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Loading... On Beautyby Zadie Smith
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. siriaeve | Jun 12, 2009 |  1   A discussion about beauty, love and mistakes. While reading this book I visited the Baroque Masterworks exhibition, The Misshapen Pearl: The Baroque Era (February 2007), at the AGGV to stare at Rembrandt's painting of his wife. Also I started using cocoa butter on my skin. (  )lumber | Apr 4, 2009 | A great book. Rivalry between university teachers, intellectual matters ad so on. This inextricably mixed with love affairs and broken hearts. Two families in pain, divorce is threatening in one when the other is struck by death. The plot's not really complex but clever and finely drawn. The background is the University life with its special rules and subtle plots. But the very subject could be beauty ; of women, paintings and souls. (  )Arvoitus | Mar 31, 2009 | fellowette | Mar 26, 2009 | Loved this book. Read it twice in a year and look forward to more from Zadie Smith. ( )mfranck | Mar 11, 2009 | 0.096 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0143037749, Paperback)In an author's note at the end of On Beauty, Zadie Smith writes: "My largest structural debt should be obvious to any E.M. Forster fan; suffice it to say he gave me a classy old frame, which I covered with new material as best I could." If it is true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Forster, perched on a cloud somewhere, should be all puffed up with pride. His disciple has taken Howards End, that marvelous tale of class difference, and upped the ante by adding race, politics, and gender. The end result is a story for the 21st century, told with a perfect ear for everything: gangsta street talk; academic posturing, both British and American; down-home black Floridian straight talk; and sassy, profane kids, both black and white.Howard Belsey is a middle-class white liberal Englishman teaching abroad at Wellington, a thinly disguised version of one of the Ivies. He is a Rembrandt scholar who can't finish his book and a recent adulterer whose marriage is now on the slippery slope to disaster. His wife, Kiki, a black Floridian, is a warm, generous, competent wife, mother, and medical worker. Their children are Jerome, disgusted by his father's behavior, Zora, Wellington sophomore firebrand feminist and Levi, eager to be taken for a "homey," complete with baggy pants, hoodies and the ever-present iPod. This family has no secrets--at least not for long. They talk about everything, appropriate to the occasion or not. And, there is plenty to talk about. The other half of the story is that of the Kipps family: Monty, stiff, wealthy ultra-conservative vocal Christian and Rembrandt scholar, whose book has been published. His wife Carlene is always slightly out of focus, and that's the way she wants it. She wafts over all proceedings, never really connecting with anyone. That seems to be endemic in the Kipps household. Son Michael is a bit of a Monty clone and daughter Victoria is not at all what Daddy thinks she is. Indeed, Forster's advice, "Only connect," is lost on this group. The two academics have long been rivals, detesting each other's politics and disagreeing about Rembrandt. They are thrown into further conflict when Jerome leaves Wellington to get away from the discovery of his father's affair, lands on the Kipps' doorstep, falls for Victoria and mistakes what he has going with her for love. Howard makes it worse by trying to fix it. Then, Kipps is granted a visiting professorship at Wellington and the whole family arrives in Massachusetts. From this raw material, Smith has fashioned a superb book, her best to date. She has interwoven class, race, and gender and taken everyone prisoner. Her even-handed renditions of liberal and/or conservative mouthings are insightful, often hilarious, and damning to all. She has a great time exposing everyone's clay feet. This author is a young woman cynical beyond her years, and we are all richer for it. --Valerie Ryan (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:08 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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At times, her ear for dialogue failed her—particularly when trying to recreate the speech patterns of an American teenager, or when rendering accents phonetically (a pet hate)—but when Smith was on, there was almost a pleasure to be gained just from reading her words aloud. I felt there was a similar wavering in her characters. Sometimes, they were fantastically well-observed individuals; at others, they seemed to collapse backwards into two-dimensional stereotypes. Smith seems to do very well at capturing human idiosyncrasies, but not necessarily human characters, if that makes sense.
For me, the best aspect of the novel was Smith's often brutal, incisive look at how class, race, and gender function within academia (for as has been brought home to me again very recently, the academic viewpoint is not a value-neutral position from which to survey the world, not even in the slightest). I particularly appreciated how she teased apart the myth, often perpetuated from a white perspective, that people of colour are all the same—a monolith defined by their non-whiteness—that rather Black British people are distinct from Black Americans are distinct from Black Haitians, and that there are tensions between all these groups born of differing cultures and socio-economic status. (