42. The Buddha of Suburbia

Book 42: The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi (B)

I read this book for my English 348 class. I was surprised by the choice, but as I continued to read... the choice became perfectly clear. My professor is in love with the idea of "national identity." It is a passion of his that he expressed to me when I interviewed him for a features article in The Carolinian. He also seems to have an interest and loves to debate about the interpretation of sex in literature. Several poems and as the novels continue through the semester, sex has become quite prominent. The Buddha of Suburbia is no exception.
At first, I was not a fan of the novel. A half Indian, half British teen is growing up in the suburbs of England with his bizarre father who is carrying on an affair behind the back of the miserable, pathetic mother. Karim, the teen, tries to find out who he is in a country that sees him as black and treats him like a foreigner. He's complicated, strange, and messed up from his kinky sexuality and his Indian father leaving his British mother for a very commercial, flamboyant woman named Eva. His parents' relationship and their fall-out is complicated and ugly. One of my favorite moments in the text comes from a visit to the upper class aunt and uncle's house.
"Once I remember Mum looking reproachfully at Dad, as if to say: What husband are you to give me so little when the other men, the Alans and Barrys and Peters and Roys, provide cars, houses, holidays, central heating and jewellery? They can at least put up shelves or fix the fence. What can you do" (29)?
Karim continues to wonder about the differences between what Eva calls "interesting" and "ugly people" later in the text after his parents split.

"When Eva had gone and I lay for the first time in the same house as Charlie and Eva and my father, I thought about the difference between interesting people and the nice people. And how they can't always be identical. The interesting people you wanted to be with - their minds were unusual, you saw things freshly with them and all was not deadness and repetition... Then there were the nice people who weren't interesting, and you didn't want to know what they thought of anything. Like Mum, they were good and meek and deserved more love. But it was the interesting ones, like Eva with her hard, taking edge, who ended up with everything, and in bed with my father" (93).

 The novel is very adult and debates the idea of how to identify with who you are based on other people's interpretation of you.
I'd recommend it for people who are more interested in reading about deep characters than they are a storyline or an interesting, exciting plot. Nothing really much happens in the novel, but the characters are deep like something of Michael Cummingham's.

Works Cited:

Kureishi, Hanif. The Buddha of Suburbia. NewYork: 

The Penguin Group, 1990. Print.