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| Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith Zadie Smith's passion for writing and film shines through in this sparkling collection of criticism, says an admiring Peter ConradFor Zadie Smith, criticism is a bodily pleasure, not an abstracted mental operation. Reading, like eating, caters to her ravenous but discriminating appetite: she finds the essence of Kafka in a sliver of words from his diary, carved, she says, as thin as Parma ham and containing the creator's "marbled mark". She doesn't need a snack when watching a film, because her eyes are feeding on the images: Brief Encounter is, for her, a chunk of Wensleydale cheese, inimitably English. The critical arguments in which Smith engages are as vital and as potentially violent as sexual wrestling matches, and in an essay on Katharine Hepburn she recalls that she ejected two lovers from her bed – on separate occasions, I should explain – because they disagreed with her about the relationship between Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib.Smith consumes books and films, by which I mean that she absorbs them, seizing on them with all her acute, avid senses. When she was 14, her mother gave her Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to read. The aim was to raise Zadie's biracial consciousness, though the result, vividly described in the first essay in this volume, was more intense and more transformative. "I inhaled that book," Smith recalls (like an oenophile, she reads through her nostrils). It took her three hours to finish the volume and she expressed her critical judgment on it in a fit of grateful, ecstatic tears. When her mother called her to dinner, she took the book to the table, not because she intended to discuss it but because it was in itself a meal, offering her communion with the nutritious blood and body of its author.This is not the way critics are supposed to comport themselves. Smith's enthusiasm is almost shocking; she breaks the rules established by the black-gowned, gruel-blooded nerds in universities who murder books by dissecting them, reduce poems and novels to texts which are no more than snarled networks of verbal signals and revenge themselves on the literature they secretly hate by writing badly about it.Reading for Smith is a mind-changing, life-giving, soul-saving affair and her criticism has a missionary urgency. In a long and brilliant study of Middlemarch – which persuaded me to change my mind about a novel I've always considered tiresome – she avows that "love enables knowledge, love is a kind of knowledge". She is referring to George Eliot's Spinozistic union of emotional experience and moral perception, but she might also be articulating her own creed as critic. The intellectual revelations Smith purveys derive from and are ignited by her love for the books she has read.In her first novel, White Teeth, she called tradition "a sinister analgesic", as deeply embedded and degenerate as dental caries. She has changed her mind about that, because for her, as the title of her collection implies, criticism is a record of the mind's growth and its game-playing versatility. Her review of a collection of EM Forster's radio book chat exactly defines Smith's newly congenial attitude to the literary past. Forster made her the gift of his talent – she used Howards End as the model for her most recent novel On Beauty – and she is repaying his generosity, just as he settled his debts to his predecessors in those broadcast talks.He refused, Smith notes, to call what he did "literary criticism, or even reviewing"; he was making "recommendations", like a "chatty librarian leaning over the counter". His modesty was "peculiarly English", a sly way of appeasing the country's hostility to culture. Smith has fewer misgivings about her own impassioned intelligence, but she is engaged in the same activity.Her task, however, is harder than Forster's was, because as well as disarming popular anti-intellectualism, she has to confront the over-intellectualised commissars of academic criticism. In a superb essay on Nabokov and Barthes, she explores the battling claims of writer versus reader, creator versus theorist, acknowledging that the dispute is being fought out inside her. As a student, she delighted in Barthes's obituary for authorship, which licensed readers to rewrite texts and use them as alibis for indulging political gripes and sexual kinks.Surely this libertarian practice was preferable to Nabokov's snooty expectation that readers should be worshippers, in awe of the author's genius? Smith's experience as a novelist persuaded her, once again, to change her mind and her essay restores faith in "the difficult partnership between reader and writer".Hence her knowing use of a theological word when she says that in Middlemarch Eliot makes "literary atonement" for our