Cover

Colophon

ALSO BY HANIF KUREISHI

SCREENPLAYS AND PLAYS

My Beautiful Laundrette

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

London Kills Me

My Son the Fanatic

Sleep with Me

FICTION

The Buddha of Suburbia

The Black Album-

Love in a Blue Time

Intimacy

Midnight All Day

Gabriel's Gift

NONFICTION

The Faber Book of Pop (edited with Jon Savage)

Dreaming and Scheming

Copyright

SCRIBNER
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2002 by Hanif Kureishi

Originally published in Great Britain in 2002 by Faber and Faber Limited

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kureishi, Hanif.
The body : a novel / Hanif Kureishi.—1st Scribner ed.
p.  cm.
I. Title.
PR6061.U68B63 2004
823.914—dc22   2003063309

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8648-7
ISBN-10: 1-4165-8648-2

THE BODY

1

HE SAID, “Listen: you say you can’t hear well and your back hurts. Your body won’t stop reminding you of your ailing existence. Would you like to do something about it?”

“This half-dead old carcass?” I said. “Sure. What?”

“How about trading it in and getting something new?”

It was an invitation I couldn’t say no to, or yes, for that matter. There was certainly nothing simple or straightforward about it. When I had heard the man’s proposal, although I wanted to dismiss it as madness, I couldn’t stop considering it. All that night I was excited by an idea that was—and had been for a while, now I was forced to confront it—inevitable.

This “adventure” started with a party I didn’t want to go to.

Though the late 1950s and early 1960s were supposed to be my heyday, I don’t like the assault of loud music, and I have come to appreciate silence in its many varieties. I am not crazy about half-raw barbecued food either.

Want to hear about my health? I don’t feel particularly ill, but I am in my mid-sixties; my bed is my boat across these final years. My knees and back give me a lot of pain. I have hemorrhoids, an ulcer, and cataracts. When I eat, it’s not unusual for me to spit out bits of tooth as I go. My ears seem to lose focus as the day goes on and people have to yell into me. I don’t go to parties because I don’t like to stand up. If I sit down, it makes it difficult for others to speak to me. Not that I am always interested in what they have to say; and if I am bored, I don’t want to hang around, which might make me seem abrupt or arrogant.