The Black Album

Yet another winner from Hanif Kureishi as he delves deep into the world of drugs, music and adolescent confusion within theworld of a group of Asian college students. Taking the title from a Prince album, Kureishi explores the interrelations between aworking class Asian student heavily influenced by literature and his revolutionary, English lecturer with whom he begins an affair.This is counterbalanced by the threats of an uprising amongst his fellow students who seek to defend themselves against the prejudice they see within neighbouring communities. In a titanic struggle, Shahid Hasan must choose between his friends and his lover, both of whom are cast in the revolutionarylights yet in radically different ways. Just as in The Buddha of Suburbia, Kureishi's own literary and musical tastes are revealedyet this also shows what can go wrong when one person takes it on themselves to embody the opinions of the majority. Theresult sees the boundaries of class and identity become tragically blurred amongst a haze of pills, alcohol and teenage outrage. Once again Kureishi reinforces his position as one of the best non-British writers in British literature with a rollercoaster novel which moves between the deadly serious and wickedly funny, true genius.

This book is so different from most I read. It is violent, real, well written and provides fascinating insights into the life of a culture we live so close with and normally do not know, our own seen from outside, i.e. the protagonist Shalid's Pakistan part of view, and into that of immigrants around us seen from Shalid's western point of view as he had been growing up here. Rather worth reading!

Funny, how much of the review I hear from folk, have been about the Indian, Pakistan, Islamic tinge on the book. Yea, it's good and stuff that he's writing about that, while much of the mainstream media still shows the myth of London in the 'Notting Hill' Film image (Damm, I use to squat there in the 80's, so I was never more than 5 minutes away from my Saltfish, Redstrip, Dub plates). But for me the strongest images are of the white folks in the book. I remember coming across SO MANY self proclaimed liberal lefties like Hanif covers in the book. Middle class English folk, who really want to make things better for us, colonials as long as they are in charge. This smug paternalistic attitude (gosh, the BBC just came to my mind) jumps out at you in funny funny incidents. In this novel, I reckon the 'anthropologists lense' (come on now, many do read his book to get an insider's glimse of a world they see a closed to them) is turned on the 'anthroplogists' themselves pretty well. This would explain why one of my friends reacted badly to it, ragging on about how she especially dislike 'that woman professor in the book' - For me, that female lecturer Hanif depicts was typical of my 'multiculti' friend.

Kureishi has written the perfect contemporary british novel for the contemporary thinker. He probes into such matters as racism and drugs, and seems to question whether either of these are necessary (after having Shahid, his protagonist, exposed to quite a bit of both). His ability to combine his powerful sociopolitical thoughts with a bit of a love story speaks of all of our lives today - we must deal with many different causes, trying to find out which ones are ours.

He's got style, but not in any exagerated sense. And anyway its the material that grabs you. Very human- the material, his characters aren't so much out of the ordinary, but Kureishi wrings out of them these cooly intense, never contrived kinds of feelings. More importantly I'm 22, Eritrean, grew up in CA, and I don't think I've ever read a book that made this kind of a connection with me. Anyway I think a lot of you displaced foreign born kids out there will really be vibing with his stuff.