The Buddha of Suburbia 683that she reads his secret lovers’ letters. When Tomas
accuses her—“So you’ve been rummaging in my let-
ters!”—not only does she not deny it, but also she
lays it on thicker: “Throw me out, then!” The sense
of oppression felt by Tomas emerges quite clearly in
the following sentences: “He was in a bind: in his
mistresses’ eyes, he bore the stigma of his love for
Tereza; in Tereza’s eyes, the stigma of his exploits
with the mistresses.” Burdened with that same sense
of oppression, Tomas comes back from Zurich to
Prague in order to join Tereza, after his fleeing from
the communist regime. He is perfectly aware that
he cannot live without her, but as soon as he enters
his apartment in Prague and meets Tereza, with the
consciousness that he can never go back, he “felt no
compassion. All he felt was the pressure in his stom-
ach and the despair of having returned.”
The oppression provoked by the communist
regime interferes not only with Tomas’s private life,
but also, and above all, with his social life. While
before 1968 he was a renowned surgeon, when he
decides to go back to his homeland to join Tereza,
his professional career deteriorates until he has
descended all the way down the social scale to win-
dow washer. This descent to the lowest social classes
is due to a critical article that Tomas wrote shortly
before the arrival of Soviet tanks in Prague. Asked
to retract his statement, he refuses because he feels
a deep sense of oppression: “he was annoyed with
himself and at his clumsiness, and desired to avoid
further contact with the police and the concomitant
feeling of helplessness.”
This widespread sense of oppression is subli-
mated in the point of view of the painter Sabina,
who translates the idea of dominant ugliness in
aesthetic terms—the kitsch. This ugliness starts in
music and touches all fields of visual life: “she dis-
covered that the transformation of music into noise
was a planetary process by which mankind was
entering the historical phase of total ugliness . . .
The omnipresence of visual ugliness would soon fol-
low.” The concept of kitsch contains also the politi-
cal and social feeling of mass oppression: It implies
that bad taste and arrogance inexorably penetrate all
levels of life, subjugating the individual’s inclinations
to a general sense of conformed beauty.
Tania Collani
kurEiSHi, HaniF The Buddha of
Suburbia (1990)
The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) is Hanif Kureishi’s
first novel and established his reputation as a fiction
writer. It won the Whitbread Award for Best First
Novel and in 1993 was adapted into an acclaimed
BBC television series, following the success of Kure-
ishi’s screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985).
The novel describes and investigates the experi-
ences of first- and second-generation immigrants in
the society of 1970s suburban England. Through the
characters of its chief protagonists, it also becomes
an examination of the psychology of mixed race.
The narrator of the novel, Karim, struggles to find
acceptance in British society as a racial hybrid, born
of an Indian Muslim father, Haroon, and a British
Christian mother, Margaret. He intertwines his tale
with that of Jamila, the daughter of Haroon’s neo-
conservative friend, Anwar, and his Pakistani wife,
Jeeta. Karim’s journey toward self-identification
involves a new understanding of being “English” and
of the transitions from adolescence to adulthood to
maturity.
The novel’s opening depicts how Karim’s natural
teenage anxieties are reinforced by the gradual dis-
solution of his parents’ marriage and interracial ten-
sions in the suburbs. In his new existence as Oriental
philosopher and spiritual guide to upper-middle-
class suburbanites, Karim’s petty bureaucrat father,
Haroon, becomes involved with the dilettantish Eva.
As this adulterous liaison develops, Margaret’s sister,
Jean, and brother-in-law, Ted, support her decision
to divorce Haroon, because it endorses their essen-
tial race-based snobbery. Their inflexible attitudes,
like Anwar’s patriarchal behavior, are the target of
Kureishi’s satire. Karim’s relationships with Jamila,
her child-like husband Changez, and Eva’s rock-star
son Charlie stabilize his own ideas about life, but
the true realization of his individuality comes from
within him.
Through these characters and their interactions,
Kureishi explores themes like parenthood, rejec-
tion, and spirituality. The Buddha of Suburbia at
times comes close to being stream-of-consciousness,
but its inherent confusions are always negotiated by
the quasi-authoritative voice of its narrator.
Divya Saksena