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Summary from Pippa.
The Buddha of Suburbia is a semi-autobiographical first novel by Hanif Kureishi and was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award when it was published in 1990. It was then serialised on TV in 1993 with a soundtrack by David Bowie. The novel takes us back to the London of the 1970s; the Labour government is soon to come to an end with the ousting of James Callaghan by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. The story is a humorous look at social mobility, class structure - both in this country and in the lives of the lower classes in India - and racism, all prominent themes of the story, interspersed with explicit descriptions of Karim’s sex life (Kureishi started out as a porn writer) and with regular references to the soundtracks of the time – The Beatles – Serjeant Pepper, Pink Floyd, The Who and the Doors.
Kureishi has been accused of exploiting his family in the writing of the novel, although he has denied this. He fell out with his father who said he had been robbed of his dignity and his sister Yasmin is quoted as saying that “if her family’s history had to become public, she would not stand by and let it be “fabricated for the entertainment of the public or for Hanif’s profit” ‘.
Kureishi says that his father was very interested in Buddhism but there was a lot of exaggeration required to achieve the comedy in the novel. He describes his work as “writing back” and a way of overcoming the racism he experienced as a young man.
The story is narrated by the central character Karim, a 17-year-old, bi-sexual mixed-race boy who describes himself as an “Englishman born and bred, almost”. He is living in the south London suburbs with his mother Margaret, father Haroon and brother Amar, who calls himself Allie “to avoid racial trouble”. Karim has his father’s “wonderful but crushing wit” but a very poor education. He takes us on a journey through his chaotic ‘rite of passage’ into adulthood, trying to escape a dull suburban life. His close family is falling apart, and his extended family is also dysfunctional. He has not done well at school although he reads a lot and has no idea what he will do with his life, but he knows that he needs to get away from “a dreary suburb of London of which it was said that when people drowned, they saw not their lives but their double-glazing flashing before them”.
Haroon, Karim’s father – “the future guru of Chislehurst” - is a clerk in the civil service for £3.00 a week who arrived from Bombay, India in 1950 to be educated and become a ‘polished English gentleman lawyer’, but never went back and according to Karim, still “stumbled around the place like an Indian just off the boat”.
Haroon’s childhood in India was one of privilege, and he has no practical skills, but gets by with his charm and charisma. He is flirtatious and women want to look after him. His marriage to Margaret has become somewhat stale. ‘Your mother upsets me’ he says. ‘She doesn’t join in things. It’s only my damn effort keeping this whole family together. No wonder I need to keep my mind blank in constant effortless meditation.’ Karim helpfully suggests divorce to his father but realises that “divorce wasn’t something that would occur to them. In the suburbs people rarely dreamed of striking out for happiness. It was all familiarity and endurance: security and safety were the reward of dullness.”
Haroon has recently met social climbing Eva Kay at a ‘writing for pleasure’ class at the King’s Head in Bromley High Street. Karim describes her as “forward, brazen and wicked”. She is impressed with Haroon and has invited him to “speak on one or two aspects of Oriental philosophy” and give a “demonstration of the mystic arts” at her bigger house in a tree-lined road in Beckenham, a much nicer neighbourhood. During the evening and while his Dad is entertaining Eva’s friends in the front room, Karim has a sexual encounter with Charlie, Eva’s son, who he has admired from a distance for a long time. “My love for him was unusual as love goes: it was not generous. I admired him more than anyone but I didn’t wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me”. After this encounter Karim realises that he “wanted to live always this intensely: mysticism, alcohol, sexual promise, clever people and drugs. The door to the future had opened: I could see which way to go”.
Some weeks later Haroon is asked to appear “by public demand” at a secret location. ‘They are looking forward to me all over Orpington’, he says. Karim is keen to join him to see ‘if Dad was a charlatan or if there was anything true in what he was doing’. He has started exaggerating his Indian accent. “He’d spent years trying to be more of an Englishman, to be less risibly conspicuous, and now he is putting it back in spadeloads. Why?”
Inevitably Karim’s parents’ marriage ends, and Karim finds himself having to choose between a more exciting life with his father and Eva in a more up-market area or his depressed mother Margaret, a working-class woman who has been to art school but now works in a shoe shop. Margaret has now moved in with her sister and husband. He feels guilty and dreads going to see his mum. Meanwhile Eva’s bohemian lifestyle opens Karim’s eyes to literature, music and culture and eventually leads to an opening for Karim as an actor with a provincial theatre company where he reluctantly accepts the part of Mowgli in The Jungle Book. He feels that he has lost his integrity by accepting this part but realises that there is nothing else on offer.
