Love in a Blue Time: Short Stories

He gives a voice to the outcasts, the forgotten, the neglected and makes us feel a part of their world.

For those (like me) familiar with Kureishi only via his film work, the stories here will not surprise, as they exhibit his usual sensitive approach to the themes of cross-cultural difficulties and men completely adrift in their middle-age. The ten stories--most in the 5-15 page range with three 40+ pagers mixed in--are fairly mixed in quality, there are a few failures, but what is good is exceedingly good. In the cross-cultural difficulties category are three workmanlike, but unremarkable stories: "We're Not Jews," "With Your Tongue Down My Throat," and "My Son the Fanatic." The latter offers an excellent example of how a somewhat offhand short story can be turned into a quite compelling and powerful film. The other seven stories all deal in one way or another with men struggling to come to terms with marriage, responsibility, commitment, and sheer growing up--or more often, not struggling but trying to simply avoid it all. Two of these, "The Flies" and "The Tale of the Turd" wander off into Gogolish territory to no great effect. Kureishi's writing is inarguably strong, and he's able to make his characters come alive with a minimum of words, and often with a fair dose of humor. But while it's fun to read the stories just to enjoy good writing, too many of these men start to feel like they're living under the same desperate cloud, which gets tiresome.

Hanif Kureishi is a gifted but sometimes very self-indulgent writer. He is especially good at writing about lost love-starved Brits. (Money in Kureishi's tales has much of the abstractness that money has for me. In contrast, drugs are something he knows!) "The flies" is a failure attempting to write a Kafkaesque parable. Not just a failure, but unreadable. But I found "Nightlight" incisive as well as evocative. "My son the fanatic" and "D'accord, baby" are also splendid social comedies (not really so far from Austen, except in graphicness and being set in a multiracial England). The title story seems to me a London version of "True West" (without ties of blood). And "With your tongue stuck down my throat" is hilarious.

I was excited and refreshed to read the first(title)story in this collection. It was smart, hip, insightful and moved at a rate that was fun after slogging through a lot of modern "literary" fiction. Unfortunately the later stories in the collection were darker, slower and in the case of "Flies"-too self-consciously symbolic("The Turd" seemed too outrageous to take the symbolism seriously). As a guy in late middle age who has long since left drugged-out, lost friends it was refreshing to relive the hilarity, pain and eventual insanity of that wonderfully self-centered life-without-limits.

Hanif Kureishi is a wonderful writer with the unique ability to touch on often serious topics as race, class and religion with unabashed humor. Love in a Blue Time is no exception. His social commentaries are expressed through well-developed characters, ranging from the highly ordinary to the very peculiar. "We are not Jews", "My Son the Fanatic" and "The Tale of the Turd" are arguably the the best short stories in this series and must-reads for fans of this gifted writer.