I am at the end of my second grad school class. It’s called Postcolonial Literature and Theory, and it’s been a mixed bag of fascination, boredom, and frustration. Most of the material we cover is purely academic, and by that I mean no one outside of the English field/profession would ever read this crap. BUT I just finished a book by Hanif Kureishi entitled “The Buddha of Suburbia” that breaks from graduate tedium.
I’m writing this mini-review because I thought I had to write a two page analysis of it, but then I remembered that I had already done that last week. So I am free to write something of no academic value:
I enjoyed reading this book. I must admit that I like most anything that deals in drugs and music in the 1970′s and then you set the story in London suburbs exploding with class unrest…I’m sold. Karim, the main character, is painfully self-centered and it is difficult to suspend disbelief enough to grant Kureishi a teenage narrator with this amount of insight into the world at such a young and confusing age. BUT if we work at ignoring our logic meters on this point, it is a fantastic semi-autobiographical tale of a young man who watches hippie culture wane, feminist/immigrant/class activism explode, and punk arrive on the London scene. There is little in the way of redemption, as Karim’s feeble response to the turmoil around him is to fuck, smoke, and snort his way through; however, there is high level satire as the immigrant characters gaze back at the crumbling British empire. Besides all that, David Bowie liked the book so much he made an album of the same title and there’s also a BBC miniseries based on it…do you need another reason to read it?
