#zadie smith
BOOK REVIEW:NW(2012) by Zadie Smith
A couple of chapters into NW, I had a revelation. “Mrs Dalloway! IfOn Beauty was a modern take on Howards End, then this must be Zadie Smith’s spin on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway! I’ve got the ‘hook’ for my review!” One quick Google search later, I sank back into my seat. Turns out the rest of the world had had that same idea when the book first came out in 2012, and that Smith had actually discussed Woolf as a direct influence on her book:
I was just trying to find a way to be adventurous and do something new in the writing while still holding on to the things that I can do well, […] So [Virginia Woolf is] just a good example of a forward-thinking and yet consistently humane writer, and just a great female modernist. An old inspiration returned to me at the right moment.
Well. So much for my spark of brilliance.
…Anyway.
Major plot spoiler towards the end of the review.
Post link
“The shadow life. He saw it everywhere—it was a kind of second sight—but what use was it? He looked back at his passenger, her face anxious, turned away. Her window misted, a single cloud. What could she possibly see?”
Read Zadie Smith’s new story “Big Week,” available, for free, through the summer.
Photovia.
Post link
“This is the world I knew. Things have changed, but history is not erased by change, and the examples of the past still hold out new possibilities for all of us, opportunities to remake, for a new generation, the conditions from which we ourselves have benefited. Neither my readers nor I am in the relatively sunlit uplands depicted in White Teeth anymore. But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated, and reimagined if it is to survive. I don’t claim that it’s easy. I do not have the answers. I am by nature not a political person and these are the darkest political times I have ever known. My business, such as it is, concerns the intimate lives of people. The people who ask me about the “failure of multiculturalism” mean to suggest that not only has a political ideology failed but that human beings themselves have changed and are now fundamentally incapable of living peacefully together despite their many differences.” via NYRB (via durgapolashi)
La escritora inglesa Zadie Smith ha publicado un libro de ensayos personales escritos durante la pandemia. Cuenta al detalle cómo vivió el proceso de confinamiento en todos los aspectos de su vida como madre, esposa y escritora en la ciudad de Nueva York. Imprescindible.
zadie smith & ruth negga
If you’re a writer, should you have kids? From Doris Lessing to Karl Ove Knausgaard, 14 famous writers weigh in.
Post link
“When a human being becomes a set of data on a Web site like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.”—Zadie Smith, “Generation Why?”, Feel Free: Essays
“Later, you’ll open your vanity case and take a trip on the light fantastic—but right at this moment you’re grateful for your little dog. You did have a huge great dog, a while back, but she was always knocking glasses off the side tables, and then she went and died on you, so now you got this tiny little angel. Pepi. A dog don’t cheat, a dog don’t lie. Dogs remind you of you: they give everything they’ve got, they’re wide open to the world. It’s a big risk! There are people out there who’ll kick a little half-pint dog like Pepi just for something to do. And you know how that feels. This little dog and you? Soul mates. Where you been all my life? He’s like those dogs you read about, that sit on their master’s grave for years and years and years. Recently, you had a preview of this. You were up in the stratosphere, with no body at all, floating, almost right there with God, you were hanging off the pearly gates, and nobody and nothing could make you come back. Some fool slapped you, some other fool sprayed seltzer in your face—nothing. Then this little angel of a dog licked you right in your eye socket and you came straight back to earth just to feel it, and three hours after that you were on a stage, getting paid. Dogs are too good for this world.”
Zadie Smith, ‘Crazy They Call Me’
Post link
You’re beeswax and I’m bird shit.
I’m mostly harmless. You’re irrational.
If I’m iniquity then you’re theft.
One of us is supercalifragilistic.
If I’m the most insane disgusting filth
you’re hardly curiosa.
You’re bubble wrap to my fingertips.
You’re winter sleep and I’m the bee dance.
And I am menthol and you are eggshell.
When you’re atrocious I am Spellcheck.
You’re the yen. I’m the Nepalese pound.
If I’m homesteading you’re radical chic.
I’m carpet shock and you’re the rail.
I’m Memory Foam Day on Price-Drop TV
and you’re the Lord of Misrule who shrieks
when I surface in goggles through duckweed,
and I am Trafalgar, and you’re Waterloo,
and frequently it seems to me that I am you,
and you are me. If I’m the rising incantation
you’re the charm, or I am, or you are
