The Buddha of Suburbia

First off I need to fess up.  I’ve broken my own rules.  By my reckoning, this is book number six in a row from a European author.  This has frustrated me far more than is reasonable.  For all my meticulous planning, I’ve been caught out.  Having said this, The Buddha of Suburbia is a pretty worthwhile book to get caught out on.  It tells the story of Karim and his family.  Growing up in the 1970s in the suburbs of London, it’s the story of family life and being a young adult trying to carve out a career.  It’s also what I think is the first book so concerned with racial identity that I’ve read since beginning the blog.  It’s sort of like Adrian Mole with added racism.

Karim’s father leaves his wife and two young sons for Eva, a local woman who encourages him to become the titular mystical figure both because she believes full heartedly in it and for fiscal gain.  The motives are never really cleared up.  Haroon loves Eva, but his belief in the mysticism he espouses is mostly a side effect of this.  He abandons India and all the associated cultures until it benefits him.  He’s a stark contrast to his best friend, Anwar, who retains his sense of traditionalism despite never returning to his country of birth.  Naturally, things are further complicated in the second generation.  They are English, but have Indian-ness thrust upon them.  Anwar’s daughter is forced into an arranged marriage and Karim as a struggling actor ends up blacking up to play Mowgli in a theatre production of The Jungle Book.

One thing I appreciated about the book was Kureishi’s treatment of passing time.   Slippery devil that it is, it makes fools of us all and, as I’ve quarter-life-crisised my way through 2014, I’ve noticed it more than ever.  Or rather, I haven’t noticed the passage of time.  It’s gotten away from me.  Barring one frankly bizarre incident of an overzealous shop assistant when I was buying Ibuprofen recently, I can’t remember the last time I got IDed.  I am, without a doubt, an adult and I have no idea how it happened.  This realism is reflected in The Buddha of Suburbia.  It starts with Karim working towards his A-Levels, then all of a sudden and with no ellipsis, he’s twenty.  Later in the novel six months pass in a sentence.  It’s alarming.

One thing I’m not too sure about, though, is Karim’s confidence.  It’s ridiculous.  It’s not just that as a teenager he’s as smart and snide as most people can only dream of being in their adult years, but it’s also his sexual confidence.  Again what I’m talking about is when he’s a teenager.  He’s utterly cool in hitting on and sleeping with both men and women alike in a way I’m sure most teenagers aren’t.  I remember just a hell of a lot more awkwardness about sex when I was seventeen.  I’m not sure if it’s not a believable representation of a person, or if I was a bit of a loser when I was a teenager and so what everyone to be the same.

I really enjoyed this book.  It deals with family with a sense of begrudging love and that phase in which we pass from teenagers being mortified by their parents’ behaviour into adults who see the funny side of said mortifying behaviour.  Reading it prior to a big old family reunion definitely geared me up to deal with mine.

In my travels I also read The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.  Come back soon for that blog.