Thérèse Neelands

White Teeth, by Zadie Smith

Oh, dear. Another “Best Book Ever, If Ever There Was One”, post. Honest to God, I either have a knack for grabbing great books off the shelf or there are a hell of a lot of good books.

I picked this up last week. It is not only hilarious, but superbly well written. It’s definitely a book to be read aloud. It shows  Smith’s witty brain, and her acute powers of observation – of people from all walks of life – kids, parents, immigrant parents struggling with their kids. Racists, crazy street people, Roman Catholics, Methodists, Muslims, Hindus, different cultures, different families, different ages, different histories.

Here is an excerpt – pg. 168

Mr J.P. Hamilton, confronted on his doorstep by three dark-skinned children clutching a myriad of projectiles, was duly surprised. As old as they had imagined but far taller and cleaner, he opened the door only slightly, keeping his hand, with its mountain range of blue veins, upon the knob, while his head curled around the frame. To Irie he was reminiscent of some genteel elderly eagle; tufts of feather-like hair protruded from ear drums, shirt cuffs and the neck, with one white spray falling over his forehead, his fingers lay in a permanent tight spasm like talons, and he was well dressed, as one might expect of an elderly English bird in Wonderland – a suede waistcoat and a tweed jacket, and a watch on a gold chain.

And twinkling like a magpie, from the blue scattering in his eyes undimmed by the white and red surround, to the gleam of a signet ring, four argent medals perched just above his heart, and the silver rim of a Senior Service packet peeping over the breast pocket.

‘Please,’ came the voice from the bird-man, a voice that even the children sensed was from a different class, a different era. ‘I must ask that you remove yourselves from my doorstep. I have no money whatsoever; so be your intention robbing or selling I’m afraid you will be disapointed’.

Magid stepped forward, trying to place himself in the old man’s eyeline, for the left eye, blue as Rayleigh scattering, had looked beyond them, while the right was so compacted beneath wrinkles it hardly opened. ‘Mr. Hamilton, don’t you remember, the school sent us, these are – ‘

He said, ‘Goodbye, now,’ as if he were bidding farewell to an elderly aunt embarking on a train journey, then once more ‘Goodbye’, and through two panels of cheap stained-glass on the closed door the children watched the lengthy figure of Mr. Hamilton, blurred as if by heat, walking slowly away from them down a corridor until the brown flecks of him merged with the brown flecks of the household furnishings and the former all but disappeared.

In a way, the book is somewhat Dickensian for me – in the way that her characters are all just slightly absurd, which somehow makes them all the more real, in the way she highlights class distinction and in her very detailed descriptions of personal particulars.

Scrumdidliumptious.

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