a different way, tell us about it!

Paperback (2003)
224 pages
Faber and Faber
7.99 GBP
amazon 6.39 GBP

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