Eva is not content with suburban life so uses her creative flair to set up an interior design business and moves the family to West Kensington where she throws herself into the social scene. Introductions to new contacts along with the success of his type-cast role in The Jungle Book brings Karim to the attention of a well-known theatre director – Matthew Pyke - who invites him to become part of his new theatre company. Karim has his first real love affair with Eleanor, another member of the cast, who is upper middle class. Eleanor introduces Karim to a new social scene, that of the monied upper middle classes in London, although she downplays her wealthy background and tries to appear working class.
Karim is going up in the world but experiences confusion over his identity, feelings of remorse for his own behaviour, self-doubt, guilt over his lack of contact with his mother, dislike of his father for leaving his mother, racism in his daily life, the contrast between his father’s cultural heritage and his own lifestyle and feelings of inadequacy because of his poor education. Once he has moved away from suburbia, he decides to lose his accent. “In the past few weeks circumstances had made me discover what an ignoramus I was. Lately I’d been fortunate, and my life had changed quickly, but I’d reflected little on it. When I did think of myself in comparison with those in Eleanor’s crowd, I became aware that I knew nothing; I was empty, an intellectual void.”
Sub-plots in the story are the lives of Karim’s friends and family back in suburbia, who he exploits to his own advantage when asked to come up with material for Pyke’s new play on class. This gets him into a lot of trouble with those closest to him and he is also accused of “playing to white people’s stereotypes of non-white people” by members of the cast.
Karim’s lifestyle is chaotic and promiscuous. He has already had a long-standing but casual sexual relationship with his friend Jamila. While Karim is expanding his horizons, Jamila is forced to marry Changez, newly arrived from India and a great disappointment in every way to Jamila and her father Anwar who runs a corner shop with his wife. Anwar has gone on hunger strike until Jamila agrees to the arranged marriage. This relationship continues until he meets Eleanor, despite the marriage between Jamila and Changez – which remains unconsummated. Changez discovers them in bed together which makes Karim feel disloyal to Changez who he is fond of and now considers to be a friend. Changez resorts to forming a relationship with a Japanese prostitute, Shinko, but continues to fall in love with his Jamila, who fails to fall in love with him and refuses to accept him as her husband in any way other than on paper. Jamila is an interesting character who lives life according to her own rules and knows Karim better than anyone. Her opinion really matters to Karim. Changez’s story adds some poignancy to the story. The arranged marriage has been a failure for both parties. There is a parallel here with the arranged marriage in Brick Lane, although this book was written a decade earlier.
Alongside dealing with all the chaos of his family and the instability of his lifestyle, Karim meets people from very different backgrounds through the theatre companies. Terry, another actor, and an active Trotskyist asks him to raise money for the Party, so he directly asks the two wealthiest people he knows – Matthew Pyke, the theatre director and Eleanor, his part time girlfriend, with mixed success. “Terry had predicted the last forty crises out of twenty, but the bitter, fractured country was in turmoil: there were strikes, marches, wage-claims”. “You may have noticed, Karim, that England’s had it. It’s coming apart”.
Finally, Matthew Pyke’s play is a success and Karim and the theatre group take it to New York where Karim meets up again with Eva’s son Charlie, the wayward musician, now making a name for himself in America with his new punk band.
Karim stays in New York for ten months but then starts to feel disillusioned by Charlie’s lifestyle and the fact that he is not actually achieving anything himself. He goes back to the suburbs and visits his mother, now in a new and happy relationship, (much to the dismay of his father Haroon), her sister Jean and husband Ted (who now runs an interior design business with Eva) and Anwar and his wife Jeeta running their corner shop. Also, Changez and Jamila are living in a commune with Jamila’s new baby by another man and her lesbian lover. These situations all give the author plenty of material for comedy.
On his return from New York, Karim takes a part in a TV soap opera and looks for approval from his father: ‘Top pay. Top job. Top person’. But all his father can say is ‘At least you’re doing something visible at last and not bumming’.
The story ends on a happy note with a reunion of most of the characters at a restaurant. Eva and Haroon announce that they are getting married. Karim reflects on his life to date, what a mess it had been but that it wouldn’t always be that way and that perhaps in the future he would “live more deeply”.
