I have a problem with Zadie Smith and her novels. Part of that problem is
On Beauty
that I walk away from these books extremely happy to have gotten to enjoy them. This isn’t the problem. The problem is: I have no idea why. I cannot intelligently explain to you why I enjoyed this book. I cannot pinpoint any passages that made me believe that this book was definitely worth the time I spent reading it. Which it was. I liked it. A whole lot. I liked it as much as I liked White Teeth. Also a book that I cannot explain why I enjoyed. So don’t ask me. It was well-written. It flowed well. The words were exactly where they should have been. All of the loose ends were tied.
It was beautiful. It was about beauty. And sometimes, maybe it’s okay not to explain it.
Claire on Kiki and Howard: “It was the kind of marriage you couldn’t get a handle on. He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice. Claire had always been curious how a marriage like that worked.”
On Claire: “As Dr. Byford explained, she was really the victim of a vicious, peculiarly female psychological disorder: she felt one thing and did another. She was a stranger to herself.”
(thank you powell’s for the half off sale!)
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Filed under: Literature Reviews, Zadie Smith , beautiful, beauty, book quotes, book review, books, inexplicable, on beauty, quotes, zadie smith