isolation by filling her book "with more objects of attention than a novel can comfortably hold". That thronging abundance is the delight of White Teeth. The narrator of Ian McEwan's Atonement worries that art can't atone for the errors and crimes of art, because its solutions are fictional and illusory; Smith at her most fervent has no such doubts. An author, in her view, is not a despotic Nabokovian god. In a wonderful aside about the indeterminacy of meaning in Shakespeare, she remarks that "the idea of a literary genius is a gift we give ourselves, a space so wide we can play in it forever". This makes me want to throw a ball to her and bounce up and down in the hope of catching it when she retaliates.Changefulness is Smith's theme throughout this collection. A lecture delivered at the New York Public Library remembers how she changed her voice, advancing from the glottally stopped argot of Willesden to the posher, plummier vowels she imbibed at Cambridge – though her aim, as she admits, was to be polyvocal, to alternate between those idioms, and she praises Obama, "a genuinely many-voiced man", for possessing the same flexibility. (Her homage to the new president dates from soon after his election, when her "novelist credo" led her to hope that his command of different vocal registers would lead to "a flexibility in all things". A year later, Obama is beginning to look merely slippery, flexing himself by inconclusively running on the spot.)Elsewhere, Smith praises fluidity, another name for the same virtue. She finds it in the languid grace with which Robert De Niro opens a fridge door in Mean Streets, in the "elastic" expressiveness of Claire Danes in Shopgirl as against the "unmoving, waxy face" of the Botoxed Steve Martin and in the athleticism of Raymond Carver's prose. For a writer, fluency is "the ultimate good omen": if the words are pouring out, they're probably good words. Its opposite is fixity, a calcification that sets the mind in stone and prepares the body for rigor mortis. This Smith detects in Wordsworth when he reneges on the revolutionary idealism of his youth, in the elderly bigotry of Kingsley Amis and in the defeatism of all those who, having reached the age of 50, stop reading contemporary fiction. These justified digs made me check on the state of my own stiffening joints and hardening arteries, my calcium-encrusted dogmas and sclerotic orthodoxies. It's good to know that, while my body rusts, I can keep my mind stretched and nimble by reading Zadie Smith.Zadie SmithPeter Conradguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books of the decade: Your best books of 2004 In a strong year for fiction, Cloud Atlas's dazzling Russian doll of a novel did not win over the Booker jury, but takes my vote. What were your favourites?I couldn't make the highly scientific meeting that determined who of us would blog on which year, so I landed 2004. Lucky for me: it means I can rave on about David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas which came out this year and was robbed (robbed, I tell you!) of the Booker by Alan Hollinghurst's (admittedly also rather good) The Line of Beauty. More on Hollinghurst later; indulge me for a moment while I revisit Cloud Atlas.David Mitchell's dazzling third novel features six interlinked first-person narratives that move through different times and genres and yet, somehow, wrap up into a complete narrative that's far more than the sum of its distinctive parts. As Mitchell put it, "having sacrificed chronology, it's important to unify the disparate parts with a theme. Using a music analogy, Cloud Atlas works as different variations on a theme played on different instruments." Or, as AS Byatt put it in her review, it's "a thrilling rollercoaster ride that you don't want to get off". [3]It was the hot favourite for the Booker but lost out to a worthy winner - The Line of Beauty - in what was a pretty strong and uncontroversial year for the prize. Hollinghurst's satire tells the story of the lives, loves and postgraduate studies of gay antihero Nick Guest against the wider political backdrop of Thatcher's Britain. While admiring the acute social observation, some reviewers found the sex-and-drugs scenes a bit icky - but, as the Observer's Alfred Hickling suggested, "even if you skip the sex and the snorting there's plenty left to enjoy". Skipping the sex was also recommended for Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons which won the bad sex award for its embarrassingly dreadful description of the eponymous heroine's loss of her virginity. The novel became even less endearing, were that possible, with the news that it was George W Bush's choice of holiday reading. Moving swiftly on, there was a Henry James theme to 2004. The Line of Beauty's Nick Guest, is writing a thesis on the American, and in the Booker shortlist Hollinghurst's novel was also up