Word: novelled
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...novel (national epic, family saga and testy teen drama knotted into one) meanders - including an abrupt jaunt to Granada, where Zakia and Zaki vacation just so, it seems, Sethi can make a point about the high potential of Islamic culture. And it's burdened by clichés: the love of all things Bollywood; mingy mothers-in-law; the kid who escapes to an American university. Still, Sethi's sharp eye, worthy of being an entomologist's, makes the book a steadily absorbing read, all 400-plus pages of it. Recollecting his first day at a private boy's academy...
...Empire - and the shadows they have cast over Britain - have been very good to Kureishi, providing him with two rich seams of material for his fiction. "When I was a kid, people were always talking about the death of the novel," he says, sitting in a café near his home in London's Shepherd's Bush. "But ever since [Salman Rushdie's 1981 novel] Midnight's Children, it's been terrifically lively. There's been a revolution in writing in the West. And that's thanks to colonialism." Read "God for the Godless: Salman Rushdie's Secular Sermon...
...Kureishi himself. For a quarter-century his films, plays and novels have captured the motley qualities of post-colonial Britain - its Karachi-born taxi drivers, jack-booted skinheads, coked-up admen and firebrand mullahs. His latest work, now playing at London's National Theatre, dramatizes his 1993 novel The Black Album. Set in 1989, during the furor over Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, it follows a British Pakistani college boy torn between the delights of sex and Western culture and the lure of Islamic fundamentalism. The book is a fresh and funny bildungsroman, capturing an antic '80s London. Sadly...
...going to extremist London mosques for research for The Black Album, scribbling down notes at Friday sermons was weirdo stuff indeed. Today, with London still scarred from the 2005 bombings by British-born terrorists and the far-right British National Party winning seats in recent European parliamentary elections, the novel seems spookily prescient. Though its themes of radical faith and alienation endure, Kureishi's mosque visits didn't. One Friday, he recalls, the mullah at a mosque in London's East End warned that "there are spies and journalists in our midst," after which Kureishi was tossed out "by four...
...very pleased and flattered" by his CBE and extols a recent stint teaching at Yale as "very comfy." But his spot in the cultural establishment is proof that his revolution succeeded. He's about to start on the screenplay of The White Tiger, the Booker Prize winning novel by Indian author (and occasional TIME contributor) Aravind Adiga. That a story about a poor Indian hustling his way in Bangalore sold millions of copies all over the world, notes Kureishi, shows that post-colonial fiction has reinvigorated the novel. (See Aravind Adiga's Summer reading list...