Tag Archive: Zadie Smith


The New York Public Libary: for the many not the few

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April 27, 2018

EX LIBRIS: THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY a film by Frederick Wiseman (USA, 2017)ex_libris_e28093_the_new_york_public_library

Zadie Smith expressed it well when in ‘North-west London Blues, when she wrote that: “Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy something to stay”.

Appropriately enough, this essay was published in the New York Review of Books for what applies to the London suburbs applies equally to the bustling metropolis of NYC.

This is more than clear from Frederick Wiseman’s painstakingly epic documentary film which presents many of the Big Apple’s library branches and buildings as beacons of anti-capitalist hope. Although not overtly political, it’s hard to miss the fact that these resources represent the polar opposite of everything Trump and his minions stand for. Continue reading →

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The lethally entertaining Infinite Jest

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May 20, 2017

INFINITE JEST by David Foster Wallace (First published 1996)

infinite_notesInfinite Jest was written over two decades ago but is still remarkably topical in an age where the line between entertainment and ‘real life’ is increasingly blurred.

It is, by any standards, a big novel and a daunting proposition to all but the most dedicated reader. It stretches to 981 pages with a further 96 pages of footnotes to push it beyond the 1000 mark.

Footnote is probably a misnomer since many are more than just clarifications or references. One runs to 17 pages. This is not a novel you’d pick up lightly or cast aside easily (unless you wanted to do someone harm!). Continue reading →

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A WRITER’S LOT IS NOT A HAPPY ONE

Filed under: Books — 1 Comment
December 29, 2014

THE AFTERNOON OF A WRITER by Peter Handke

(Translated by Ralph Manheim, Minerva paperback, 1991)

One of Zadie Smith’s more sobering rules for budding writers was that they should be resigned to “the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied”.

This bleak, but no doubt realistic, viewpoint is one I suspect Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke would also subscribe to.

In ‘The Afternoon Of A Writer’ he presents the scribe’s life as one dogged by self doubt, guilt and constant feelings of inadequacy.

The brief tale follows a nameless man who having spent some time writing “a few lines that had clarified a state of affairs to his satisfaction” goes out for a random stroll around a nameless European city before returning home where he feeds his nameless cat and goes to bed. His life is no bed of roses! Continue reading →

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AN INFINITE THING I PROBABLY WON’T DO AGAIN

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September 14, 2013

dfwI have this ambitious (probably crazy) plan of re-reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and making my own ‘reader’s guide’ to try to examine just why and how it is a masterpiece. Often I read novels carelessly and miss connections or subtleties. This novel represents the ultimate challenge for a more attentive study. It is something I started and set aside a few years back and this is the preamble I wrote at the time: 

Infinite Jest was written in 1996 and is, by any standards, a big novel. It stretches to 981 pages with a further 96 pages of footnotes to push it beyond the 1000 mark. Footnote is probably a misnomer since many are more than just clarifications or references. One (110) runs to 17 pages. So, it’s not a novel you’d pick up lightly or cast aside easily (unless you wanted to do someone an injury!).

It is a definitive example of a genre of contemporary fiction that British critic James Wood memorably calls “hysterical realism”. In this category he also places U.S. heavyweight writers Thomas Pynchon & Don Delillo and British post-colonialist authors Salman Rushdie & Zadie Smith. Wood writes:
“Storytelling has become a kind of grammar in these novels; it is how they structure and drive themselves on. The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked”

Continue reading →

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ONE NATION UNDER A FORMAT

Filed under: Politics — Leave a comment
May 2, 2013

In November 2010, Zadie Smith wrote about the movie Social Network for the New York Review of Books.

This was not just a review, but a brilliant critique of the whole communicative, ‘let’s share everything’ propaganda machine which Facebook epitomizes.

Reading it again, makes me think how on the nose she was. Here’s an extract:

“With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos”.

You can read the whole article here.

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