against Colm TóibÃn's accomplished fictional portrait of Henry James, The Master. Andrea Levy's Small Island was an unexpected (she beat Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Rose Tremain's The Colour) but well-deserved winner of the Orange prize. Mike Phillips called it Levy's "big book" and I have to agree – it's a gripping, thoughtful read. However, I can't pass judgment on 2004's other "big book" - Susannah Clarke's 900-page monster, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I have to confess that the doorstopper has spent the last five years undisturbed on my bookshelf, inducing guilt every time I glance at it as I'm suspect that, could I only summon the energy to lift it off the shelf and make a start, I might enjoy it. Not everyone did, though: the Guardian review deemed it "as insubstantial as fairy gold" while for Michel Faber "this large, loquacious book has nothing much to say, the plot creaks frightfully in many places and the pace dawdles." Philip Roth's The Plot Against America won plaudits, as did How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions by Francis Wheen and the first volume of Bob Dylan's Chronicles. Finally, two fantastic children's authors sprang on to the scene this year. Meg Rosoff won the Guardian children's fiction prize (and the Whitbread) with her wonderful and unconventional tale of two cousins falling in love and being divided by war, How I Live Now. Michelle Paver launched the first book in her bestselling Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series, Wolf Brother, introducing her Paleolithic world and characters Torak, Wolf and Renn. Neatly, the series wound up this year with the sixth book, Ghost Hunter. So tell me: which was your favourite book of 2004, and who have I missed out? For memory-jogging purposes, Wikipedia's account of 2004 in literature, and our own critics' picks of the year provide some useful reminders. Best books of 2004FictionChildren and teenagersBest booksMichelle Pauliguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
'Detective Fiction' gets P.D. James talking Crime novelist P.D. James ventures into non-fiction with 'Talking About Detective Fiction,' her survey of the genre that has ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Grace Kelly, Clint Eastwood: Singularly American bios For anyone who longs for the day when the word superstar actually meant something, these two books will come as welcome escapes. ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
What Nigeria means to me Chinua Achebe looks back on his troubled relationship with his countryNigerian nationality was for me and my generation an acquired taste – like cheese. Or better still, like ballroom dancing. Not dancing per se, for that came naturally; but this titillating version of slow-slow-quick-quick-slow performed in close body contact with a female against a strange, elusive beat. I found, however, that once I had overcome my initial awkwardness I could do it pretty well.Perhaps these irreverent analogies would only occur to someone like me, born into a strongly multiethnic, multiÂlingual, multireligious, somewhat chaotic colonial situation. The first passport I ever carried described me as a "British Protected Person", an unexciting identity embodied in a phrase that no one was likely to die for. I don't mean it was entirely devoid of emotive meaning. After all, "British" meant you were located somewhere in the flaming red portion of the world map, a quarter of the entire globe in those days and called "the British Empire, where the sun never sets". It had a good ring to it in my childhood ears – a magical fraternity, vague but vicariously glorious.My earliest awareness in the town of Ogidi did not include any of that British stuff, nor indeed the Nigerian stuff. That came with progress in school. Ogidi is one of a thousand or more "towns" that make up the Igbo nation, one of Nigeria's (indeed Africa's) largest ethnic groups. But the Igbo, numbering more than 10 million, are a curious "nation". They have been called names such as "stateless" or "acephalous" by anthropologists; "argumentative" by those sent to administer them. But what the Igbo are is not the negative suggested by such descriptions but strongly, positively, in favour of small-scale political organisation so that (as they would say) every man's eye would reach where things are happening. So every one of the thousand towns was a mini-state with complete jurisdiction over its affairs. A sense of civic attachment to their numerous towns was more real for precolonial Igbo people than any unitary pan-Igbo feeling. This made them notoriously difficult to govern centrally, as the British discovered but never appreciated nor quite forgave. Their dislike was demonstrated during the Biafran tragedy, when they accused the Igbo of threatening to break up a nation-state they had carefully