The Buddha of Suburbia is a semi-autobiographical first novel by Hanif Kureishi and was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award when it was published in 1990. It was then serialised on TV in 1993 with a soundtrack by David Bowie. The novel takes us back to the London of the 1970s; the Labour government is soon to come to an end with the ousting of James Callaghan by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. The story is a humorous look at social mobility, class structure - both in this country and in the lives of the lower classes in India - and racism, all prominent themes of the story, interspersed with explicit descriptions of Karim’s sex life (Kureishi started out as a porn writer) and with regular references to the soundtracks of the time – The Beatles – Serjeant Pepper, Pink Floyd, The Who and the Doors.
Kureishi has been accused of exploiting his family in the writing of the novel, although he has denied this. He fell out with his father who said he had been robbed of his dignity and his sister Yasmin is quoted as saying that “if her family’s history had to become public, she would not stand by and let it be “fabricated for the entertainment of the public or for Hanif’s profit” ‘.
Kureishi says that his father was very interested in Buddhism but there was a lot of exaggeration required to achieve the comedy in the novel. He describes his work as “writing back” and a way of overcoming the racism he experienced as a young man.
The story is narrated by the central character Karim, a 17-year-old, bi-sexual mixed-race boy who describes himself as an “Englishman born and bred, almost”. He is living in the south London suburbs with his mother Margaret, father Haroon and brother Amar, who calls himself Allie “to avoid racial trouble”. Karim has his father’s “wonderful but crushing wit” but a very poor education. He takes us on a journey through his chaotic ‘rite of passage’ into adulthood, trying to escape a dull suburban life. His close family is falling apart, and his extended family is also dysfunctional. He has not done well at school although he reads a lot and has no idea what he will do with his life, but he knows that he needs to get away from “a dreary suburb of London of which it was said that when people drowned, they saw not their lives but their double-glazing flashing before them”.
Haroon, Karim’s father – “the future guru of Chislehurst” - is a clerk in the civil service for £3.00 a week who arrived from Bombay, India in 1950 to be educated and become a ‘polished English gentleman lawyer’, but never went back and according to Karim, still “stumbled around the place like an Indian just off the boat”.
Haroon’s childhood in India was one of privilege, and he has no practical skills, but gets by with his charm and charisma. He is flirtatious and women want to look after him. His marriage to Margaret has become somewhat stale. ‘Your mother upsets me’ he says. ‘She doesn’t join in things. It’s only my damn effort keeping this whole family together. No wonder I need to keep my mind blank in constant effortless meditation.’ Karim helpfully suggests divorce to his father but realises that “divorce wasn’t something that would occur to them. In the suburbs people rarely dreamed of striking out for happiness. It was all familiarity and endurance: security and safety were the reward of dullness.”
Haroon has recently met social climbing Eva Kay at a ‘writing for pleasure’ class at the King’s Head in Bromley High Street. Karim describes her as “forward, brazen and wicked”. She is impressed with Haroon and has invited him to “speak on one or two aspects of Oriental philosophy” and give a “demonstration of the mystic arts” at her bigger house in a tree-lined road in Beckenham, a much nicer neighbourhood. During the evening and while his Dad is entertaining Eva’s friends in the front room, Karim has a sexual encounter with Charlie, Eva’s son, who he has admired from a distance for a long time. “My love for him was unusual as love goes: it was not generous. I admired him more than anyone but I didn’t wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me”. After this encounter Karim realises that he “wanted to live always this intensely: mysticism, alcohol, sexual promise, clever people and drugs. The door to the future had opened: I could see which way to go”.
Some weeks later Haroon is asked to appear “by public demand” at a secret location. ‘They are looking forward to me all over Orpington’, he says. Karim is keen to join him to see ‘if Dad was a charlatan or if there was anything true in what he was doing’. He has started exaggerating his Indian accent. “He’d spent years trying to be more of an Englishman, to be less risibly conspicuous, and now he is putting it back in spadeloads. Why?”
Inevitably Karim’s parents’ marriage ends, and Karim finds himself having to choose between a more exciting life with his father and Eva in a more up-market area or his depressed mother Margaret, a working-class woman who has been to art school but now works in a shoe shop. Margaret has now moved in with her sister and husband. He feels guilty and dreads going to see his mum. Meanwhile Eva’s bohemian lifestyle opens Karim’s eyes to literature, music and culture and eventually leads to an opening for Karim as an actor with a provincial theatre company where he reluctantly accepts the part of Mowgli in The Jungle Book. He feels that he has lost his integrity by accepting this part but realises that there is nothing else on offer.
