Headline, Feb26, 2013

'''THE MASTER STORY TELLER:  

BRITISH AUTHOR HANIF KUREISHI''​'

Writers for sure are a unique breed. So when as a writer you get to a certain age, middle age really, the full force of mortality suddenly hits smack in the face.

You start to think about your life, where you have come from and where you are going. Your relationship with your parents takes on a new resonance, possibly because you have a children of your own. To make sense of all this you write about it.

Hanif Kureishi is a hugely successful writer. His brilliant work in My Ear at His Heart, which explores his relationship with his father, is a fairly recent entry into the subgenre of the literary memoir.There are other short stories and the five novels including The Buddha of Suburbia and Intimacy. There are the screen plays, of which My Beautiful Laundrette is still the best known.

Hanif's father came from a large privileged muslim Indian family, who following Partition. settled in Bromley, Kent. He married a local girl and found a clerical job at the new Pakistani Embassy. But he really wanted to be a writer and everyday he would sit at his desk and write novels. None were ever published because his son says,''they weren't very good.''

My Ear at His Heart is structured around Hanif's experience of reading those unpublished novels. of ''reading him through his books.'' From a work tellingly called The Redundant Man, he learns how his father felt unwanted by his parents, and how deeply frustrated he was to be doing a dead-end job.

My father was giving me two messages. One that he was a brave man and he wrote all his life and never gave up, and two, that he led a life of total frustration and was doing something that he clearly wasn't good enough at. Ironically, by writing this book, Hanif Kureishi is publishing his late father's stories.

Respectful and loving dedication to all the students in UK and India.

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless