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Between Lovemaking and an Autopsy, Hanif Kureishi's My Ear at His Hear t: Reading My Father

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In 2004, Hanif Kureishi published My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father, a memoir of a failed author whose manuscripts never received any recognition. Rafiushan Kureishi, a writer exiled as a clerk at the Pakistani Embassy in London, was a disappointed man 'lost in suburban restraint', a 'redundant man' (as in the title of one of his rejected novels). While looking for his father in some manuscripts he has retrieved, Kureishi also confronts his own often painful and conflicted apprenticeship in writing. The suffering of his father is much more than material for writing - by addressing some of the fahter's unpublished texts, Kureishi questions vital dimensions of their dificult relationship as well as trying to better understand who this man had been. The homage unquestionably paid in My Ear at His Heart may also represent, in some peculiar nostalgic way, a settling of scores with a 'semi-broken' man whose rivalry towards his most successful journalist brother, Omar, sometimes spilled over into his only son's early success. Of course, Kureishi repeats and does not repeat his father - by becoming a celebrated writer he vindicates the father's lifelong frustrated dedication to literature.

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Kureishi, Hanif, 1954-..... My ear at his heart: reading my father Writing Memoir An Apprenticeship in writing Reading

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Flora, Luísa. "Between Lovemaking and an Autopsy, Hanif Kureishi's My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father". Narratives of Suffering: Meaning and Experience in a Transcultural Approach. Lolita Guimarães e Jose A. Nicdao (eds.). Oxford: InterDisciplinary Press. 2014. 39-50.

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InterDisciplinary Press

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