rouse yourself baby/I'm lying here awake and alone

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I have other things to do, like studying for the GRE or packing for London, but let's face it: reading fiction is the best and funnest. In this entry: I (belatedly) make good on my 2013 resolution to read more novels by POC. More novelists to explore: Xiaolu Guo, Sanjeev Sahota, Taiye Selasie (yes, I am using the Best of Young British Novelists

Comments

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How could anyone like anything as much as White Teeth?, is the question. Maybe I should read Howard's End, then. I was actually wondering if On Beauty might not come from a more personal place for Zadie Smith, since it is about 'middle class black people in academia' and how they navigate that nexus of class privilege and blackness, and if her proximity to that sort of life situation had not actually blunted the sharpness of her writerly tongue. (Which I accept is a terrible thing to think - and anyway, now, thinking about it, if anything she's written should be read as a "Zadie Smith autobiography" it's probably NW.) That being said, I actually think that writing about academics is hard to pull off - once you make the main characters self-aware, self-absorbed, painfully self-doubting "modernist" types it becomes difficult to maintain the kind of distance between author and narrator/protagonist that you need to be effectively satirical. (Hence why my favourite campus novel is the unabashedly earnest Juno & Juliet, which I still recommend a good six years after having read it, and why I was underwhelmed by David Lodge's Changing Places, which is supposed to be this great masterpiece of campus comedy.) (The fact that I wasn't particularly impressed by Changing Places might mean that I should not be trusted when it comes to evaluating novels set in academia.) (In my defence, I was sixteen and I had never set metaphorical foot in a university campus) Case in point: the fact that On Beauty started with three fairly plodding emails that don't immediately read as parodic until you realise that Jerome's gone off to try and marry someone!

ANYWAY. I shall have to read Howard's End, and maybe the Elaine Scarry essay that she took her title from?

AND ALSO. HI, you! Thanks for the compliment - will we see your book reviews for August anytime soon? No pressure though! ♥

[littlerhymes]

Yeah I think it's plausible that aspects of On Beauty comes from a personal place. Interesting thought about her perhaps not having sufficient distance to achieve the proper affect - definitely all her books it's the one that feels most like an exercise. (Disclaimer: I haven't read NW.)

I have read Juno & Juliet! ... I can't really remember much about it. /o\ I'll happily take your word for it on Changing Places, 16 year old opinion or not. :)

P.S. A few years back she wrote this fascinating essay/book review in NY Books about Forster which is a great read.

August post - it's a mess but it's coming! slowly...

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That is a really interesting essay, but i'm afraid that all I got from it was "chatty librarian" and "Zadie Smith is a really, really good essayist". (Which Changing My Mind, which I've read bits of, and The House That Hova Built had already made clear...) so no, not super invested in Forster as such, but pretty interested in Zadie Smith writing (about) Forster! NW is good though. I'd describe it as sub-Joycean (and, tediously, have done so several times in this journal) and earnest and tired and good. I want to say it's less comic, but no, that isn't true, either - the comedy comes from the omniscient narratorial voice, as in her previous novels, but it feels like a comedy borne of weariness and disillusionment, if that makes sense, there's no big punchline.

Ahhhh, finally after ALL THESE YEARS I find another person who's read Juno & Juliet and they can't remember what it's about /o\ oh, well! I look forward to your August post :)