Sunday, November 11, 2012

My Forced Read: White Teeth

I am such a distant fan of Zadie Smith. I love reading articles that she is in - I love her style and the idea of her. That said, I have  no read one of her pieces of work. It's time that I jump in. For the past few years - possible over five - I have picked up her novel, I put it down. Something in the description doesn't pull me in. But during this book challenge - I also want to challenge myself to read different things. I have not been good at straying from my old faithfuls. But today, I will start. Here goes nothing. Pray for me Saints. I am about to read "White Teeth."

Book Description:  


Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own.

At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.

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