One night, when I am old, sick, right out of semen, and don't need things to get any worse, I hear the noises growing louder. I am sure they are making love in Zenab's bedroom which is next to mine. Waldo, a feted filmmaker, is confined by old age and ill health to his London apartment.
Frail and frustrated, he is cared for by his lovely younger wife, Zee. But when he suspects that Zee is beginning an affair with Eddie, 'more than an acquaintance and less than a friend for over thirty years,' Waldo is pressed to action: determined to expose the couple, he sets himself first to prove his suspicions correct - and then to enact his revenge. Written with characteristic black humour and with an acute eye for detail, Kureishi's eagerly awaited novella will have his readers dazzled once again by a brilliant mind at work.
Hanif Kureishi’s latest book is a blackly comic novella told from the point of view of Waldo, an elderly, dying, wheelchair-bound film-maker who begins to suspect that Zee, his much younger wife, is having an affair with Eddie, an old acquaintance who has come to visit. Waldo decides to prove his suspicions and then to enact revenge. This book is as much character study as it is plot though, and the book is packed with wry observations and comic asides. And also a lot of explicit languages, explicit scenes, deeply unlikeable characters and enough political incorrectness to upset pretty much everyone – but in a good way.
