Love + Hate: Stories and Essays by Hanif Kureishi
The first story of Love + Hate invites us on businessman Daniel’s return flight home. He is sipping a glass of champagne, unaware that his trip might not be as straightforward as he had expected and will descend (or rather ascend) into apocalyptic chaos. These passengers might never be going home.
Love + Hate jumps between fact, fiction and memoir. Kureishi’s relationships with his father and with his son are both explored at length, as are his thoughts on other writers work, his film and TV projects, and even his preference of writing pen. Each subject, however, expands to wider and more universal issues of human relationships and emotion. His thoughts on the fancy Montegrappa pen nib or fondness for Muji gel ink is in fact about desire, gratification and hedonism; an essay on the film he developed with Roger Mitchell, Le Week-End, is an exploration into marriage, age, authenticity and, ultimately, satisfaction.
'Isn’t a writer a kind of con artist or spellbinder, telling stories for their life like Scheherazade, drawing the other into a conspiracy of lies, convincing them to turn the page and believe in flapdoodle?' asks Kureishi in his last essay of the 15, entitled The Thief. He is speaking about his complicated relationship with the man who conned him out of his life savings, yet over time became an obsession for the writer as they went on to cultivate a relationship based on lies, desire and dogged hope. The essay is a compelling, cathartic and brutally honest read and a good finish to an up and down kind of collection – really a sketchbook of Kureishi’s ideas, propositions and thoughts. Fingers crossed it will help him make some of that £100,000 back.