Zadie Smith, filha de uma jamaicana e um inglês, nasceu em Londres em 1975. O seu primeiro romance é considerado pela revista Time um dos 100 melhores romances ingleses escritos entre 1923 e 2005.

Dentes Brancos relata a história de três famílias que vivem em Londres, durante o período de tempo entre 1974 e 1992:
Os Jones - Archie Jones é um inglês (ex-suicida) de meia idade casado com Clara, uma jovem jamaicana cuja mãe é testemunha de Jeová e que tem como único sonho manter-se viva para assistir ao fim do mundo.
Os Iqbal - são um casal de emigrantes muçulmanos, oriundos do Bangladesh. Têm dois filhos gémeos que o pai tenta salvar dos pecados da sociedade ocidental, enquanto se debate com as suas próprias fragilidades que colidem com a sua crença religiosa.
Os Chalfen - um casal com quatro filhos, são a família perfeita; todos muito inteligentes e bem integrados socialmente. Generosos, apoiam os filhos dos Jones e dos Iqbal, encaminhando-os para um futuro promissor. Se são bem sucedidos é outra história.

Zadie Smith cria um romance onde, com muito humor, retrata a normalidade das famílias disfuncionais e a anormalidade das perfeitas; os conflitos interiores gerados pela religião; a dificuldade dos emigrantes para manterem as suas tradições num país culturalmente oposto ao seu; e a luta dos jovens para encontrarem o seu lugar no mundo. Um projecto ambicioso, para um primeiro romance de uma miúda com apenas 25 anos, mas que concretizou muito bem.

Nota: Quando li este livro pela primeira vez sofria de uma doença muito grave (workaholism) que justifica tê-lo arrumado na prateleira dos "não gostei nada". Reli-o motivada pela opinião do Nelson sobre Uma Questão de Beleza e por me terem falado muito bem de Swing Time, que será traduzido para português em 2017.

*abgebrochen

Thoroughly engaging from start to finish, though the first 50 or so pages were simply stunning (I think the author mentions in a recent essay that she herself finds them overwritten, but I was immediately smitten). That White Teeth was pulled off by a 24 year old is amazing, as it would be a feather in anyone's cap.

The novel is perhaps not as audacious (past page 50) sentence-by-sentence as something I'd normally go for (Delillo, Pynchon etc.), but it is a bravura performance nonetheless. Yet the critic James Woods needn't have worried about Zadie Smith, for there is precious little sociological "hysteria" in this realism, as the author's verbal dexterity is always deployed in the service of the revelation of character.

The way I saw it, the novel is somewhat indebted to Dickens the way Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance is indebted to George Eliot, as a spring-board to the revivification of (rather than a bland copying of) an older tradition. I also caught echoes of Martin Amis's locutions, and surely that is not a bad thing. But in the end, Smith creates her own style and her own fictional universe out of these influences, as well as one of the most hilarious adjectives I have read in recent memory, "Chalfenism", named for an absurdly believable family of over-confident rationalists, and one of the most fully realised set-pieces in an already great book.

There are parts of this book fully deserving of unadulterated love and veneration, worthy of 4 stars in the least. The fact that the real Indian, Jamaican and Bangladeshi diaspora are reproduced here and not the imagined Indian, Jamaican and Bangladeshi diaspora of white writers too reluctant to put in the requisite amount of research for getting the most inconsequential tidbits right has much to do with it. In addition, Zadie Smith succeeds in keenly evoking their history, language, cultural ethos, the stench of their festering old wounds inflicted by an undo-able past, and their bizarre hypocrisies making the leap across land and oceanic borders into alien territory, exempted from being dissected by the scalpel of 'western reason' in the name of minority rights.

There's the undeniable truth of centuries of conditioned servility, hatred of the power which established the ground rules of the abusive relationship called colonialism, and the unfathomable responsibility of bearing the burden of yesterday.

n  "[] they can't help but reenaact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country in to the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign."n

There's the Bengaliness of the family to be religiously guarded against the sallies of Western liberalism; imminent dilution of the much treasured Bengali DNA in the gene pool staved off at all costs. And there's war to be waged on foreign territory - for another inch of land, another notch up on the dignity scale, for yet another step of the socioeconomic ladder. Whenever stung by the prick of casual racism, whenever thwarted, they will go back to their institutionalized tendencies of seeing things in black and white and studiously avoiding mentions of a gray area; they won't think twice before disregarding their favorite Gandhiji's famed 'An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.' They will seek out the greener pastures of first world optimism but resist synthesis, tugging at the roots of old grudges again and again so that the present and the now can be drawn and quartered on the altar of history.