Eva is not content with suburban life so uses her creative flair to set up an interior design business and moves the family to West Kensington where she throws herself into the social scene. Introductions to new contacts along with the success of his type-cast role in The Jungle Book brings Karim to the attention of a well-known theatre director – Matthew Pyke - who invites him to become part of his new theatre company. Karim has his first real love affair with Eleanor, another member of the cast, who is upper middle class. Eleanor introduces Karim to a new social scene, that of the monied upper middle classes in London, although she downplays her wealthy background and tries to appear working class.
Karim is going up in the world but experiences confusion over his identity, feelings of remorse for his own behaviour, self-doubt, guilt over his lack of contact with his mother, dislike of his father for leaving his mother, racism in his daily life, the contrast between his father’s cultural heritage and his own lifestyle and feelings of inadequacy because of his poor education. Once he has moved away from suburbia, he decides to lose his accent. “In the past few weeks circumstances had made me discover what an ignoramus I was. Lately I’d been fortunate, and my life had changed quickly, but I’d reflected little on it. When I did think of myself in comparison with those in Eleanor’s crowd, I became aware that I knew nothing; I was empty, an intellectual void.”
Sub-plots in the story are the lives of Karim’s friends and family back in suburbia, who he exploits to his own advantage when asked to come up with material for Pyke’s new play on class. This gets him into a lot of trouble with those closest to him and he is also accused of “playing to white people’s stereotypes of non-white people” by members of the cast.
Karim’s lifestyle is chaotic and promiscuous. He has already had a long-standing but casual sexual relationship with his friend Jamila. While Karim is expanding his horizons, Jamila is forced to marry Changez, newly arrived from India and a great disappointment in every way to Jamila and her father Anwar who runs a corner shop with his wife. Anwar has gone on hunger strike until Jamila agrees to the arranged marriage. This relationship continues until he meets Eleanor, despite the marriage between Jamila and Changez – which remains unconsummated. Changez discovers them in bed together which makes Karim feel disloyal to Changez who he is fond of and now considers to be a friend. Changez resorts to forming a relationship with a Japanese prostitute, Shinko, but continues to fall in love with his Jamila, who fails to fall in love with him and refuses to accept him as her husband in any way other than on paper. Jamila is an interesting character who lives life according to her own rules and knows Karim better than anyone. Her opinion really matters to Karim. Changez’s story adds some poignancy to the story. The arranged marriage has been a failure for both parties. There is a parallel here with the arranged marriage in Brick Lane, although this book was written a decade earlier.
Alongside dealing with all the chaos of his family and the instability of his lifestyle, Karim meets people from very different backgrounds through the theatre companies. Terry, another actor, and an active Trotskyist asks him to raise money for the Party, so he directly asks the two wealthiest people he knows – Matthew Pyke, the theatre director and Eleanor, his part time girlfriend, with mixed success. “Terry had predicted the last forty crises out of twenty, but the bitter, fractured country was in turmoil: there were strikes, marches, wage-claims”. “You may have noticed, Karim, that England’s had it. It’s coming apart”.
Finally, Matthew Pyke’s play is a success and Karim and the theatre group take it to New York where Karim meets up again with Eva’s son Charlie, the wayward musician, now making a name for himself in America with his new punk band.
Karim stays in New York for ten months but then starts to feel disillusioned by Charlie’s lifestyle and the fact that he is not actually achieving anything himself. He goes back to the suburbs and visits his mother, now in a new and happy relationship, (much to the dismay of his father Haroon), her sister Jean and husband Ted (who now runs an interior design business with Eva) and Anwar and his wife Jeeta running their corner shop. Also, Changez and Jamila are living in a commune with Jamila’s new baby by another man and her lesbian lover. These situations all give the author plenty of material for comedy.
On his return from New York, Karim takes a part in a TV soap opera and looks for approval from his father: ‘Top pay. Top job. Top person’. But all his father can say is ‘At least you’re doing something visible at last and not bumming’.
The story ends on a happy note with a reunion of most of the characters at a restaurant. Eva and Haroon announce that they are getting married. Karim reflects on his life to date, what a mess it had been but that it wouldn’t always be that way and that perhaps in the future he would “live more deeply”.