«Hanif Kureishi’s new novel has attracted a great deal of pre-publication notice, not because it’s a new novel by Hanif Kureishi but because the story revolves around a young writer commissioned to compile the autobiography of a crotchety and celebrated literary elder. The relationship between the two men closely mirrors that between V S Naipaul and Patrick French, whose 2008 authorised biography of the Nobel laureate, The World Is What it Is, was remarkable for its unflattering candour. However many attributes Mamoon shares with Naipaul and however much the relationship between biographer and subject borrows from real life, the book is a fully imaginative endeavour. Kureishi will be 60 this year and has recently sold his papers to the British Library – both landmarks in a literary life. And, around the diverting games of I-spy-Naipaul in The Last Word, the novel also contains deeper reflections on the businesses of writing, reading and biography, and their fate in what may be a post-literary culture.»
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The last word
Hanif Kureishi