Texto em Lngua Inglesa

My ear at his heart

[Obs. prvia: O pai do escritor deixou um livro incompleto que Hanif Kureishi pretende editar. desse
manuscrito que se fala neste excerto.]

Chapter One of 'An Indian Adolescence' is entitled 'Past Recaptured. End of Thirties'.
There is something I should confront. Although dad's book is written in the third person,
switching occasionally, by 'mistake', into the first, I have to say it seems inevitable that I will read his
stories as personal truths, if not in the detail then in the feeling. It annoys me, as it might any novelist,
to have my own work reduced to autobiography, as though you've just written down what
happened. Often, writing isn't always a reflection of experience so much as a substitute for it, an
'instead of' rather than a 'reliving', a kind of daydreaming. The relation between a life and the telling
of it is impossible to unravel. Still, whatever my father has made, I will be reconstructing him from
these fragments or traces, attempting to locate his 'self' in these imaginings or scatterings. But where
else could you look? In Henry James's Portrait of a Lady Madame Merle says, 'There's no such thing as
an isolated man or woman; we're each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall
we call our "self"? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs
to us and then it flows back again.'
I can recall my father insisting, both to me and my agent, that his book was a novel. When
my agent suggested that he might increase his chances of having it published if he said it was a
memoir, father continued to argue that it was fiction. 'I am sticking to my guns over this,' he said
firmly.

My father as a child

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 Certainly, the book is full of dialogue, character and dramatised incident. Perhaps father
needed it to be a novel because it contained so much truth. In order to speak, he required the disguise
of character and imposed narrative. Yet a book, like any work of art, is a series of illusions, and
however convinced you are by them, however much you see yourself in the characters and their
dilemmas, there is another character behind all the others. This is the concealed author who is
everywhere and nowhere, the dreamer himself, the trickster who played the trick, with whom you
also identify. As a young man, if I discovered a writer I liked, I'd look out for anything written about
him. He or she, as well as the work, then became the subject, the source of the words. If he liked hats,
I would think about getting a hat; reading about Scott Fitzgerald always inspired me to go to the
pub. The fact is, the place writers and artists hold in the public imagination exists beyond their work.
Whatever sort of book dad has written, there is no denying the trickster's fingerprints are all
over it, or that he has done an elemental but traditional thing in trying a self-portrait, an attempt to
say something about his life by way of a story with himself at the centre. It is also an invitation to
have others see him. But what exactly will I see? People always say more than they mean to. Their
words gain their own life, a sort of independent momentum. It is this 'overflowing' I am compelled by.
[]
I think I am writing this book in the way he wrote his, as a sort of collage, hoping the thing
holds together, divided and split though it may be, like any mind. Many of the young writers I teach
worry about the structure of their work, but I tell them that at the beginning the form of a piece is
almost always the least interesting thing about it.

Hanif Kureishi (2005), My ear at his heart. Reading of my father , Londres: Faber and Faber, pp. 18-21.

FACULDADE DE CINCIAS HUMANAS | Palma de Cima, 1649-023 Lisboa - Portugal | T: (+351) 217 214 199 |
E: direccaofch@fch.lisboa.ucp.pt | www.fch.lisboa.ucp.pt