"And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie...and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident."

But then there are the 'just-roll-with-it' parts which deserve no more than 2 stars - the cocksure and smug tone in which the narrator recounts this multi-generational saga of families caught in the chaos of modern day materialism vs heritage, the unrealistic, often two-dimensional characterization and the zany Britcom feel to the episodes which warrants a suspension of disbelief and gives rise to the nagging suspicion that this was written with the idea of a film or tv series adaptation in mind.

As much as Smith's light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek, clever mockery of roots and righteous reliance on said roots for existential validation is absolutely legitimate and spot-on, it is awfully disingenuous to think roots can and should be so easily discarded. Assimilation requires time and the immigration conundrum will never be felt as acutely by second generation immigrants (like Smith herself) as by their progenitors. This is where I prefer Jhumpa Lahiri's narrative voice (her later works) over Smith's - no inflection of moral and intellectual superiority, no pronouncing of judgement on flawed choices but a restrained attempt at humanizing all characters.

Since the 4-star and 2-star ratings are equally bona fide in my eyes, a 3-star it is. More so because I can't remember the last time a woman writer of contemporary literary fiction made me laugh so hard.

Zadie Smith (1975-) en su ópera prima Dientes blancos (2000) traza un relato costumbrista de un barrio de inmigrantes londinense durante las décadas de los 70, los 80 y los 90. Toma como referencia una atípica amistad, forjada por el azar durante la primera guerra mundial, entre Samad, un musulmán moreno originario de Bangladesh, bien parecido, educado, orgulloso y testarudo, y Archie, un blanco ateo inglés, poco agraciado, pusilánime, indeciso e ingenuo, que reaparece después de 30 años y a la que ambos se aferran para soportar unas vidas que no funcionan como ellos habían esperado.

Zadie Smith se apropia de sus vidas y las de sus familias para construir un microcosmos donde ejemplificar los múltiples obstáculos a los que los inmigrantes se enfrentan para conseguir su lugar en el mundo. Obstáculos motivados por prejuicios religiosos, culturales, sociales, económicos, raciales, generacionales, de género, de identidad… de los demás, pero también de ellos mismos y que los lleva a buscar diversas formas, muchas veces radicales, de ser aceptados por un país, una religión, una familia, unos amigos... Porque la sensación que se observa con más intensidad en Dientes blancos es la de vacío, un vacío que hay que llenar cueste lo que cueste, aunque eso signifique equivocarse muchas veces y sufrir sin remedio.

Aparte del interés de estas experiencias vitales, lo que hace diferente esta obra es la manera que la autora eligió para contárnoslas. Durante sus más de 500 páginas se mantiene un tono de humor, incluso irónico, con unas ingeniosas y acertadas apreciaciones en la descripción de personajes y situaciones que aleja la lectura de un tremendismo y un juicio moral que hubiera sido demasiado ingenuo.

Para algunos será frivolidad, para otros normalización, para mí sencillamente una buena elección de estilo. En cualquier caso: lectura interesante.

“Clean white teeth are not always wise, now are they?”

This is one impressive novel, easily one of the smartest novels I’ve ever read. I was bowled over by Zadie Smith’s perceptiveness. She writes incredibly authentic prose involving a huge range of characters, subjects, time periods and viewpoints.

Indecisive Archie, guilt-ridden Samad, angry Alsana, reckless Millat, careful Magid, long-suffering Irie … there are so many characters and they are all so specific, so real, so unique in what they obsess over, how they react, even the way they swear. She covers multiple generations, races, countries and harrowing situations, as if she’d lived as and through them herself.

There are so many themes, you could just sort of take your pick and read into this what you want. Religion? check. Multiculturalism? check. Family? check. Dentistry? check. Genetic engineering? check. The Godfather? Check. The list is endless.

There were parts I didn’t like so much: the beginning had a snarky tone, and the end felt overloaded with new characters and plotlines. But the majority of the book was mesmerizing: sharp, funny and insightful.

“Don’t you see, Abba? whispered Millat. That’s it. That’s the long, long history of us and them. That’s how it was.”

