The Body: A Novel

How often have we said, ourselves, or heard someone else say, "If only I could be twenty again and know what I know now?" That is precisely what happens in Hanif Kureishi's novel THE BODY. Adam, a successful writer on the wrong side of sixty describes himself as a man with hemorrhoids, an ulcer and cataracts, whose bed is his "boat across these final years." Fortunately he's a "cheap drunk" and still has sex occasionally with his wife. His two children are grown and have left home. Then he gets the chance to have his brain removed from his old body and put into a dead but preserved young body of his choice. Although he could even choose the body of a young woman or someone of another race, he selects a young humpy Alain Delon look-alike.This is one of those novels where knowing too much of the plot spoils the story and what a story it is. While you may anticipate some of what happens to Adam, the author in his usual brilliance has a surprise or two for you. In the best science fiction tradition of Kafka's METAMORPHOSIS, Ishiguro's NEVER LET ME GO or even Joyce Carol Oates' recent macabre short story "Wild Nights"-- although like the works of these other world-class writers, Kureishi's fiction is certainly fine literature as well and rises above the genre of science fiction-- he raises questions about our obsession with youth, the dereliction of society of the aged, the loneliness and isolation of being different, the basic human need to be loved and in the circle of friends and finally what he calls the "nightmare of eternal life."THE BODY is at once a horrific and fantastic gem of a novel.

I love his style of writing. This book deff makes you think considering the world we live in. I thought the ending was meh but the meat of the book was great.

I say it's a masterpeice because I wrote a story very similar to this one and then decided to put it in a drawer and forget it about 15 20 years ago ... I thought no one in their right mind would ever read, let alone buy such a tall tale ....And now Kureishi has done such a good job with this subject, that I can only say "chapeau" and also another French word as i curse myself for not trying to publish my quite similar story long ago. Good job Hanif !!

I chose it because I needed to read this story, and I could get it only from Amazon and at a reasonable price.I usually read books by Kureishi, I find he's an appealing writer who deals with crucial subjects of our culture.

What a strange little book. Part philosophy, part sci-fi. You know it can't be good to have your brain transplanted into another body!

Great author. great novel. Deep and leaves you thinking!

Hanif Kureishi ‘The Body’Stories of love and redemptionAdam is an old man, aware of the decay of his body and of all the bodies around him. He also believes that the body and the soul are not two ways of describing the same thing, namely a human being, but distinct, separate entities. One night, at a party, he is told of a London clinic that is pioneering a new, expensive technique transplanting an individual's brain - and thus his essence - into a younger, fitter body of his choice. Adam seizes the opportunity to escape his own decay, but only on a short, six-month "lease". He wants a holiday from his aging body, so that he can later reflect on the meaning of deterioration.His phoney youth turns out to be a nightmare of loneliness, mechanical sexual experimentation and bad jobs. Real youth requires innocence, or at least ignorance, and what Adam finds he values most is his knowledge of the world and the world's knowledge of him.Assuming the identity of an itinerant backpacker, Adam sets off on a tour of Europe, where he goes to clubs and experiments with drugs. He eventually settles, amid a group of bohemian women, on a remote Greek island. But increasingly he feels a prisoner inside his own body and longs not only to return to his old life with his wife in London, but to his old body as well.The melancholy of "The Body" carries over into the other stories in this collection: about a son who can't forgive his dying mother, a father who can't live with his son, a couple who meet their doppelgängers and can't bear to see their life as it really is. Yet these are blissfully readable cautionary tales, wittily and often movingly crafted. In each case, a little bit of love and redemption are allowed to creep in. Children are not quite condemned to repeat their parents' mistakes; a father comes to understand the anger of his son; Adam gradually understands that his old body - and therefore his mortality - should have been a source of affection. These are small but significant victories marked out in a lonely world.In the story 'The Real Father', a film editor takes his young son on a trip to the English seaside. The man, Mal, and the boy scarcely know each other. They have certainly never lived together - the boy was the result of a brief, casual relationship many years before. Mal tries forlornly to buy his son's affection. They take a room together in a boarding house and, once his son is asleep, Mal wanders down to a beachside bar where he meets some youths gathered around a boom-box. They offer him some whisky and urge him to dance. It is years since he has danced, and even then he did not dance so much as 'pogo'. Yet as he is drawn towards the music, Mal finds himself beginning to hop and then to pogo, 'alone of course, jumping up towards the sky'. The next morning, he discovers that things are a little easier with his son, as if that moment of heightened self-abandon the previous night has awakened something in him, a subdued sense of fellow feeling and inchoate love for the boy.It is hard to explain why exactly Hanif Kureishi is such a good writer, because his sentences are often very ordinary. Rather, the effect of reading him is cumulative: you are impressed by a certain intensity, and indeed integrity, of vision. He can be very cold and cruel; but at the same time he understands essential truths about the drift and lassitude of modern life in cities. His is a fiction of wintry interiors, of emotional dislocation and of strangers seeking comfort with one another.

I'm not sure what the author was trying to do here. This book seems like some kind of incomplete study on the idea of regaining one's youth, but wherein the author gave up, filed it somewhere, and then pulled it out in order to fulfill some publishing obligation. There's not a character in here that is sympathetic (a few are PATHethic). Really, this is TV screenplay material, not something to satisfy the discriminating reader, or for that matter, even the most tolerant.

the book is perfect conditions

I received the item fast and it was as described in informationbox. Lovely

great book