White Teeth

7678 visningar
uppladdat: 2005-12-06
Inactive member

Inactive member

Nedanstående innehåll är skapat av Mimers Brunns besökare. Kommentera arbete
This story is about archie’s (alfred archibald jones), an englishman, and samad’s (samad miah iqbal), an indian, journey from the first day at the tank till their children grow up and start living their own lives.
Archie was a seventeen year old boy who had fooled the doctors and got himself into the army, while samad was a two year older radio operator. Archie spent the first week staring at samad which created a thin, invisible bond between the two which samad tugged at when he needed archie to help him against the rest of the tank.
After the war archie returned to england and got married. Shortly afterwards samad followed with his new wife to the same quarters and settled down close to archie. They both continued to talk and share a very special bond which they did not even share with their wives. Both wives gave birth nearly at the same time, archie’s wife to a daughter and samad’s to two twinboys.
Samad’s twins, millat and magid, are as different as day and night. When millat buys nike, osh-kosh begosh and strange jumpers, magid buys grey pullovers, grey shirt and black tie. He would never buy anything colourful even for his Amma’s ,(mother’s), sake. When the boys had started to grow and show disrespect samad sent magid to bangladesh to give millat some space to grow and develope in. Archie’s daughter, irie, is not a beauty with her mother’s buckle teeth, her grandmother’s huge jamaican curves and her father’s eyes.

Zadie Smith´s White Teeth is a delightfully cacophonous tale that spans 25 years of two families´ assimilation in North London. The Joneses and the Iqbals are an unlikely a pairing of families, but their intertwined destinies distill the British Empire´s history and hopes into a dazzling multiethnic melange that is a pure joy to read. Smith proves herself to be a master at drawing fully-realized, vibrant characters, and she demonstrates an extraordinary ear for dialogue. It is a novel full of humor and empathy that is as inspiring as it is enjoyable.

White Teeth is ambitious in scope and artfully rendered with a confidence that is extremely rare in a writer so young. It boggles the mind that Zadie Smith is only 24 years old, and this novel is a clarion call announcing the arrival of a major new talent in contemporary fiction. It is a raucous yet poignant look at modern life in London and is clearly the book to read this summer.

Since publishers crave the sassy and sexy equivalents of music and fashion, and yet continue to need people who can string more than a sentence or two together, it seems as though she fits the bill entirely. While the hype was revving up, I picked up a QPD ´exclusive chapter sampler´ of White Teeth and must confess that it had me hooked. It introduces us to Archie Jones and his peculiar second marriage to Clara (Jamaican and half his age), who fails in a suicide attempt.
Whenever there is as much of a buzz around something as there is around White Teeth, I am always slightly reticent. It has to be said, though, that this first novel is a witty and perceptive debut with some brilliantly observed characters and some very funny colloquialisms and idiosyncrasies. For instance, when Irie (the brilliantly named daughter of Archie and Clara) is arguing with Millat (twin brother of Magid, son to Samad and Alsana Iqbal), we get the following:
´Who said you were eating it?´
´I don´t want to.´
´Well, you´re not going to.´
´Well, good, ´cos I don´t want to.´
´Well, good, ´cos I wouldn´t let you even if you wanted to.´
´Well that´s lucky cos I don´t. So shame.´ (P142)
These delightful parries are developed wonderfully. There are moments when Smith´s pace approaches that of Ben Elton at his best, such as the moment when Samad meets the ´loquacious lips´ of Poppy Burt-Jones, the oh-so-trendy school teacher at his son´s school. Here too, Smith exposes the ironies of the politically correct do-gooders of the world, whilst managing to retain the dramatic interest.
To be frank, Smith has run riot. A very bright woman who (as we all must know by now) got an advance after only 80 pages, with accolades from Salman Rushdie amongst others, she has given us a stream of consciousness reflecting her own experiences growing up, with some clever pointers and twists thrown in. Perhaps understandably, she is at her best when on the surface of her characters - the patois and swagger of Millat and his posse, the Chalfont style of living, Archie and Samad down at Micky´s gaff... It is only really Archibald and Samad whose deeper insights are revealed, and this is where perhaps Smith could have developed the other characters further.
In general though, this is a ´top shout,´ appropriating the street vernacular and paying the price of momentary lapses of style. The play on contemporary ideas indicates a fertile imagination and sense of humour. There is more substance in White Teeth than can be found in the banal irony of postmodern relativists and far, far more passion. Because ultimately, it seems that Zadie Smith really cares about who she writes about.
Smith brings us into her world - a world shaped by the past, by colonialism and immigration, by mixed marriages, by inner city life at the turn of the century. Admittedly, she errs towards some of today´s more popular notions when she decryies tampering with genes (Marcus Chalfont and a ubiquitous mouse), but at the same, time she presents with continual intelligent humour and a lively pace. White Teeth, a multigenerational, multiethnic, somewhat zany novel, is the ambitious undertaking of first-time novelist Smith. Set in London and spanning more than 25 years, with recollections and accounts back to earlier days, it presents the combined story of the Jones and Iqbal families. The friendship of Archibald and Samad, respectively, the fathers, dates back to their shared, if somewhat bizarre, experiences during World War II. Their much younger wives (Clara Jones, a Jamaican who escaped from her Jehovah´s Witness upbringing, and Alsana Iqbal, married because of family arrangements) and the children (a girl for the Jones´, twin sons for the Iqbals) become like one family out of habit and self-defense. They grow and change (or not) as the years progress, and there is a sort of predestined circularity of the events and outcomes. Smith has an excellent ear for dialect and a wonderfully descriptive sense in the way she presents the multiethnic underclass.

