mtvessel: (Default)
Dec 2006
On Beauty - Zadie Smith - Penguin, 2005
* * *
Well, if I were David Lodge, I would sue. In On Beauty, Zadie Smith has taken his standard novelistic set-up - a university milieu that is a thinly disguised fictionalisation of a real place, two academics who represent the opposite poles of a contemporary debate (atheistic politically-correct liberalism vs right-wing meritocratic individualism), various inappropriate love affairs and some dramatic revelations - and given it her own multi-cultural spin. The result is a more assured and better plotted book than her first, White Teeth, but also a rather less interesting one.
Read more... )
mtvessel: (Default)
28 May 06
White Teeth - Zadie Smith - Penguin Books, 2001
* * * *
I have few regrets about my upbringing, but one of them is that it was, to quote Greg Dyke, horribly white. In my class at school there was only one person from an ethnic minority. His name was Cyrus. I liked and admired him - he was a gifted violinist - but I think his experiences at school must have been similar to those of Steve, the black character in Jonathan Coe’s fine novel The Rotters’ Club. One of my friends used to tease him about his name and accent, and I, to my eternal shame, smiled and said nothing (racism is a sin of omission as well as commission). Cyrus bore it all in good part but did not attempt to keep in touch once we went our separate ways after A-levels. I checked on Friends Reunited the other day and unsurprisingly he wasn’t there.

I might perhaps have been more sensitive to Cyrus’ thoughts and feelings if I had had the opportunity to read a decent novel about the British ethnic minority experience when I was growing up, but at the time there weren’t any (or at least none that made it into the school library). Things have changed. Now there are several to choose from, and White Teeth is one of them.
Read more... )

Profile

mtvessel: (Default)
mtvessel

June 2025

S M T W T F S
1 234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Tags

Style Credit

  • Style: Midnight for Heads Up by momijizuakmori

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 21st, 2025 05:41 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios