Collected Stories

By: Hanif Kureishi

Publisher: Faber and Faber

Pages: 670

Price: Rs 850

What is most daunting about Hanif Kureishi’s Collected Stories is its immense volume — 670 pages — and I have lost count of the chapters. But while browsing the contents, I find some very intriguing titles: Weddings and Beheadings, The Penis and The Body — the title story in a sub-category — which is the longest in this latest collection of stories by Hanif Kureishi.

Kureishi is a celebrated English novelist, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have been translated into 36 languages. He has won several awards, including an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette.

Among the New Stories, which has Kureishi’s unpublished works, Weddings and Beheadings is disquieting. It talks about the helplessness, dismay and apprehensions of a videographer who records beheadings. In a city ravaged by internal strife and ethnic hatred, there are fewer weddings, graduations and parties to be shot, laments the videographer who dreams to be a filmmaker one day. Through this story and My Son the Fanatic, Kureishi highlights the religious tensions and discord within the Muslim community.

My Son the Fanatic, which has been adapted into a film starring Om Puri, is the story of a hardworking immigrant Pakistani taxi driver Parvez whose son is determined to pursue jihad. When Parvez fails to quell his son’s spiritual enthusiasm, he thrashes him. The story ends on a poignant note. The battered teenaged son with a slit lip asks his dad: “So, who’s the fanatic now?” His query haunts, and you begin to wonder whether the battered teenager who is pursuing jihad is wrong? Or is he the wronged?

Kureishi’s literature is unconventional and often absurd, which is why he has a large fan following. But his writings are also raunchy. He talks about sex casually as he talks about everyday activities. In fact, in the 1970s, Kureishi wrote pornography under the pen name Antonia French.

To experience Kureishi’s height of absurdity, read The Penis. A porn actor goes to a surgeon requesting him to sew back his lost organ, but the doctor says this is his most unusual surgery. He has enlarged breasts, lips and buttocks, but has never sewed back a penis.

In the collection, another interesting chapter is The Body, in which a sexagenarian littérateur, Adam, trades his old self with a new body — much like how you’d get a new suit from the designers — to reverse degeneration and ageing. Though The Body kicks off with a lot of momentum and stimulates the mind, halfway through, it loses rhythm. However, Kureishi revives the thrill towards the end.

Kureishi talks about relationships in several of his stories. Four Blue Chairs is about how a couple (or the relationship) survives the trauma of getting furniture from a store to their apartment. But the story is long-drawn and the four blue chairs fail to charm you as they begin to settle in the couple’s apartment.

 In all, what you get to experience in this collection of stories is Kureishi’s linguistic charm, easy eloquence, unusual energy, insouciance, wit and, most importantly, his insights about relationships, aspirations, multiculturalism and fundamentalism. And there’s absolutely nothing to beat Kureishi’s absurdity.