and laboriously put together.The paradox of Biafra was that the Igbo themselves had originally championed the Nigerian nation more spiritedly than other Nigerians. One proof of this: the British had thrown more of them into jail for sedition than any others during the two decades or so of pre-independence agitation and troublemaking. So the Igbo were second to none on the nationalist front when Britain finally conceded independence to Nigeria in 1960, a move that, in retrospect, seems like a masterstroke of tactical withdrawal to achieve a Âsupreme strategic advantage.At the time we were proud of what we had just achieved. True, Ghana had beaten us to it by three years, but then Ghana was a tiny affair, easy to manage, compared to the huge lumbering giant called Nigeria. We did not have to be vociferous like Ghana; just our presence was enough. Indeed, the elephant was our national emblem; our airline's was the flying elephant! Nigerian troops soon distinguished themselves in a big way in the United Nations peacekeeping efforts in the Congo. Our elephant, defying aerodynamics, was flying.Travelling as a Nigerian was exciting. People listened to us. Our money was worth more than the dollar. In 1961 when the driver of a bus in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia asked me what I was doing sitting in the front of the bus, I told him nonchalantly that I was going to Victoria Falls. In amazement he stooped lower and asked where I came from. I replied, even more casually: "Nigeria, if you must know; and, by the way, in Nigeria we sit where we like in the bus."Back home I took up the rather important position of director of external broadcasting, an entirely new radio service aimed primarily at our African neighbours. I could do it in those days, because our politicians had yet to learn the uses of information control and did not immediately attempt to regiment our output. They were learning fast, though. But before I could get enmeshed in that, something much nastier had seized hold of all of us.The six-year-old Nigerian federation was falling apart from the severe strain of regional animosity and ineffectual central authority. The transparent failure of the electoral process to translate the will of the electorate into recognisable results at the polls led to mass frustration and violence. While western Nigeria, one of the four regions, was going up literally in flames, the quiet and dignified Nigerian prime minister was hosting a Commonwealth conference to extricate Harold Wilson from a mess he had got himself into in faraway Rhodesia. But so tense was the local situation that the visiting heads of government had to be airlifted by helicopter from the Lagos airport into a secluded suburb to avoid the rampaging crowds.Nigeria's first military coup took place even as those dignitaries were flying out of Lagos again at the end of their conference. One of them, Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus, was in fact still in the country.The prime minister and two regional premiers were killed by the coup-makers. In the bitter, suspicious atmosphere of the time, a naively idealistic coup proved a terrible disaster. It was interpreted with plausibility as a plot by the ambitious Igbo of the east to take control of Nigeria. Six months later, northern officers carried out a revenge coup in which they killed Igbo officers and men in large numbers. If it had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a tragic interlude in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the north and unleashed waves of brutal massacres, which Colin Legum of the Observer was the first to describe as a pogrom. It was estimated that 30,000 civilian men, women and children died in these massacres. Igbos were fleeing in hundreds of thousands from all parts of Nigeria to their homeland in the east.I was one of the last to flee from Lagos. I simply could not bring myself quickly enough to accept that I could no longer live in my nation's capital, although the facts clearly said so. One Sunday morning I was telephoned from Broadcasting House and informed that armed soldiers who appeared drunk had come looking for me to test which was stronger, my pen or their gun.The offence of my pen was that it had written a novel called A Man of the People, a bitter satire on political corruption in an African country that resembled Nigeria. I wanted the novel to be a denunciation of the kind of independence that people were experiencing in postcolonial ÂNigeria and many other countries in the 1960s, and I intended it to scare my countrymen into good behaviour with a frightening cautionary tale. The best monster I could come up with was a military coup d'état, which every sane Nigerian at the time knew was rather far-fetched. But life and art had got so entangled that season that the publication of the novel and Nigeria's first military coup