WRITING THE SELF: A BIOGRAPHY

Two reviews of Ruvani Ranasinha's biography of Hanif Kureishi, from Jude Cook at The Spectator, and Susie Thomas at the LTS.

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Below, two reviews of Ruvani Ranasinha's exhaustive and humbling biography of myself, from Jude Cook at The Spectator, and Susie Thomas at the LTS.

From Spectator magazine issue: 13 January 2024 pages 37-8

Hanif Kureishi – portrait of the artist as a young man

Descriptions of the gifted author tearing up the literary landscape of the late 20th century are deeply poignant when set alongside Kureishi’s recent despatches from hospital.

Hanif Kureishi: Writing the Self, A Biography

Ruvani Ranasinha

Manchester University Press, pp. 994, £30

If any novelist, playwright or screenwriter of the past 40 years could be called ‘a writer of consequence’, to use the literary agent Andrew Wylie’s term, it would be Hanif Kureishi. While not shifting units on the scale of his near contemporaries Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, Kureishi’s cultural influence – through his explorations of race, class and sexuality in novels such as The Buddha of Suburbia and films like My Beautiful

Laundrette – is inestimable. In this first major biography, Ruvani Ranasinha tracks Kureishi’s progress from his birth in Bromley in 1954 to a Pakistani father and English mother, through his glittering, always provocative career, to the recent accident which rendered him unable to walk or use his hands. It’s a long and challenging read, yet one that fizzes with insight into the tumultuous times in which Kureishi produced his best writing.

Ranasinha’s major coup is her seemingly unrestricted access to Kureishi’s diaries, which allows an extraordinary intimacy with her subject, bringing him into ever sharper focus as the book progresses. From the start, Kureishi fantasises about escaping the violent racism of his youth through writing: ‘I dreamed of being on TV and being called a writer.’ And not just any old writer: ‘I want to win the Nobel Prize,’ he admits, though Ranasinha illustrates how his cast-iron self-belief is undermined by a lifelong inferiority complex bequeathed by the suburban upbringing in which his father mentored him as a creative artist. When he finally finds his subject, his diary records drolly: ‘The Asian community has been for me what dishwashing was for Orwell.’

It is Kureishi’s search for this compelling subject, and a satisfactory form with which to express it, that takes up the first half of the book. Beginning with Borderline, his play for the Royal Court, Ranasinha comments: ‘Kureishi’s plays helped revitalise British drama with new vocabularies and visions of identity in an increasingly cross-ethnic, transnational world.’ This was followed by the remarkable success of his first film, My Beautiful Laundrette, a catalyst

for Asian writers, filmmakers, journalists and actors who saw themselves portrayed for the first time as funny, feisty and successful rather than as caricatured victims in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. When Kureishi distilled his experience as a dramatic writer into fiction, the result was his spectacular first novel, the enduringly fresh and funny The Buddha of Suburbia. Here the diaries reveal him as canny in repositioning himself as a literary writer, wanting to create fiction that aspired to match the best pop music – ‘thrilling to youth but also accessible to mum’. In Buddha, he succeeded in dramatising the ‘combustible intersection of the absorbing, colliding social worlds its mixed-race narrator straddles’.

On Kureishi’s subsequent fiction (from The Black Album to the short story collections and the controversial roman-à-clef Intimacy), Ranasinha is adroit at teasing out layers of cultural nuance, as well as parallels between the life and the work. She repeatedly makes connections between the films and novels, particularly the trope of the politically committed woman caught in a relationship with two men. She also adumbrates how Kureishi’s familiar list of influences (Baldwin, Genet, Proust, Roth, Bowie) has shaped his work.

At the same time, the book steers clear of hagiography. An excellent interpreter of the best novels and films, Ranasinha nevertheless judges other works as weak when appropriate. And she’s not afraid to expose Kureishi’s literary vanity, writing that his youthful ‘flattering self-comparisons with the great authors he worshipped persisted into midlife’, while commenting astutely on his private life: ‘His remarkable readiness to own up to his faults is at once inextricably allied to an evasion of personal responsibility.’

Ranasinha also explores how prescient Kureishi was in tracking the rise of Islamist fundamentalism in his film My Son, the Fanatic. He ‘immediately grasped the global implications of the Rushdie affair…Very early on he feared that the fatwa and its aftershock could derail the confidence of multicultural Britain.’ Kureishi observed: ‘The major conflicts… over the next 20 years or so are not going to be between capitalism and communism, but between liberalism and Islam.’

Ultimately, it’s the close reading of the diaries that provides the most illumination, with Ranasinha weaving extracts into an exegesis of the plays, films, essays and stories, while tracking Kureishi’s picaresque progress through the labyrinth of literary London in the 1980s and 1990s to fatherhood and his emergence as a mentor to an entire generation. ‘Not only had he played a pivotal role in inspiring second- and third-generation British Asians to becomes artists, but his early films had also helped create an identifiably British- Asian cultural presence.’