I loved this book, at times i was laughing out loud. There are just so many layers to her writing...she writes plainly, but intelligently, and it is full of humor and spunk. Her cultural isights are amazing...i swore she was talking about me at one point...and it was nice the way she included smidgens of dialect and superstition from 3 different cultures, with such depth! I completely recommend this book. Josh you were so right!

I first read White Teeth in 2012. I reread it for a reading group discussion in July, 2019.

This is what I had to say after the first reading:
If literary fiction could always, or at least more often, be as good as this...well, I guess I would be an even more voracious reader than I am. I decided to read White Teeth before I jumped into NW because I read somewhere that both books are set in the same neighborhood of Northwest London. I have not felt as satisfied as I did while reading White Teeth in quite a while--well except for two weeks earlier when I read Telegraph Avenue.

In fact the two books have some parallels. Both throw together families of varying backgrounds who are joined together by a friendship between two men. Both are grounded in a neighborhood and poke around into what makes people the way they are.

I have only been to London once when I was a teen, but I could see, even smell, the setting of this book. I think watching movies helps, but the descriptions put me there, in the streets, in the apartments, restaurants, bars, and schools.

Working class Archie Jones and Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal have been friends since fighting together in World War II, when one saved the other's life. Samad lost the use of one hand and Archie has a piece of metal forever in his thigh. Archie's second wife Clara is the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant who is a devout Jehovah's Witness. Samad's wife came to him via an arranged marriage in the Deshi community. Each man in his own way is bewildered by his offspring as well as by his wife, not to mention the pace of life in the last decade of the century and the millennium.

Smith uses multiple viewpoints and various bits of history which she calls "root canals" to build the intertwining strands of three families. The children of Archie and Samad get tangled up with a middle class English family, the Chalfens: progressive, liberal, educated idiots with their beliefs in science, psychology and enlightened parenting.

They all have white teeth. The each want love, a better life, a belief in something beyond themselves. That sounds serious but they ricochet off each other in the most comic ways. White Teeth is a comedy show and a reality show resting on a keen awareness and observance of the multicultural lives we now lead.

Though Zadie Smith takes her time developing the stories of these characters, she begins right off with a sense of tension, maintaining it at a disturbing steadily intensifying rate until the final explosion. Really, I had no idea where she was taking me but went willingly only to have it brought home to me that these root canals are reproduced in every generation.

"But first the endgames. Because it seems no matter what you think of them, they must be played, even if, like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docking of passenger boats, the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story."

As you can see, I was impressed on that first reading. It turns out I remembered it well but rereading was worth the time spent.

1) I got just as much enjoyment but I understood the ending much better. I was able to see how she accomplished a perfect knitting together and tying up of the multiple threads the story contains.

2) For the other reading group members who struggled with it, some not even finishing it, all of whom pretty thoroughly disliked it, I could sympathize. It is not a novel for everyone though it has all of humanity in it: colonizers, colonized, immigrants, mixed cultures and religions, the privileged, the underprivileged, the old and the young.

Perhaps Zadie Smith, like many novelists, tried to put everything in her head into her debut. Still, it got the attention of the literary world and she is having a great career.

Zadie Smith aveva circa 23 anni quando scrisse questo che è il suo romanzo d'esordio. 23.
Io a 23 ancora dovevo imparare a fare i parcheggi a S e Sally Rooney ne aveva 28 quando ha scritto quella cagata di Persone Normali.
Insomma, Denti bianchi non è un romanzo perfetto ma Zadie ha tutta la mia approvazione per il mondo che è stata capace di mettere su e quindi: che bomba di esordio!

Il romanzo è una perfetta rappresentazione del realismo isterico. La Smith prende due famiglie disfunzionali, multiculturali, assurde ma sempre credibili, e grazie alla loro storia tratta un'infinità di temi attraverso lunghe digressioni e flashback che però non spezzano mai il ritmo ma ti avvolgono completamente.
La sua scrittura è limpida e divertente ed è a prova di bambini urlatori in spiaggia o di sconosciuti chiacchieroni in attesa all'aeroporto.

La Londra multiculturale tra gli anni '70 e '90, il rapporto genitori e figli tra scontro generazionale e culturale, l'amicizia e l'amore tra contrasti e matrimoni difficili, tradizioni, religione e scienza, crisi adolescenziali e scoperta del sesso.
È un romanzo denso che scorre e fa sorridere continuamente.

