Sometimes it feels like I'm always reading Zadie Smith (like - incompletely - here, here and here).
More than any other writer, I think of her as having been a companion throughout my reading life from the time when I could (generously) be called an adult, dating back to White Teeth's publication in 2000, and while her novels have never been right at the top of the heap of my favourites (although NW has become better and better in my memory of it), I find her varied short non-fiction hugely nourishing for my spirit.
Feel Free collects pieces originally published from 2010 to 2017, possibly including a few which appear for the first time in it, and so is a sequel of sorts to Changing My Mind. I'd read and enjoyed at least a couple of these before, including her riffs on Joni Mitchell, Anomalisa (*) and dance lessons for writers; and I'm skimmed or skipped a few, where their subjects didn't quickly draw me in (but I expect that I'll return to them over time).
Throughout there are so many delights - insights articulately carefully and aptly, often in a way that's marvellously illuminating. The ones that made the strongest impression on me:
More than any other writer, I think of her as having been a companion throughout my reading life from the time when I could (generously) be called an adult, dating back to White Teeth's publication in 2000, and while her novels have never been right at the top of the heap of my favourites (although NW has become better and better in my memory of it), I find her varied short non-fiction hugely nourishing for my spirit.
Feel Free collects pieces originally published from 2010 to 2017, possibly including a few which appear for the first time in it, and so is a sequel of sorts to Changing My Mind. I'd read and enjoyed at least a couple of these before, including her riffs on Joni Mitchell, Anomalisa (*) and dance lessons for writers; and I'm skimmed or skipped a few, where their subjects didn't quickly draw me in (but I expect that I'll return to them over time).
Throughout there are so many delights - insights articulately carefully and aptly, often in a way that's marvellously illuminating. The ones that made the strongest impression on me:
- "Generation Why?" - on Facebook, The Social Network, identity, and the way software reduces humans and 'locks us in'
- "Killing Orson Welles at Midnight" - on Christian Marclay's "The Clock" and, inevitably, fiction, cinema and time
- "Getting In and Out" - on Get Out, blackness, being biracial, engaging with the question of artists depicting suffering that is not theirs, and what she calls '[t]he real fantasy ... that we can get out of each other's way, mark a clean cut between black and white, a final cathartic separation between us and them'.
- "The Bathroom" - about family. 'It's only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.'
- "Man Versus Corpse" - art, reality, nature, perspective, death
- "Love in the Gardens" - a particularly charming account of two times and places in Rome whose real heart is Smith's relationship with her deceased father
In general, I liked the pieces she's written taking pop culture works that I'm familiar with as a jumping-off point, and those mining questions about the nature of being human and alive today, and am less drawn to the ones that are more explicitly engaged with contemporary politics and the state of society (where she is maybe a bit less original in her thinking).
