Hi Crystal,
Sorry this is so late – I haven’t been sleeping much lately, so this seems like normal hour to write a blog post. It’s really not.
Anyway, I read White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. It’s about two immigrant families in London. The story stems from the meeting of the patriarchs of each family, Archie and Samad, during World War II. Archie is a dull British man with a simplistic world view, and Samad is a Bengali immigrant looking to follow his Muslim faith, respect his family history, and protect his immediate family from Western influences. As Archie enters middle age, he marries a much younger Jamaican woman and former Jehovah’s Witness named Clara. Samad goes through with an arranged marriage and weds Alsana, a petite, traditional, and strong-willed Bengali woman who is also much younger. The novel follows their families and social circles as they intertwine and develop in North-ish London.
I really liked this book! Smith deals with themes like history and culture and religion and fate and modernity explicitly, with a healthy satire. She builds a diverse and struggling London, a rough and modern one.
The plot of the book isn’t extremely exciting all time, but it’s genuine in describing the frequently mundane and thoughtful parts of the characters’ lives, and is able to juxtapose these with the colorful, fateful lives of their non-British ancestors.
Even so, it’s a sprawling book. It sometimes seems too much for Smith to handle in a first novel – the themes and symbols, but also the family history that reaches far back into the twentieth century. It’s tangled, as immigrant histories always are. Making the encompassing statements she does about race in British culture is also a lot. But I think she succeeds in doing all that.
White Teeth is grest in that it’s honest and funny and profund at the same time. And by that I mean Smith writes doesn’t just write honest and funny and profound chapters; she writes honest and funny and profound sentences. Her dialogue is especially good. Would earnestly recommend.
Lots of love,
Ana
Ex Libris 