Reading a Book, Reading a Film: A Portrait of Youth in “My Son the Fanatic”

Abstract

“My Son the Fanatic”, a short story by Hanif Kureishi, explores the relations within a Pakistani family, specifically between a father, fully adapted to the English way of life, and a son, caught in the mesh of religious fundamentalism. What my paper wishes to explore, however, goes beyond this father/son relationship, and takes, as its starting point, another dualism: the connection between Kureishi’s short story and its film adaptation by Udayan Prasad. Therefore, it is my aim to compare and contrast the short story with the film: how different is it to create a film having as its starting point a novel from creating a film by taking a short story as its basis, especially, as is the case here, when that short story doesn’t amount to more than thirteen pages? How do we as readers and/or viewers stand before each of the two narratives?