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Loading... White Teeth (original 2000; edition 2000)by Zadie Smith
Work detailsWhite Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000)
White Teeth is an epic story of 2 families living in London - Archie Jones and his Jamaican born wife, Clara, and Samad and Alsana Iqbal, two Bengali Muslims. It's hard to describe this book since it covers such an amazing amount of topics - from the conflict in a traditional family whose kids just want to fit in with their British friends to women's rights and marital fidelity to moral decisions made during war. Smith covers these difficult topics with an easy writing style and a great sense of humor. I listened to the audio version, expertly narrated by Jenny Sterlin. My only dissatisfaction with the book is that it seemed to cover too much in time and scope that I couldn't see where the book was going, although the ending didn't seem to leave any loose ends. (  ) jmoncton | Jun 3, 2013 |  Whew. Well done. Immigration/culture shifting is kind of universal. Kind of.. ( ) Elpaca | May 1, 2013 | I doubt I’d have read if not for my real world book club, and even though I barely liked it, I don’t regret reading it. It is hilarious at parts but I can’t give it more than 3 stars because this is one case where the whole adds up to less than the sum of the parts; many pages were entertaining, but the whole story didn’t wow me. I do like how it’s funny in sad parts, including the suicide attempt at the beginning! loved that. However, when the narrator wasn’t amusing me, they were annoying me. The story is very busy, sprawling, lots characters, lots going on, too weird structure for me and writing I found distancing, and it seemed very ambitious but for me it didn’t succeed and it ultimately felt like kind of a mess. I often do like big epic novels, but this one didn’t come together for me. I think it tried to be profound (immigration, race, cultural, identity, etc. ) but I don’t think it succeeded. I was interested in Irie for a time, but then not, and I don’t think any of the characters will stick with me. I didn’t get that invested in any of them. I didn’t like most of the deviations from the regular font text, but the family tree (on page 281 of my edition) was a hoot. I have some interest in genealogy and I’d love to see more detailed, honest family trees such as this one. There are also lots of quotable quotes. I liked many including, “Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.” This quote does get repeated. I’m not sure how to sum up my feelings/thoughts about the book except to reiterate how read certain pages was a pleasure but reading the book in its entirety was not. And, the whole wasn’t as good as some of its parts; the whole didn’t come together for me. (  )1  Lisa2013 | Apr 17, 2013 | The book falls apart in the end, but she aimed very high and very nearly got there. ( ) idyll | Apr 9, 2013 | Why use 5 words when you can use 25 to say the same thing? ( ) Marzia22 | Apr 3, 2013 | no reviews | add a review Has as a reference guide/companion
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0375703861, Paperback)Epic in scale and intimate in approach, White Teeth is a formidably ambitious debut. First novelist Zadie Smith takes on race, sex, class, history, and the minefield of gender politics, and such is her wit and inventiveness that these weighty subjects seem effortlessly light. She also has an impressive geographical range, guiding the reader from Jamaica to Turkey to Bangladesh and back again.Still, the book's home base is a scrubby North London borough, where we encounter Smith's unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal, who served together in the so-called Buggered Battalion during World War II. In the ensuing decades, both have gone forth and multiplied: Archie marries beautiful, bucktoothed Clara--who's on the run from her Jehovah's Witness mother--and fathers a daughter. Samad marries stroppy Alsana, who gives birth to twin sons. Here is multiculturalism in its most elemental form: "Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks." Big questions demand boldly drawn characters. Zadie Smith's aren't heroic, just real: warm, funny, misguided, and entirely familiar. Reading their conversations is like eavesdropping. Even a simple exchange between Alsana and Clara about their pregnancies has a comical ring of truth: "A woman has to have the private things--a husband needn't be involved in body business, in a lady's... parts." And the men, of course, have their own involvement in bodily functions: The deal was this: on January 1, 1980, like a New Year dieter who gives up cheese on the condition that he can have chocolate, Samad gave up masturbation so that he might drink. It was a deal, a business proposition, that he had made with God: Samad being the party of the first part, God being the sleeping partner. And since that day Samad had enjoyed relative spiritual peace and many a frothy Guinness with Archibald Jones; he had even developed the habit of taking his last gulp looking up at the sky like a Christian, thinking: I'm basically a good man.Not all of White Teeth is so amusingly carnal. The mixed blessings of assimilation, for example, are an ongoing torture for Samad as he watches his sons grow up. "They have both lost their way," he grumbles. "Strayed so far from what I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave." These classic immigrant fears--of dilution and disappearance--are no laughing matter. But in the end, they're exactly what gives White Teeth its lasting power and undeniable bite. --Eithne Farry (retrieved from Amazon Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:10:42 -0500) From the Publisher: On New Year's morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie-working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt-is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie's car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel. Epic and intimate, hilarious and poignant, White Teeth is the story of two North London families-one headed by Archie, the other by Archie's best friend, a Muslim Bengali named Samad Iqbal. Pals since they served together in World War II, Archie and Samad are a decidedly unlikely pair. Plodding Archie is typical in every way until he marries Clara, a beautiful, toothless Jamaican woman half his age, and the couple have a daughter named Irie (the Jamaican word for "no problem"). Samad-devoutly Muslim, hopelessly "foreign"-weds the feisty and always suspicious Alsana in a prearranged union. They have twin sons named Millat and Magid, one a pot-smoking punk-cum-militant Muslim and the other an insufferable science nerd. The riotous and tortured histories of the Joneses and the Iqbals are fundamentally intertwined, capturing an empire's worth of cultural identity, history, and hope. Zadie Smith's dazzling first novel plays out its bounding, vibrant course in a Jamaican hair salon in North London, an Indian restaurant in Leicester Square, an Irish poolroom turned immigrant cafe, a liberal public school, a sleek science institute. A winning debut in every respect, White Teeth marks the arrival of a wondrously talented writer who takes on the big themes-faith, race, gender, history, and culture-and triumphs.… (more) (summary from another edition) |
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