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Most reviewed: Something to Tell You

03.03.08 Anna Richardson

Hanif Kureishi’s new book was widely covered on last weekend's literary pages, beating other new titles to the "most reviewed" spot (29th February to 2nd March).

Something to Tell You (Faber) is "about love, death, loneliness, celebrity, orgies, incest, pornography, murder--the usual stuff, in fact", wrote Jane Shilling in the Sunday Telegraph. The narrative was "artfully constructed reverie", with "mordant side-excursions into contemporary politics". "There is a plot twist or two too far towards the end", she added. "But these are minor blemishes in a novel that describes with such elegant seriousness the fear of ageing, the inanition of pleasure, the survival of love, the longing to understand and be understood: all the melancholy fascination of being 'no longer young, and not yet old'".

John Sutherland, in the Financial Times, was also effusive: "Hanif Kureishi has written a subtle and strikingly topical novel." He praised the author's "sure finger on the pulse of 'multiculturalism'--the topic that current newspapers and politicians handle so clumsily" and pointed out that "Something to Tell You has much to tell us and does it extraordinarily well".

Tom Gatti in the Times, meanwhile, thought "some subtlety of flavour is lost" in Kureishi's all-inclusive approach, although the result was "never bland", and the Daily Mail's Michael Arditti lamented the lack of "a single engaging character in the book".

Stephen Abell in the Daily Telegraph, however, found that Something to Tell You had "some serious artistic problems". "A novel has to be more than a list of things or attributes, what feel like shorthand notes for a better effort to come," he explained. The novel is "literally, a scrap book of a middle-aged man's existence. Hanif Kureishi, sad to say, has nothing more to show us than that".

Most reviewed (29nd February to 2nd March)

Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi
(Faber 9780571209774 £16.99)
"Artfully constructed reverie" Sunday Telegraph
"Subtle and strikingly topical" Financial Times
"Complex, but engaging" Mirror
"Many of the relationships lack conviction" Daily Mail
"Kureishi thinks about a hell of a lot of stuff” Times
"Ugly prose describing an ugly world" Daily Telegraph

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth by Frances Wilson
(Faber 9780571230471 £18.99)
"An elegant, psychologically astute and original book" Observer
"Finely judged" Sunday Telegraph
"Sensitive and astute" Sunday Times
"Compelling" Times
"What this new study identifies, skillfully and brilliantly, is a sad contrast between the heart-stopping sublimity that Dorothy finds in common things and the appalling heaviness of what is left unsaid" Daily Mail

Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes
(Cape 9780224085236 £16.99)
"Inventive and invigorating" Financial Times
"Barnes’ clinical approach tends to reduce other people to extensions of himself" Observer
"The coldness that pervades his writing is perhaps genetic" Sunday Times
"A random collection of thoughts" Sunday Telegraph

Media Anna Richardson Hanif Kureishi Something to Tell You

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