This is a magnificent, meticulous and exhaustive biography, and one worthy of its mercurial subject. It is as judicious and well-written as Zachary Leader's two-volume life of Saul Bellow. Its depictions of a young, gifted author tearing up the literary landscape of the late 20th century are almost unbearably poignant when set alongside Kureishi’s recent Substack dispatches from his hospital bed, in which he describes himself as ‘a broken man with a smashed body’. Ranasinha’s postscript, detailing the accident, at least gives hope for his physical rehabilitation and looks forward to Kureishi’s forthcoming memoir, Shattered, which he is dictating to his sons. Some writers just refuse to be silenced.

Available at  www.amazon.co.uk/Hanif-Kureishi-Writing-Ruvani-Ranasinha

Written by Jude Cook

Jude Cook’s latest novel is Jacob’s Advice (2020). He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Westminster

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Times Literary Supplement, October 6 2023 page 7

Kureishi’s chronicles. A writer who redefined what it means to be English.

Ruvani Ranasinha’s Hanif Kureishi: Writing the Self is an illuminating biography; the fact that it is also a portrait of modern Britain is a tribute both to the scope of Kureishi’s work and the thoroughness of her research. As Kureishi noted in his comic novel about literary rivalry, The Last Word, a living author can help or hinder a biographer. Kureishi actively encouraged Ranasinha, a distinguished scholar of Global Literature, granting her full access to his archive at the British Library and to other papers in his possession. He also put her in touch with key figures in his life, while allowing her complete editorial freedom. The result is an engaging read and an invaluable resource.

Writing the Self explores the wound from which it all began, as the teenage Kureishi wrote “Run Hard Black Man” in his bedroom in Bromley. Ranasinha details the racist culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and his determination to get out of the suburbs by writing. Although he was failing at school, his diaries reveal that, like Shahid in The Black Album, Kureishi was engaged in “the migraine reads”: educating himself in politics, feminism, and the major works of Russian, American and English literature. Hovering over him, as both an inspiration and a warning, was his Indian-born father who rose every morning to write before commuting to work, but whose novels were never published.

As Ranasinha shows, Kureishi’s studies in philosophy at King’s College and his involvement with The Royal Court and Riverside Studios were formative experiences. For the first time he encountered people who took the arts seriously, who were eccentric and passionate and devoted to creativity. With the success of Kureishi’s early plays and an invitation to write a film for Channel 4, Kureishi’s career took off.

The irreverence and tenderness of My Beautiful Laundrette (Kureishi’s first film with Stephen Frears) and of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia, made speaking about the essential questions of the time feel new and urgent. As Pyke, the theatre director in The Buddha, asks: “We have class, race, fucking and farce. What more could you ask for?” Kureishi’s success in changing the script of what it means to be English, opened doors for a host of other writers from Meera Syal and Ayub Khan Din to Zadie Smith.

For more than forty years Kureishi has written plays, screenplays, novels, stories and journalism with unrivalled wit and candour. In the course of 900 pages Ranasinha elucidates the context in which the works were produced, from his early involvement in the Labour Party, his first trip to Pakistan, his complex attitude to issues of representation in a multicultural society, to his support for his friend Salman Rushdie after the fatwa. She also discusses the way in which his work has been received: in particular, the critique of his limited images of Muslims; she also considers the accusations of misogyny, from which she explicitly defends him. Her coverage of the poignant films about ageing and desire that he made with the late Roger Michell (The Mother and Venus) and his darkly funny novel, The Nothing, about a libidinous filmmaker who is confined to a wheelchair, are detailed and engaging.

Ranasinha is even-handed in her discussions of the controversies that resulted from Kureishi’s use of family and lovers as material. Her interviews with his late mother, sister, and partners provide valuable insights, most notably in her demonstration of his reliance on Tracey Scoffield’s contribution to The Buddha of Suburbia and her sense of betrayal when Intimacy was published. Although his former partner Monique Proudlove did not wish to be involved in the biography, Ranasinha acknowledges her support for his writing. The inclusion of his sons’ views is also well judged: Kureishi comes across as a loving and intellectually nurturing father but not a practical parent. As his son Carlo says of his childhood: “Dad can only write. He outsources everything else”.

The discussions of psychoanalysis, and the influential role Adam Phillips has played in Kureishi’s life and work, particularly Something to Tell You, are illuminating; their dialogue began thirty years ago and continues to this day. Kureishi’s collaborations with Stephen Frears, Roger Michell, David Bowie, Udayan Prasad, Akram Khan and Jatinder Verma; and the tributes from former students such as the playwrights Joe Penhall and Winsome Pinnock, provide a rich portrait of a creative self in relation to others.

On Boxing Day 2022 Kureishi suffered an accident in Rome which has left him paralysed and unable to hold a pen. His world has been broken in two: his past almost seems to belong to someone else. He mourns his former life and longs to go home but continues writing the self with undiminished vitality: thousands of readers are following “The Kureishi Chronicles” which Carlo transcribes and uploads to Substack. These harrowing and sometimes hilarious dispatches from an NHS hospital bed will be collected in Hanif Kureishi’s next book, Shattered. Ranasinha’s biography is a testament to the fullness of Kureishi’s life before Boxing Day and to the enduring importance of his work.

Susie Thomas is completing a biography of Waguih Ghali. Her most recent book is So We Live: The Novels of Alexander Baron, 2019, edited with Ken Worpole and Andrew Whitehead.