Mi ha lasciato la voglia di ritornare a Londra, di mangiare cibo speziato, di bere birra al pub, di tornare adolescente e rifare tutto da capo.

OK, primero, Zadie Smith tenía 25 años cuando publicó este libro de 500 páginas. Respetos por eso. La novela arranca muy bien, hay imágenes poderosas, un uso del lenguaje diestro y poético. Me enamoré de los personajes, en especial de Archie, Samad, Clara, Millat, Magid y Irie. Los relatos de la guerra y del colegio son los que más me gustaron. Es un libro complejo, porque tiene distintas capas. La historia en sí, que es la historia de dos o tres generaciones de familia mestiza; y las dimensiones identitarias de los personajes como entes migrantes. Es un libro inglés, sobre la idiosincrasia inglesa, que conlleva en su historia la invasión a India, la esclavitud de islas caribeñas, como Jamaica. La prosa de Smith es limpia, cuidada. La primera mitad del libro me dejo LOCA, hermosamente sorprendida; la segunda mitad... no sé, se alarga demasiado, todo eso del future mouse me tenía cansada. En fin. Pasé tres meses leyendo y también pensé en lo grato que es pasar tanto tiempo en un mismo libro, con una misma autora, en un mismo universo. Me acunó esta novela. Subrayé muchas frases (por su belleza musical humana y por su hermosa ejecución del inglés). De todo lo que subrayé, me quedo con una frase por sobre todas:

"Talk, talk, talk and it will be better. Be honest, slice open your heart and spread the red stuff around".

No le doy cinco nomás porque guatea un poco al final.

Ar trebui să îmi placă mai mult Zadie Smith. E desteaptă, are umor, sunt de acord cu opțiunile ei ideologice. Și mai important, recunoaște măreția lui Roth și criticii o compară cu Franzen. Deci ar trebui să fie exact genul meu. Mai mult, sunt conștientă că e impresionant că la 20 și ceva de ani a scris ceva atât de inteligent și asumat.
Dar ceva (îmi) lipsește. Subtilitate, profunzime. Am simțit și la On Beauty, prima carte a ei pe care am citit-o eu: prea îmi pune totul pe tavă, prea nu lasă deloc loc imaginației. Prea nu e nimic dincolo de cuvinte, totul e spus pe șleau. E un stil facil (cam ca la Sally Rooney, dar mai deștept, totuși), care mie nu îmi place.

I had no idea what this book was going to be about when I started. And it is written in fast prose, it is hard not to read it fast too. After a while, I started to feel there were strange things happening here that I wasn’t at all expecting, despite my lack of expectations. It’s the story of two men and their families, written by a woman, but I kept feeling it was written by a man. I said exactly that to someone while reading it, how easy it is for a woman to write from a male perspective. Talk about sex every couple of minutes and that’s about as authentic maleness gets. But then the women were all drop-dead gorgeous too, perfect lust filled bodies in a fantasy of sweaty, writhing passion, even if she only has half a set of teeth, and the impression this was written by a man becomes impossible to resist. And violence, culturally sanctioned violence, even if the culture hates to have that stated out loud, shows time and again that violence rhymes with impotence, in a metre of one beating at a time.

Religions pile atop each other too, from the submission of Islam to witnessing the sacrifice of boyfriends to the mother of Jehovah, where even Mormons have a walk on role. Perhaps that is part of the migrant experience I never had, saved by my white skin and my parents’ atheism. The needs of gods that are kept and those of the gods that are lost.

Privilege is defined in so many ways, but the least obvious way to show a lack of privilege might be what Bourdieu called amor fati. Our love of the fate never chosen, but loved as if chosen. Where fate might be the opposite of freedom, but it’s loved all the same as if it had been a blessing, even as a burden. Our lack of say in the outcome, our life depending on the toss of a coin, where we cling to rituals because they provide the only semblance of control we otherwise have. In this dangerous and vicious world, our fate proves time and again that if it thinks of us at all, it is as than intruders, as Simmel’s strangers... who had once been a wanderer, someone who would arrive today only to leave tomorrow, but who now arrives today, and although still here tomorrow, might leave again sometime – for aren’t they a stranger now precisely because they left where they belonged? Why else are they here, other than that they have already left once before a place that had more call on their love than here can ever have? Why else do they cling to their strange foods and their stranger gods?

What can you keep in the new world? What must be lost? Why can’t you get to choose? Why is desire so damn all-consuming and why is it so unkind?