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Loading... White Teeth: A Novelby Zadie Smith
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. humour as a weapon, against racism, sexism and so much more in. | Jul 3, 2009 |   Tedious (  )livrecache | Jun 27, 2009 | Begins by wonderfully peeling off rings of flesh from fresh, vivacious, New London, with a particular ear for verbal ticks and pangs. However, explodes sometime midway, mushrooming into a top-heavy, clumsily earnest paean. Waddles into a shallow stream of magical realism and drowns like a fat baby. But worth it for that beginning half. (  )nohablo | Jun 2, 2009 | White Teeth starts out as a fairly typical sort of immigrant story. It is much more ambitious than most because it covers two families, the Iqbals and the Joneses, instead of just the one. Both families are interesting, and Zadie Smith tells their stories with affection and wry humor. As the children in both families grow up, their parents make different decisions about how English/Bangladeshi/Jamaican/Muslim/Jehovah’s Witness-y they want their children to be. But the children have minds of their own. It’s a good story that I thoroughly enjoyed, even if it wasn’t the most original story in the world. And at about the midpoint, things take a turn. We meet the Chalfens, a family of liberal intellectuals with children who, like the Iqbal and Jones children, are making their own decisions about who they are going to be, regardless of what their parents say. Marcus Chalfin is a geneticist, and his presence in the book brings to the fore questions of heredity and identity, of nature and nurture. The scope of the tale broadens so that it’s no longer just an exploration of cultural identity (a rich enough theme on its own). It takes in how we all become who we are. Are we just products of our genes? Can we ever separate ourselves from our biological heritage? Do we really choose our own course? Smith uses this new thread to enrich and deepen the story, but she never allows it to take over. The tone of the book stays consistent, and the central characters never fade too far into the background. By the end, seemingly inconsequential threads from the opening chapters start to show up again, and everything dovetails into a stunningly inconclusive conclusion. I loved it. See my complete review (with a comparison to the less masterfully told immigrant tale, Middlesex) at my blog. (  )teresakayep | May 22, 2009 | 1  0.184 seconds to build listing
Amazon.com (ISBN 0140276335, 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 Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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