(1988) by Wilhelm Grimm. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Michael di Capua Books. (21 March 2007).
28 March 2007
The text of this book is from a recently discovered manuscript by Wilhelm Grimm. The dust-jacket blurbs make it out to be a previously undiscovered fairy tale to complement “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Red Riding Hood.” But actually, the story here is much closer to religious allegory than what you’d expect to find in a normal Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale—and this is an excellent vehicle for Maurice Sendak, whose talent is to mix images from the worlds of adulthood and childhood and to invite readers from each side of the age divide to look at the details from their counterparts’ perspective, details they normally would filter out. This is a story of the enduring love of a mother for her lost child. Images of trees and flowers, of spreading roots and ruined chapels and crumbling tombstones fill every page and give us a sense of the power time has both to deepen our sorrows, and to bring about a sea change into ripeness and redemption.
White Teeth
(2000) by Zadie Smith. Published by Random House.
Up to p. 217 of 448; 28 March 2007
If you want to understand how far a writer can push the envelope her audience’s sympathy, look no further than the character of Samad Iqbal, the creation of one Zadie Smith. Iqbal is an ageing Bangladeshi who served in WWII. Frustrated in his ambitions to become a renown scientist, he scrapes along as a waiter in London. He bolsters his ego by nurturing an obsession with his ancestor Mangal Pande, a failed rebel whose story constitutes the most minor sort of footnote imaginable.
When Iqbal gets into a love affair with one of his sons’ teachers, he’s filled with shame, but he can’t really recognize it for what it is. He blames the decadence of modern English society, and can only remedy his guilt by splitting up his twin sons, sending one back to Bangladesh.
Zadie Smith is almost cruel. At every turn she invites us to laugh at Iqbal’s pomposity and blindness to the way others see him. But her portrait of Iqbal also includes so many little intimacies and scraps of humanity that we can’t hate him; we can’t even think he’s a particularly bad guy. Like all the characters he’s been loaded up with flaws that have to do with the past.
While reading this book, I keep thinking back to Naslund’s “Ahab’s Wife,” in which the main character, Una, was essentially a person far superior to her time, impervious to any hint of bigotry or chauvanism. It’s a grand thing to wish for, but it doesn’t tell us nearly as much about how real people work as does Smith’s novel in which the characters’ are living in and of a world packed with prejudices and misunderstandings.
In general, the men in this book are a little shabbier than the women. While Samad and his best friend Archie are fixated on their trumped up stories about their respective pasts, their wives Alsana and Clara are at least able to take steps toward adapting to the world of the present. But this gender skew isn’t exactly unfair because Smith recognizes that our ideas about our past, make-believe or not, are essential to our sanity and survival. Samad and Archie are a couple of old geezers who are long on talk and short on heroic deeds, but Smith doesn’t negate the importance of their inflated stories—rather, she pays subtle tribute to them, as in the section where she describes how old men telling stories in cafés use salt shakers and eating utensils to stand for the heroes and villains of their own stories, and how the act of storytelling brings these old men to the full flush of life in a way that nothing else can.
4 April 2007; pp. 217-338
One of the first writers’ manuals I first looked through was Rita Mae Brown’s “Starting From Scratch.” Brown is remarkable for how frankly and directly she deals with matters of social class in American life. The middle class, she says, never interested her much as a fictional subject; rather, she focuses on the tensions that come up when the poor and the rich come into contact.
You can tell that Zadie Smith has entertained some of the same contempt for the people in the middle as Brown does. In the third part of the book, the children Irie Jones and Millat Iqbal are sent to spend some quality time every week with the Chalfans, a stable, upstanding family who are seen to have a lot to offer to kids from “disadvantaged or minority backgrounds.”
Well. Of course, once we see inside the home of the Chalfans (and especially when we see inside the mind of mother Joyce Chalfan) the results are scathing. The family is immensely self-satisfied, and nearly every comment out of everyone’s mouth is packed with unconscious bigotry and condescension. Joyce, a popular author of books about houseplants, is overflowing with ridiculous theories about how Asian societies “mess kids up,”; when Millat’s lesbian cousin Neena and her lover come over for dinner, Joyce can’t resist asking, “Do you use each other’s breasts for pillows?”
What’s remarkable about the portrait of the Chalfans, though, is how compassionate it is. Zadie Smith has an ability to let her mind run on parallel tracks; she never cuts herself off from the funny, disparaging aspect of observing her characters; but deep down, there’s something very fair-minded and objective determining the overall structure. The cool, scientifically detached part of her mind seems to determine what elements to describe when fleshing out the details of a character’s culture. And the human part (the part with sharp, white teeth) is in charge of how to describe it.
