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Old 09-29-2006, 07:50 AM   #1 (permalink)
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White Teeth by Zadie Smith

anyone read this book...at first it kinda started off weird but its a good book 50 more pages and i done.


Editorial Reviews
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Epic in scale and intimate in approach, White Teeth is a formidably ambitious debut. First novelist Zadie Smith takes on race, sex, class, history, and the minefield of gender politics, and such is her wit and inventiveness that these weighty subjects seem effortlessly light. She also has an impressive geographical range, guiding the reader from Jamaica to Turkey to Bangladesh and back again.

Still, the book's home base is a scrubby North London borough, where we encounter Smith's unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal, who served together in the so-called Buggered Battalion during World War II. In the ensuing decades, both have gone forth and multiplied: Archie marries beautiful, bucktoothed Clara--who's on the run from her Jehovah's Witness mother--and fathers a daughter. Samad marries stroppy Alsana, who gives birth to twin sons. Here is multiculturalism in its most elemental form: "Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks."

Big questions demand boldly drawn characters. Zadie Smith's aren't heroic, just real: warm, funny, misguided, and entirely familiar. Reading their conversations is like eavesdropping. Even a simple exchange between Alsana and Clara about their pregnancies has a comical ring of truth: "A woman has to have the private things--a husband needn't be involved in body business, in a lady's... parts." And the men, of course, have their own involvement in bodily functions:

The deal was this: on January 1, 1980, like a New Year dieter who gives up cheese on the condition that he can have chocolate, Samad gave up masturbation so that he might drink. It was a deal, a business proposition, that he had made with God: Samad being the party of the first part, God being the sleeping partner. And since that day Samad had enjoyed relative spiritual peace and many a frothy Guinness with Archibald Jones; he had even developed the habit of taking his last gulp looking up at the sky like a Christian, thinking: I'm basically a good man.

Not all of White Teeth is so amusingly carnal. The mixed blessings of assimilation, for example, are an ongoing torture for Samad as he watches his sons grow up. "They have both lost their way," he grumbles. "Strayed so far from what I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave." These classic immigrant fears--of dilution and disappearance--are no laughing matter. But in the end, they're exactly what gives White Teeth its lasting power and undeniable bite. --Eithne Farry --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Old 09-29-2006, 09:24 AM   #2 (permalink)
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Ok, looks interesting. Can you post me your copu when you finished reading it?
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Old 10-01-2006, 10:07 PM   #3 (permalink)
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Originally Posted by XtasyReds View Post
Ok, looks interesting. Can you post me your copu when you finished reading it?
send me de 4 bucks to ship it
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Old 10-02-2006, 12:09 AM   #4 (permalink)
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Originally Posted by Sugahkhayne View Post
send me de 4 bucks to ship it
Well, that defeats the whole purpose. Steupse
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Old 10-02-2006, 01:01 AM   #5 (permalink)
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I been pushing this book on here for the past year.

London peeps will especially get a kick out of it
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Old 10-18-2006, 12:21 PM   #6 (permalink)
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I loved the book. And yes, being a londoner i did get a kick out of it... especially all the slang that was used... made me a little homesick.. it was a long book but I felt it was a good read.
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