An impressively witty satirical first novel, London-set, chronicling the experiences of two eccentric multiracial families during the last half of the 20th century. When Archie Joness suicide attempt on New Years Day 1975 is stymied by a finicky butcher (who frowns upon such things taking place in a car parked illegally in front of his establishment, especially when hes awaiting an early morning delivery), his life is changed forever. Lamenting the break up of his marriage, the distraught and disoriented Archiea middle-aged Brit who fancies himself in the direct-mail business but actually spends his life folding papersthen wanders into an end-of-the-world party where he meets his next wife. Jamaican Clara Bowden is 19 to Archies 47, at six feet tall she towers over him, and she´s missing all her upper teeth, the result of a motorcycle mishap. Nonetheless, six weeks later the mismatched pair are married and living near Archies WWII buddy Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim. And so begins Smiths frenetic, riotous, unruly tale, which hops, skips, and jumps from one end of the century to the other while following the Jones and Iqbal broods. Archie and Clara have a daughter, Irie, whose name translates into ``no problem´´ (although she has plenty of them); Samad, who is head waiter at an Indian restaurant, has twin sons, Millat and Magid. When theyre nine, their father separates the boys, sending Magid back to Bangladesh to be raised the old-fashioned way, far from the corruption of postwar London, filled with its mods and rockers and hippies and Englishmen and other bad influencesincluding Samad himself, who has been lusting after his twins schoolteacher. There isn´t much of a plot here, the book being swept along by a series of sometimes hilarious, oft-times clever, occasionally tedious riffs on everything from race relations through eugenics and on to religion, but 25-year-old Smith is a marvelously talented writer with a wonderful ear for dialogue.
Zadie Smith´s White Teeth is a hilarious, well-written, overstuffed comic-book of a novel: episodic and picaresque, by turns heartbreaking and heartening. The plot is tortuous, the science absurd on which the climax hangs but no matter. Smith´s dizzy white-water ride of people and cultures carries one along quite briskly enough, thank you, without time to criticize or think about inconsistencies.
No need to even attempt to describe the events that take place in White Teeth; they´re utterly unimportant. The melange of sub-societies Jamaican and British and Bangladeshi-Moslem, analytic and religious and mystical-nihilist come together with Smith´s ear for dialect and mindset to make a tasty stew. Yes, the book could have been better. There´s too much foul language, drugs, raunchiness, violence, coincidence, pain, and greasy food. The caricatures often push the characters offstage. The ending is over-the-top silly, an unnecessary exercise in knot-tying.
So what? It´s the journey that counts: the rhythmic rattling of the train, the scenery scrolling by the window, the chatter of one´s fellow passengers, and the helter-skelter chaos of arrival/departure that every station-stop throws the carriage into. Getting off at one´s destination is anticlimactic. So is the conclusion of White Teeth.
"Whilst he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the music of the spheres, the flap of a tiger-moth´s diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that Makes Shit Happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie."

