The English writer Zadie Smith is an author determined to polish her plots essentially from her characters. Because each of his novels is a kind of complete theatricalization, naturalized in rich dialogues and reflections made soliloquies.
Interventions that set the scene and bring to the stage the reality to be exposed, like a magical stagehand built exclusively from and for the recreation on the words made of stage boards.
And no, it is not dramaturgy, it is novelistic, only under the artisanal factory of one of those authors to be discovered as an exponent of literary avant-garde. Horizons of a literature in which the protagonists reach waves of maximum power that reverberate in echoes of humor, tragic sense, rage and even guilt, depending on the moment.
Realism of the times, plots of social component with the most intense hook of the future of some protagonists who conquer from the first page. Life is the best action that can mark the progress of a story, you just have to know how to tell life, which is not little. And that knows a lot about surprising zadie smith.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Zadie Smith
White teeth
That first novel that augurs a different, hypnotic, expert writer in her early childhood, in a literature practically invented by her.
Perhaps in the end it is not the best work, but it must be framed by the awakening of the author and the style, the imprint towards levels of realism always necessary in every era of our civilization. Because if writers do not tell us, with the charm of their prose, what is happening in the world, there will be no chronicles of intrastories, which is what is important in all this of our evolution.
And what greater reality than the migration of our days, the mixture and xenophobia, the search for the future, defeat, successes, humor as the only weapon that is valid against everything and passion as a guide sine qua non.
Archie and Samad keep that treasure, which necessarily sifts over the years, of the memories of the war. Today's London no longer fears any Blitz, but for two old men modernity may be the worst Blitz that constantly bombards them. Now it seems that both are faced with the alienating idea that their children do not know how to enjoy and take advantage of the time of peace that they gave them. But neither are they able to see that it is not yet the time of harmonious peace that they imagine.
Because their children are still black, to explain it with acid humor, and that is still a burden for the eternal heirs of paradise: the white people convinced of it. Maybe that's it, maybe Archie and Samad fought for nothing, so they couldn't win freedom even for their children. How can you not laugh at the tragedy of this type of discovery? It's that or recover the old rifle... A story of hilarious irony with a touch of harsh criticism. An intense novel like only a writer barely twenty years old could write.
About beauty
Perhaps the trick for this realism made in Zadie Smith lies in age, in a youth capable of tackling the most transcendent dialogues from precise brushstrokes without further considerations and extensions typical of bearded and wrinkled thinkers or philosophers with tiny eyes, consumed behind their glasses. .
Without a doubt, beauty requires few considerations or heavy reasoning. What is beautiful is the ephemeral and at the same time timeless in our memory. And nobody can approach it from the descriptive or the ideological. A treatise on beauty should be a compilation of moments, a few words exchanged with someone while something fantastic happens or a simple gesture transports us to that place outside of us where beauty passes precipitously, to its own.
In her early twenties, Zadie describes scenes of beauty among the prosaic of our world. Because things exist essentially because of their opposites. And there can be no supreme beauty without the opposition of the vulgar. Beauty undoubtedly starts from the individual, in this case from a professor like Howard Belsey, he endures that feeling of decadence that appears when one is already old enough to return to earth from the natural peak of the life line.
Children, wife, love lapses and reluctance for almost everything. In the ruinous conception of his existence, Belsey is at times hilarious in his encounters with everything, with the coming generations that his children represent, with a love that days ago was defenested by the first window he found in that home and with a trade in the one who sees nothing but intruders and climbs. But beauty is always, even with more splendor in decadence, between dialogues the novel advances towards an end that reconciles everything, as a breath of wind can reconcile us with life.
Swing times
We come to the author's fifth novel and although that brightness of the characters is maintained, the intensity of this new magical realism of the XNUMXst century may have decreased in its level of an exciting chronicle of the everyday or perhaps it is something that in a certain way How this novel seems to try to plagiarize the impetuous "White Teeth."
But come on, the novel also has its charm because it continues to abound in the gift of this author. In a kind of first person from the writer herself, we meet the protagonist in the future and her friend Tracey. They are both united by a friendship that, with that synergy of old friends, also creates harmony of dreams and hopes.
Of course, it is to be expected that the wishes of both will end up truncated because they are not precisely from wealthy families. And it is from those dreams where that acid humor is born once again that it extinguishes awakening a bomb-proof humanity, with those dialogues towards empathy from the first word.
Another thing is what happens behind closed doors in each of the girls' homes, because in the comings and goings of a not so remote past and today we discover the very disparate environments that favor each friend in very different ways. to face their challenges. A novel about the friendship of different personalities forged around similar ambitions. A new representation of that authentic life that beats within each scene.
I have only read Grand Union and I found it despicable. It's confusing and one long excruciating mental straw. Some critics believe that being a woman, black and shameless, we already have the ingredients of a good writer. Well no. She lacks talent and interest and I fear this author is a publishing bluff.