37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
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Elegant and Thoughtful Essays, November 30, 2009
In addition to her considerable talents as a novelist, Zadie Smith has been quietly assembling an impressive body of literary and cultural criticism over the past several years. Those pieces have been collected in this volume, a virtuosic demonstration of the workings of a first-class mind expressed in consistently lucid prose. Smith, who divides her time between New York and London, is an acute observer of contemporary culture, possessed also with the intellectual grounding to make her commentaries more than ephemera.
The first section of the volume consists of six scholarly essays on writers like Zora Neale Hurston (one of her early literary inspirations), Nabokov and Barthes, George Eliot, E.M. Forster and Kafka. The most intriguing (and perhaps controversial) piece in this section is one entitled "Two Directions for the Novel," in which she contrasts the lyrical realism of Joseph O'Neill's lavishly praised NETHERLAND with her preference for the "constructive deconstruction" of English novelist Tom McCarthy's experimental REMAINDER.
Smith's lecture, "Speaking in Tongues," the highlight of a section entitled "Being," is a moving meditation delivered only a few weeks after the election of Barack Obama. More than any other essay in the collection, this one puts her dazzling talents on full display. In it, she moves gracefully from the story of shedding the accent of her birth ("Willesden was a big, colorful, working-class sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle.") to a discussion of Pygmalion, to an incisive dissection of Obama's memoir. Along the way, she discourses on such subjects as Shakespeare, the religious wars of 17th-century England and Cary Grant. None of this feels as if it's calculated to showcase her erudition. Rather, it's an invigorating display of the breadth of her learning and of her ability to knit together seamlessly elements of culture both high and low.
A close study of Smith's generous essay "That Crafty Feeling" (a version of a lecture delivered to Columbia creative writing students) will repay aspiring writers many times over. In it, she lays down 10 genial guidelines about the writing craft, of which this terse admonition about literary influences is but one example: "Other people's words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write...Other people's words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you're going."
The three essays collected under the heading "Feeling" are the most poignant in the book. Smith begins with a description of a family Christmas around 1980 (she was six or so at the time), and then in "Accidental Hero" recounts her father Harvey's wartime memories, including his participation in D-Day ("So much experience that should be parceled out, tenderly, over years, came to my father that day, concertinaed into twenty-four hours.") and concludes with "Dead Man Laughing," a sly meditation that winds its way effortlessly from the gentle fun she pokes at her father's sense of humor (he loved "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and "Fawlty Towers") to a professional critique of the art of comedy.
Smith's collection winds up with a lengthy reconsideration of David Foster Wallace's short story collection, BRIEF LIVES OF HIDEOUS MEN. In the same vein as the literary criticism that leads off the volume, it's a discussion that will challenge the general reader, but it's an unsurpassed introduction to Wallace's work and an exceptionally generous tribute to a departed colleague.
The only section of CHANGING MY MIND that mildly disappoints is "Seeing." Focusing on the movies, Smith offers an appreciation of Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo, a profile of the Italian actress Anna Magnani and a series of vignettes from Oscar weekend 2006. The longest piece in this section collects Smith's reviews of mainstream films that year. The problem with this relatively lengthy chunk of the book is that a good many of the films Smith critiques (such as the ghastly Get Rich or Die Tryin' and Date Movie) are best forgotten and, in any event, unworthy of her talents.
In a recent essay in the Guardian, Zadie Smith explains that something she calls "novel nausea" inspired her to turn to the essay form. "But in a strange circular effect, it has been the experience of writing essays that has renewed my enthusiasm for the things fiction does that nothing else can," she concludes. "Writing essays on Kafka, on Nabokov, on George Eliot, on Zora Neale Hurston, I was newly humbled and excited by the artificial and the fully imagined." It's reassuring to know that a gifted writer of fiction now has recharged her creative batteries, but these elegant and thoughtful essays can only inspire the hope that she'll return with more soon.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Varied and brilliant, just like its author, December 15, 2009
If you love her fiction, you will enjoy the fact that Ms. Smith's voice is just as funny, insightful, unaffected and wise in her non-fiction essays. In this, which covers everything from the joys of reading Nabokov to Italian cinema, from the conditions of life in Liberia to her own relationship with her family and father, the reader gets to know aspects of her as a person, not merely as an author. It is instantly clear that she is not merely a dazzling writer, but an incredible human being, as well as a fine journalist and reviewer. She just "gets it", so get this book!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
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Changing All Our Minds, December 3, 2009
As always, Smith writes not just with brain and spine, as her hero Nabokov urged, but with stomach too and heart and funny bone. Divided into five (not four) sections entitled "Reading," "Being," "Seeing," "Feeling," and "Remembering", the collection is eclectic, including travel journalism, family histories and movie reviews, which range from blow-your-mind brilliant to, in one or two cases, a little flat. But - and this is not a sentence you get to write too often - it's the lit crit that really sparkles. The essays about consuming and producing literature are what will earn this book a place on the shelf of every serious creative reader and writer. I loved, and learned from and yes, had my mind changed by, their forensic effervescence.
From The Creative Intelligence Blog by Orna Ross, author
Lovers' Hollow &
A Dance in Time
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