happened within two days of each other.Critics abroad called me a prophet, but some of my countrymen saw it differently: my novel was proof of my complicity in the first coup.I was very lucky that Sunday morning. The drunken soldiers, after leaving Broadcasting House, went to a residence I had recently vacated. Meanwhile I was able to take my wife and two small children into hiding, from where I finally sent them to my ancestral home in eastern Nigeria. A week or two later, unknown callers asked for me on the telephone at my hideout. My host denied my presence. It was time then to leave Lagos.My feeling was one of profound disappointment. Not Âbecause mobs were hunting down and killing in the most savage manner innocent civilians in many parts of northern Nigeria, but because the federal government sat by and let it happen. The final consequence of this failure of the state to fulfil its primary obligation to its citizens was the secession of eastern Nigeria as the Republic of Biafra. The demise of Nigeria at that point was averted only by Britain's spirited diplomatic and military support of its model colony. It was Britain and the Soviet Union that together crushed the upstart ÂBiafran state. At the end of the 30-month war, Biafra was a vast smouldering rubble. The cost in human lives was a staggering two million souls, making it one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history.I found it difficult to forgive Nigeria and my countrymen and women for the political nonchalance and cruelty that unleashed upon us these terrible events, which set us back a whole generation and robbed us of the chance, clearly within our grasp, to become a medium-rank developed nation in the 20th century.My immediate response was to leave Nigeria at the end of the war, having honourably, I hoped, stayed around long enough to receive whatever retribution might be due to me for renouncing Nigeria for 30 months. Fortunately the federal government proclaimed a general amnesty, and the only punishment I received was the general financial and emotional indemnity that war losers pay, and some relatively minor personal harassment. I went abroad to New England, to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and stayed four years and then another year at the University of Connecticut. It was by far my longest exile from Nigeria and it gave me time to reflect and to heal somewhat. Without setting out consciously to do so, I was redefining my relationship to Nigeria. I realised that I could not reject her, but neither could it be business as usual. What was Nigeria to me?Our 1960 national anthem, given to us as a parting gift by a British housewife in England, had called Nigeria "our sovereign motherland". The current anthem, put together by a committee of Nigerian intellectuals and actually worse than the first one, invokes the father image. But it has occurred to me that Nigeria is neither my mother nor my father. Nigeria is a child. Gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed and incredibly wayward.Being a Nigerian is abysmally frustrating and unbelievably exciting. I have said somewhere that in my next reincarnation I want to be a Nigerian again; but I have also, in a rather angry book called The Trouble with Nigeria, dismissed Nigerian travel advertisements with the suggestion that only a tourist with a kinky addiction to self-flagellation would pick Nigeria for a holiday. And I mean both.Nigeria needs help. Nigerians have their work cut out for them – to coax this unruly child along the path of useful creative development. We are the parents of Nigeria, not vice versa. A generation will come, if we do our work patiently and well – and given luck – a generation that will call Nigeria father or mother. But not yet.Meanwhile our present work is not entirely without its blessing and reward. This wayward child can show now and again great intimations of Âaffection. I have seen this flow towards me at certain critical moments.When I was in America after the Biafran war, an army officer who sat on the council of my university in Nigeria as representative of the federal military government pressured the university to call me back home. This officer had fought in the field against my fellow Biafrans during the war and had been seriously wounded. He had every right to be bitter against people like me. I had never met him, but he knew my work and was himself a poet.More recently, after a motor accident in 2001 that left me with serious injuries, I have witnessed an outflow of affection from Nigerians at every level. I am still dumbfounded by it. The hard words Nigeria and I have said to each other begin to look like words of anxious love, not hate. Nigeria is a country where nobody can wake up in the morning and ask: what can I do now? There is work for all.Chinua AchebeBiographyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |