The Last Word
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The new novel from Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia) follows Harry Johnson, an aimless young but not that young writer, dispatched by his sleazy editor to the estate of Mamoon Azam, a famously difficult Indian-born author (transparently modeled on V.S. Naipaul). Harry's editor wants him to worm his way into the man's affections and write a sordid bestseller biography exposing Mamoon's past indiscretions, which are apparently so vile they drove his first wife to fatal alcoholism. This is where Kureishi turns the tables, as Harry turns out to be less of a lamb than we might expect, entering into a battle of wits with Liana, Mamoon's vain and glamorous trophy wife, bedding a maid whom he enlists as a spy, and otherwise transforming himself into Mamoon's mirror image. But the older writer proves a formidable adversary, one who has his own legacy in mind. The ensuing battle of writerly wills, of narratives and counter narratives, reaches a boiling point once Mamoon is introduced to Harry's pregnant fianc , who could wind up as the master's final heroine or his last conquest. Kureishi, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, has always written rock-solid dialogue, and the distinctive voices of the lead characters, each of whom wants something from the others, make this novel an erotic evocation of writer and reader at their most sadomasochistic.
