We know her only by her “I,” a pronoun that she wields warily. Smith’s narrator, a woman in her thirties, isn’t named. It is Smith’s most affecting novel in a decade, one that brings a piercing focus to her favorite theme: the struggle to weave disparate threads of experience into a coherent story of a self. “Swing Time,” a longish book split into short, fleeting chapters, channels the propulsive, addictive, discursive mode of the novel-memoir hybrid that has lately been in fashion (Smith has admiringly referred to the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard as “crack”), but in the service of more traditional fiction, the kind that is unambiguously invented. Her following novel, “NW” (2012), shifted between a lush high modernism reminiscent of “The Waves”-era Virginia Woolf and clever, postmodern nuggets of narrative.
Forster and itself a departure from both “White Teeth” (2000), her boisterous début, and its successor, the comparatively cramped “The Autograph Man” (2002). The same year, in her essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” she declared herself finished with the sort of polished realism that had marked her previous book, “On Beauty” (2005), a loose tribute to E. “Forms, styles, structures-whatever word you prefer-should change like skirt lengths,” she wrote in 2008. Smith is a restless stylist, candid about her openness to influence. That’s the case in “Swing Time” (Penguin Press), Smith’s fifth novel, and the first she’s written in the first person. The imperfect truth, eight years later, is that “I” often seems like all we have. “Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun we.”
“It’s the kind of town where the wise man says ‘I’ cautiously, because I feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience,” Smith said. It’s taken for granted that people are various creatures, and that such variety is cause for celebration, not censure. Obama’s description, in his memoir, of the liminal position he occupied between his mother’s and his father’s worlds prompted her to imagine Dream City, a fantastical place “of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion.” In Dream City, a person born to parents of different nations, colors, and cultures, as Smith and Obama were, doesn’t have to worry about declaring allegiance to one or the other. Illustration by Olimpia ZagnoliĪ month after Barack Obama was elected to his first term as President, Zadie Smith appeared at the New York Public Library to deliver a lecture called “Speaking in Tongues” on the vagaries of race and identity. Smith’s fifth novel follows two girls bound and battered by memory.
0 kommentar(er)