Take the subplot involving Millat Iqbal, a young man blessed with the charms of Adonis and hence with a nonstop sex life. Just as Millat seems to be actually falling in love with somebody, his friends from the group KEVIN (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation) start blitzing him with pamphlets about the flaws of Western sexuality. All of a sudden, Millat finds he can’t be around his darling Karina without thinking she dresses like a prostitute. He’s trying to get her to cover up the belly he used to find beautiful to look at. He’s stopping random women in cafés and trying to talk to them about how much more alluring it is to conceal than to reveal.
In the real world, whole European legal systems are reduced to slobbering incoherence by the issues of headscarves in public places, but Zadie Smith can saunter right into this territory without missing a step. Millat is neither a villain, nor is he wholly a fool; when he cuts himself off from Karina, we’re in no doubt that he’s messing up a good thing, but we also get a hint of the real draw that the KEVIN pamphlets have on his psyche.
Smith does an good job giving us brief immersions into a great variety of cultures: Bangladeshi, British middle class, Jamaican, Jehovah’s Witness, white imperialist, academic, bureaucratic and the little nameless subcultures that spring up at the intersections of these larger categories that supposedly explain so much.
14 April 2007; pp. 338 to end.
Something I liked about this novel is that it never tries to be exhaustive. I always had the feeling that there was a lot to be said about the various characters, that their lives had been plotted out in detail, but Smith is decisive in only giving the facts necessary to tell this particular story. This is really nice to see in a young writer, because it indicates at once an awareness of the huge potential territory to be explored during a career, and the necessary ability to zero in on one particular part of it.
In the last sections of the book, Smith focuses more and more on ideas about genetic engineering, by way of Marcus Chalfen’s scientific process of creating a FutureMouse™ whose seven-year destiny has been entirely determined in advance by genetic engineering. This hot topic in bioethics fits very well with the themes of religion, race, family and attachment to the past that overshadow the first parts of the book.
And yet the books denoument, in which we follow all the characters to the much heralded unveiling of FutureMouse™, is pretty weak. The point-of-view shifts between too many characters who have too little to do. It’s impressive that Smith is able to show how various fundamentalist groups (Jehova’s Witness, militant Islamist, animal rights’ extremists) are all unified in their opposition to this tinkering with nature, but it still feels artificial . . . and moreover, bringing all these conflicting elements on the same stage is only setting the reader up for disappointment if the ending is anything less than a massive cataclysm. It isn’t, and you leave the book feeling a little sad that the only really misstep was right at the end.
Because the rest of the book is great fun. Indeed, maybe the reason that the ending doesn’t work so well is because Smith created such a perfect climax a little earlier when the fast-maturing Irie Jones finally gets together with her longtime crush Millat. The outcome is so artfully done, weaving together all the themes of the book so beautifully, that it can only be called genius.
Up to p. 217 of 448; 28 March 2007
If you want to understand how far a writer can push the envelope her audience’s sympathy, look no further than the character of Samad Iqbal, the creation of one Zadie Smith. Iqbal is an ageing Bangladeshi who served in WWII. Frustrated in his ambitions to become a renown scientist, he scrapes along as a waiter in London. He bolsters his ego by nurturing an obsession with his ancestor Mangal Pande, a failed rebel whose story constitutes the most minor sort of footnote imaginable.
When Iqbal gets into a love affair with one of his sons’ teachers, he’s filled with shame, but he can’t really recognize it for what it is. He blames the decadence of modern English society, and can only remedy his guilt by splitting up his twin sons, sending one back to Bangladesh.
Zadie Smith is almost cruel. At every turn she invites us to laugh at Iqbal’s pomposity and blindness to the way others see him. But her portrait of Iqbal also includes so many little intimacies and scraps of humanity that we can’t hate him; we can’t even think he’s a particularly bad guy. Like all the characters he’s been loaded up with flaws that have to do with the past.
While reading this book, I keep thinking back to Naslund’s “Ahab’s Wife,” in which the main character, Una, was essentially a person far superior to her time, impervious to any hint of bigotry or chauvanism. It’s a grand thing to wish for, but it doesn’t tell us nearly as much about how real people work as does Smith’s novel in which the characters’ are living in and of a world packed with prejudices and misunderstandings.
In general, the men in this book are a little shabbier than the women. While Samad and his best friend Archie are fixated on their trumped up stories about their respective pasts, their wives Alsana and Clara are at least able to take steps toward adapting to the world of the present. But this gender skew isn’t exactly unfair because Smith recognizes that our ideas about our past, make-believe or not, are essential to our sanity and survival. Samad and Archie are a couple of old geezers who are long on talk and short on heroic deeds, but Smith doesn’t negate the importance of their inflated stories—rather, she pays subtle tribute to them, as in the section where she describes how old men telling stories in cafés use salt shakers and eating utensils to stand for the heroes and villains of their own stories, and how the act of storytelling brings these old men to the full flush of life in a way that nothing else can.
