,written
by Hanif Kureishi, won the
Whitbread Award for the best first novel. It has been translated into 20
languages and was also made into a four-part drama series by the BBC in 1993,
with a soundtrack by David Bowie.Hanif Kureishi's two novels The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black
Album are about initiation, (black, Asian) British youth, pop culture, the
condition of England, and London.Due to the orality in The Buddha, the historical events, and the many
dialogues full of colloquialism, the reader gets the impression of realism. The
novel is highly episodical; juxtaposition and collage
are the techniques that Kureishi uses.
The
Buddha of Suburbia is said to be very autobiographical. It is about Karim, a hybrid teenager, who is desperate to escape
suburban South London and make new experiences in London in the 1970s. Gladly
he takes the unlikely opportunity when a life in the theatre announces itself.
When there is nothing left for him to do in London anymore, he stays in New
York for ten months. Returned to London, he takes on the offer of a part in a
TV soap opera and the book leaves its reader on the verge of Thatcherism. The
suburbs are "a leaving place" from which Kureishi's
characters must move away. To Karim, London—even
though it is geographically not far away from his home—seems like a completely
different world. Therefore his expectations of London are great.
In
The Buddha the move (in)to the city (and later on through the city) seems to be
like an odyssey, or even a pilgrimage. On the first page Karim
introduces himself as follows: "Englishman I am (though not proud of it),
from the South London suburbs and going somewhere". This motif is
reinforced throughout the novel. Pop music is an important theme in Kureishi's novels. One could even say that his novels have
a soundtrack. London itself is associated by Karim to
a sound. "There was a sound that London had. It was, I'm afraid, people in
Hyde Park playing bongos with their hands; there was also the keyboard on The
Doors' "Light My Fire". There were kids in velvet cloaks who lived
free lives". Through his work with two theatre companies, Karim gets to know new people from completely different
backgrounds, like the working-class Welshman Terry who is an active Trotskyist and wants him to join the party, or Karim's lover Eleanor who is upper middle-class but
pretends to be working-class. Through the latter group of people, surrounding
Eleanor or Pyke (a strange theatre director), he realises that these people are speaking a different
language, because they received a good education, which was not valuable in the
suburbs.
In
The Buddha other characters and their struggle to make it in London are
described, too. Kureishi portrays Eva, as a social
climber at war with the city: "Eva was planning her assault on London. […]
she was not ignored by London once she started her assault. She was climbing
ever higher, day by day. […] As Eva started to take London, moving forward over
the foreign fields of Islington, Chiswick and Wandsworth inch by inch, party by party, contact by
contact,[…]". Later in the novel the main character's father (an Indian
immigrant, a boring bureaucrat living with his family in a grey London suburb)
is suddenly discovered by the London high society, that is hungry for exotic
distractions, and so he becomes their buddha-like
guru, though he himself does not believe in this role. His son does not believe
in him either, and at the same time has his first erotic experiences. A rather
funny novel on cultural, class and gender differences, and how the British way
of life copes with these. Within the problems of prejudice and racism lies one
of the themes of initiation novels: the question of identity. Furthermore,
London seems to be the perfect setting for the protagonists' "often
painful growth towards maturity through a range of conflicts and dilemmas,
social, sexual and political." (Bart Moore-Gilbert, 2001, 113) These characterisations mark Kureishi's
novels as examples of Bildungsromane and novels of
initiation.
Even
though the Buddha is set in the seventies and ends just before the Thatcher era
begins, Kureishi was writing it under the direct
influence of the outcome of Thatcherism. It is not surprising then, looking
back, that he can see the roots of conservatism already in the seventies.
©.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Buddha_of_Suburbia_(novel)
Academic
year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Giuseppe Improta
imgiu@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València
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