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Loading... Swing Time: LONGLISTED for the Man Booker Prize 2017 (original 2016; edition 2016)by Zadie Smith (Author)
Work InformationSwing Time by Zadie Smith (2016)
  
Books Read in 2017 (36) Books Read in 2018 (39) » 13 more Booker Prize (130) Books Read in 2019 (540) Books Read in 2023 (2,481) music to my eyes (42) wish list (6) Netgalley Reads (187) To Read (224) Recommendations (9) Africa (71) No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) ChrisByrd | Apr 4, 2024 |  ) monicaberger | Jan 22, 2024 | (  ) blueskygreentrees | Jul 30, 2023 | Most likely this could have been a purposeful decision on the author's part to give us a blank slate to discover the story through, but she was so dull. At least her mama was ambitious. The minor characters like Hawa were much more interesting to me. The parts I liked involved the time the main character spent monitoring Aimee’s girl's school and the cultural shock and blunders she went through. I feel like this is one of those books you’re supposed to like, y’know that has universal appeal, but I didn’t get the point. It was a struggle to finish. ETA: The reason the main character and Tracey fell out is so dumb. Like, they drifted apart for sure, but why was that the catalyst? (  ) DestDest | May 21, 2023 | Maybe the end was very clever and I just missed it, I dunno. Listened to this as an audiobook, really liked the reader’s ability to render various accents. (  ) steve02476 | Jan 3, 2023 |
 For its plot alone, Swing Time makes for truly marvellous reading. The narrator’s journey, from gritty estate to glittering globe and back again, is the juicy stuff of which film adaptations are made. And the music! If one were to make a playlist of the references, one would have a greatest hits of black music: from Gambian drummers to Cab Calloway to Michael Jackson to Rakim. What makes Swing Time so extraordinary are the layers on which it operates; beneath its virtuosic plotting lies the keenest social commentary.  Some of the narrator’s experiences in Africa with Aimee — combined with her efforts to understand shifting attitudes toward race in music and dance — are meant to raise larger questions about cultural appropriation, and the relationship between the privileged West and the developing world. But these issues do not spring organically from this clumsy novel — a novel that showcases its author’s formidable talents in only half its pages, while bogging down the rest of the time in formulaic and predictable storytelling. Belongs to Publisher SeriesGallimard, Folio (6739) Has as a student's study guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty Two brown girls dream of being dancers--but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either. Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live. But when Aimee develops grand philanthropic ambitions, the story moves from London to West Africa, where diaspora tourists travel back in time to find their roots, young men risk their lives to escape into a different future, the women dance just like Tracey--the same twists, the same shakes--and the origins of a profound inequality are not a matter of distant history, but a present dance to the music of time"-- No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.64)
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