This is a first class debut novel, which has made the news due to the huge advance, which the author received - a six-figure number. So, the question seems to be: is White Teeth worth all that money? The answer has to be YES.
White Teeth is a brilliant novel, superbly confident in its execution. It starts off in 1975, the year of the author´s birth, with the attempted suicide of Archibald Jones. Anyone who was born in 1970s Britain cannot fail but identify with the characters and events in this book. If you can recall the VW badge craze, then this is the book for you. However, this is not just a novel for the younger generation, for there is at least one extended family in White Teeth, each member of which is brought vividly to life. There´s Archibald Jones and Samed Iqbal, who first meet in a British tank in 1945, and who then meet up again thirty years later to start the families featured within White Teeth. There´s the brilliant and comic portrayal of the aged Hortense Bowden, an avid Jehovah´s Witness, who keeps waiting for the end of the world.
Zadie Smith´s novel has been described as Dickensenian, but I think there´s a touch of Thackeray in there too. The author mocks her characters, and parodies them, but she also has a lot of compassion for them. No one, in the world of White Teeth, is beyond redemption. Zadie Smith´s characters are truly vibrant. Take Samed Iqbal and his troubles with ´slapping the salami´. As a reader, you begin to wonder how Zadie Smith has such insight into the male mind and universe, because it rings so true.
For anyone embarking on a Cultural Studies course, this novel is a must. Throw away your textbooks with their dry statistics! One of White Teeth´s main themes is the mix of cultures in North London, from the Bengali Iqbals, to the archetypal Englishman Archie Jones, to the half-Jamaican Bowdens, and a slight smattering of the Irish. The novel maps these characters as they try to live out their years in a world which is losing religion and tradition. Samed kidnaps one of his sons to be brought up as a proper Bengali back home, while his other son, Millat, flirts with girls and joins the fundamentalist Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (KEVIN - they´ve got an acronym problem).
History and fate are intermingled in this novel. Hortense Bowden´s apocalyptic vision of the future is indivisibly linked to the aftershocks of her birth. Samed can´t stop boring people with tales of his illustrious ancestor, the rebellious Mangal Pande. Irie Jones seeks to visit her family´s home of Jamaica. And Joyce Chalfen sees genius in each Chalfen portrait, whilst Joshua Chalfen literally joins up with FATE. Archie Jones, who leaves most decisions to the flick of a coin, also finds that History has a nasty shock in store for him. However, the future´s present here also, with Marcus Chalfen´s work on genetics forming a pivotal part of the plot.
Like BBC TV´s ´Our Friends in the North´, White Teeth is divided up amongst a handful of years relevant to the characters. So, you can wallow in nostalgia as you see the Berlin Wall fall down once more, relive of the turmoil of that October 1987 storm, and remind yourself of the Bradford protest against The Satanic Verses. Salman Rushdie´s review of White Teeth is the only bit of marketing on the front cover, and indeed, Zadie Smith has been compared favourably with Rushdie.
There are quite a few pop culture allusions scattered throughout the novel, but I doubt that these will date, as they tend to be of the immortal kind (references to ´Taxi Driver´, and ´Goodfellas´). The plot of another gangster movie, ´Miller´s Crossing´, seems to...

...läs fortsättningen genom att logga in dig.

Medlemskap krävs

För att komma åt allt innehåll på Mimers Brunn måste du vara medlem och inloggad.
Kontot skapar du endast via facebook.

Källor för arbetet

Saknas

Kommentera arbetet: White Teeth

 
Tack för din kommentar! Ladda om sidan för att se den. ×
Det verkar som att du glömde skriva något ×
Du måste vara inloggad för att kunna kommentera. ×
Något verkar ha gått fel med din kommentar, försök igen! ×

Kommentarer på arbetet

Inga kommentarer än :(

Källhänvisning

Inactive member [2005-12-06]   White Teeth
Mimers Brunn [Online]. https://mimersbrunn.se/article?id=4970 [2024-03-29]

Rapportera det här arbetet

Är det något du ogillar med arbetet? Rapportera
Vad är problemet?



Mimers Brunns personal granskar flaggade arbeten kontinuerligt för att upptäcka om något strider mot riktlinjerna för webbplatsen. Arbeten som inte följer riktlinjerna tas bort och upprepade överträdelser kan leda till att användarens konto avslutas.
Din rapportering har mottagits, tack så mycket. ×
Du måste vara inloggad för att kunna rapportera arbeten. ×
Något verkar ha gått fel med din rapportering, försök igen. ×
Det verkar som om du har glömt något att specificera ×
Du har redan rapporterat det här arbetet. Vi gör vårt bästa för att så snabbt som möjligt granska arbetet. ×