For me, 'NW' is not really a story about characters or lives. It is about format, it is about narrative style. And given that Zadie experiments with 4 different styles to tell the stories of 4 different characters living in NW London, the result is that the book is disjointed, uneven and lackin...
Some damn fine essays. A few to skim maybe, too - but "Rereading Barthes and Nabokov," "Two Directions for the Novel," and "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace" offered some of the better analysis I've read in recent years, and some of her memoir essays...
Their eyes were watching God: What does soulful mean?"As a reader, I want to claim fellowship with "good writing" without limits; to be able to say that Hurston is my sister and Baldwin is my brother, and so is Kafka my brother, and Nabokov, and Woolf my sister, and Eliot and Ozick. Like all read...
Reading this book of essays, I fell in love with Zadie Smith’s style. She’s so personable and reasonable, that it’s impossible not to feel some sort of affinity toward her voice. But I had a moment when I felt a connection I don’t feel with a writer only because her style is impeccable.This kin...
Short story or novella? Hard to say. It would make a lovely little film. Fatou is such a great character. In her subservience and in her rebellion she is full of promise. It's one of those stories where you really want to know what happened yo her next despite the fact that the story is quite com...
Earlier today I called my local Dymocks to ask them to put a book on hold for me. When I got down there I had a look around the store and almost walked straight past this tiny book tucked into a shelf among the others. I bought it, took it home, and read it straight away.“The Embassy of Cambodia”...
The impulse to gush inarticulately about this book is very overwhelming, but to do so simply to get it out of my system is to do it an injustice. The second impulse I have is to try to revisit my University years and invoke the language of all those fuddy-duddy critical theorists (or, to go easie...
Le lecteur goodreadsien moyen n'est pas particulièrement enthousiaste face à ce livre. C'était le deuxième roman de Zadie Smith, après White Teeth (qu'il faudrait vraiment que je relise), & on voit que le lectorat avait pas l'intention de lui en laisser passer une. Je suis contente de ne pas l'av...
Wood pooh-poohed this text, inaptly, as it turns out, as hysterical realism. Am not sure if Wood was interested in the bad gender politics of that particular generic designation, but the gross amalgamation of this text with Pynchon, Rushdie, Delillo, DFW does not make much sense. (It’s most sim...
So recently I checked out Alice in Wonderland with Through the Looking Glass as they are books we are discussing at the Reading for Pleasure book club here on Goodreads as Alice is our book club's classic group read for the month of June and Through the Looking Glass is the Book Club Buddy read t...