The Last Word - Rilegato

Kureishi, Hanif

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0571277527 ISBN 13: 9780571277520

Casa editrice: Faber & Faber, 2014

Riassunto

Shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize

Mamoon is an eminent Indian-born writer who has made a career in England - but now, in his early 70s, his reputation is fading, sales have dried up, and his new wife has expensive taste.

Harry, a young writer, is commissioned to write a biography to revitalise both Mamoon's career and his bank balance. Harry greatly admires Mamoon's work and wants to uncover the truth of the artist's life. Harry's publisher seeks a more naked truth, a salacious tale of sex and scandal that will generate headlines. Meanwhile Mamoon himself is mining a different vein of truth altogether.

Harry and Mamoon find themselves in a battle of wills, but which of them will have the last word?

The ensuing struggle for dominance raises issues of love and desire, loyalty and betrayal, and the frailties of age versus the recklessness of youth.

Hanif Kureishi has created a tale brimming with youthful exuberance, as hilarious as it is touching, where words have the power to forge a world

Su questo libro

Recensione:

Brilliantly funny and entertaining. (David Sexton, Evening Standard)

His best work to date ... very funny ... Kureishi has written a major work, founded on a major literary problem, set by a master of his craft. (John Sutherland, The Times)

'A great read ... with vivid characters, a serpentine plot and some fizzing dialogue ... Kureishi doesn't miss a trick. The Last Word is hugely entertaining and one of his best novels for some time.' (Max Davidson, Mail on Sunday)

This is Kureishi at his mischievous, subversive best. (Boyd Tonkin, Independent)

Kureishi's best novel since The Buddha of Suburbia, perhaps because it returns to the original themes of family, race and identity ... the assertion at its heart, that a writer can be an artist, telling the truth, makes this book important as well as enjoyable. (Amanda Craig, Independent on Sunday)

The provocative, powerful new novel from Hanif Kureishi ... The Last Word grippingly explores the point at which a real human being becomes a character. (Anita Sethi, Metro)

In the story's resolution, kindness, humanity and affection prevail and the last few pages touch a depth of feeling previously not seen. They are impossible to read without a lump in your throat. (John Harding, Daily Mail)

Writing for both Mamoon and Harry - and presumably Kureishi, too - is a visceral business and the patter between all the characters has a sharp edge. It is not so visceral, however, that Kureishi forgets to be thoroughly entertaining or steer his conversations with great variety and skill. Biography, as he notes, "is a process of disillusionment"; fiction though, as he shows here, can be every bit as perceptive but also much funnier. (Michael Prodger, New Statesman)

The Last Word is a highly spiced, tongue-in-cheek addition to the respectable subgenre pioneered by A. S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale and Penelope Lively's According to Mark - a novel about how a biography comes to be written, the pressures brought to bear on both biographee and anatomist, and the procedural difficulties that lie in wait along the way ... There are some splendid bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you jokes and Mamoon's titanic ego is deployed to considerable effect. (DJ Taylor, Literary Review)

Writing is the devil, Kureishi says here. The Last Word has devilry in abundance. Swiftian and Hogarthian, this would be gloomy reading, a tale of shattered communities and the imagination monetised, were it not for the delicious wickedness of the lampooning. (Chris Dolan, Herald)

Descrizione del libro:

The new novel from Hanif Kureishi: an outrageous, clever and very funny story of sex, lies, art and what defines a life.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Faber & Faber
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0571277527
• ISBN 13: 9780571277520
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 304