4 April 2007; pp. 217-338
One of the first writers’ manuals I first looked through was Rita Mae Brown’s “Starting From Scratch.” Brown is remarkable for how frankly and directly she deals with matters of social class in American life. The middle class, she says, never interested her much as a fictional subject; rather, she focuses on the tensions that come up when the poor and the rich come into contact.
You can tell that Zadie Smith has entertained some of the same contempt for the people in the middle as Brown does. In the third part of the book, the children Irie Jones and Millat Iqbal are sent to spend some quality time every week with the Chalfans, a stable, upstanding family who are seen to have a lot to offer to kids from “disadvantaged or minority backgrounds.”
Well. Of course, once we see inside the home of the Chalfans (and especially when we see inside the mind of mother Joyce Chalfan) the results are scathing. The family is immensely self-satisfied, and nearly every comment out of everyone’s mouth is packed with unconscious bigotry and condescension. Joyce, a popular author of books about houseplants, is overflowing with ridiculous theories about how Asian societies “mess kids up,”; when Millat’s lesbian cousin Neena and her lover come over for dinner, Joyce can’t resist asking, “Do you use each other’s breasts for pillows?”
What’s remarkable about the portrait of the Chalfans, though, is how compassionate it is. Zadie Smith has an ability to let her mind run on parallel tracks; she never cuts herself off from the funny, disparaging aspect of observing her characters; but deep down, there’s something very fair-minded and objective determining the overall structure. The cool, scientifically detached part of her mind seems to determine what elements to describe when fleshing out the details of a character’s culture. And the human part (the part with sharp, white teeth) is in charge of how to describe it.
Take the subplot involving Millat Iqbal, a young man blessed with the charms of Adonis and hence with a nonstop sex life. Just as Millat seems to be actually falling in love with somebody, his friends from the group KEVIN (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation) start blitzing him with pamphlets about the flaws of Western sexuality. All of a sudden, Millat finds he can’t be around his darling Karina without thinking she dresses like a prostitute. He’s trying to get her to cover up the belly he used to find beautiful to look at. He’s stopping random women in cafés and trying to talk to them about how much more alluring it is to conceal than to reveal.
In the real world, whole European legal systems are reduced to slobbering incoherence by the issues of headscarves in public places, but Zadie Smith can saunter right into this territory without missing a step. Millat is neither a villain, nor is he wholly a fool; when he cuts himself off from Karina, we’re in no doubt that he’s messing up a good thing, but we also get a hint of the real draw that the KEVIN pamphlets have on his psyche.
Smith does an good job giving us brief immersions into a great variety of cultures: Bangladeshi, British middle class, Jamaican, Jehovah’s Witness, white imperialist, academic, bureaucratic and the little nameless subcultures that spring up at the intersections of these larger categories that supposedly explain so much.
14 April 2007; pp. 338 to end.
Something I liked about this novel is that it never tries to be exhaustive. I always had the feeling that there was a lot to be said about the various characters, that their lives had been plotted out in detail, but Smith is decisive in only giving the facts necessary to tell this particular story. This is really nice to see in a young writer, because it indicates at once an awareness of the huge potential territory to be explored during a career, and the necessary ability to zero in on one particular part of it.
In the last sections of the book, Smith focuses more and more on ideas about genetic engineering, by way of Marcus Chalfen’s scientific process of creating a FutureMouse™ whose seven-year destiny has been entirely determined in advance by genetic engineering. This hot topic in bioethics fits very well with the themes of religion, race, family and attachment to the past that overshadow the first parts of the book.
And yet the books denoument, in which we follow all the characters to the much heralded unveiling of FutureMouse™, is pretty weak. The point-of-view shifts between too many characters who have too little to do. It’s impressive that Smith is able to show how various fundamentalist groups (Jehova’s Witness, militant Islamist, animal rights’ extremists) are all unified in their opposition to this tinkering with nature, but it still feels artificial . . . and moreover, bringing all these conflicting elements on the same stage is only setting the reader up for disappointment if the ending is anything less than a massive cataclysm. It isn’t, and you leave the book feeling a little sad that the only really misstep was right at the end.
Because the rest of the book is great fun. Indeed, maybe the reason that the ending doesn’t work so well is because Smith created such a perfect climax a little earlier when the fast-maturing Irie Jones finally gets together with her longtime crush Millat. The outcome is so artfully done, weaving together all the themes of the book so beautifully, that it can only be called genius.
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