I am a sucker for multi-generational sagas, even more so when said sagas address cultural clashes and brightly illustrate how the world changes around people who are often out of breath trying to keep up with it.

Smith’s famous “On Beauty” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) has a special place in my heart, and I am kicking myself that it took me a long time to get to her acclaimed debut because all the stuff I loved in her other work is here, but as a delicate sapling that has yet to explore into glorious blooms. Her fluid prose, the way she builds her characters – ordinary people who have extraordinary inner lives – the wry and sometimes deliciously dark humor that swirls through the story.

There is no plot per se in “White Teeth”: just the story of how Archie did not kill himself, the story of how Samad had a middle-age crisis, how Irie tries to figure herself out, and how Millat and Magid grew up to be so different from each other, despite being twins.

War threw Archie and Samad together, and a friendship developed over the kind of experiences that no one else can truly grasp. When the two men returned to England, they each married women that they care for but do not understand, and had children that seem to them like they came from an entirely different planet. Smith explores their lives, how they are all tangled in each other’s existence. Their lives are intricately bound together, the net of human connection strongly illustrated by who comes and goes in their lives, and Smith does a wonderful job showing the different perceptions first generation immigrants will have on their cultural identity vs the way their second generation children will see it.

Reading this book hot on the heels of Evaristo’s “Girl, Woman, Other” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), it’s hard not to find many things in common between both works. I think I found Evaristo's book more readable, I was always more eager to pick it up, but considering this is Smith's debut novel, it is a very impressive work, with a finely drawn cast of characters that feel real in a bittersweet way.

3 and a half stars.

The last time I read a book with this much narrative confidence, power and authority was back in January when I tackled Midnight’s Children.

It's rare that a book comes with a voice this strong. Like Rushdie’s novel, Smith creates a present that is pervaded by the past. Her characters are very aware of their ancestry, and they really struggle to reconcile with it in the modern world. Are they Indians? Are they British? Are they black or white? Or are they a little bit of everything? Because of their duality, they struggle to find themselves in the modern metropolis. They don’t quite know who they should be, so they cling to and project ideas they are far removed from. And it’s all a little tragic, to see such confusion.

n  “...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.” n

Every character Smith has conjured up here could be someone you’d encounter in real life; they are all very real people and they are faced with some very real problems. However, the issue I had with the novel is that we simply do not stay with them for long enough for them to develop. We glimpse them, nothing more. I’d even hesitate to actually call this a novel; it’s more like four loosely related novellas slapped together with a very small amount of glue to bind them. It’s close on collapsing.

As such, this doesn’t have a plot per say. It’s more like four separate character studies. And it does work to an extent; it captures a large part of the contemporary space, but as a novel it feels fragmented with little to no cohesion. Some sections were better than others, with characters who were more flawed and interesting to read about. To make this a little clearer, I feel like I need to write four seperate reviews in order to talk about his book properly and rate each section differently.

I’m not going to do that, but I hope you get my point; it’s quite a difficult book to talk about because it doesn’t feel like a normal book. Smith followed a similar model in NW but that came together as it captured the city is what trying so hard to evoke whereas this feels very much apart. I can see why many other users on here have chosen not to rate it.

n  It's a very powerful debut, but I did not enjoy all of it. A mixed bag for me. n

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Just because everyone says it's good doesn't make it readable. Just because it has an 'ethnic' plot doesn't make it realistic. Just because it's about ordinary people doesn't make it believeable.

And just because I read it only a couple of months ago doesn't make it memorable.

Three stars because it might have been that good, I've forgotten all but the general gist of the book.

I heard the name Zadie Smith while in my literature graduate program and bookmarked it for when I had far less required reading and more time for introspection. White Teeth was purchased for publication as an unfinished draft while Smith was still in graduate school at Cambridge University. On top of that, comparisons are being tossed around like Dickens, Rushdie, and Irving... suffice to say, I was skeptical and apprehensive about sitting down with the next Great Expectations. And with 400+ pages in front of me, I continued to place the interlocking stories of Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal on the back-burner.

Despite Archie and Samad being the central father figures in the beginning of the novel, the narrative soon transitions to focus on Samad's twin sons, Magid and Millat, as well as Archie's similarly-aged daughter Irie. Magid and Millat exist exclusively as foils of one another and as a gesture toward the theme of nature v. nurture... and by extension, genetic cloning as an extension of biological twinning. Magid is sent by father Samad to his ancestral home of Bangladesh when he is 10-years-old; in contrast, Millat remains in London and slowly becomes radicalized into a fundamentalist organization called K.E.V.I.N. (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation). Irie, on the other hand, struggles with her identity as half-Jamaican, half-English as her life interweaves with the Iqbal twins.

Altogether, this sweeping narrative employed methods of interconnectivity most similar to my reading experience of Cloud Atlas. Similar, too, was my reaction to both of the narratives: I enjoyed the active intertextuality, but I found few elements far too precious or as other critics have described, hyper-realism. I did want an exploration of the postcolonial identities of Asian, Africa, and Caribbean persons dwelling in Northwest London. In many ways, however, the pieces fit too neatly, which I found slightly antithetical to the genre of postcolonialism. Interlocking stories coalesce to the point of... well, not quite absurdity, but certainly improbability. With a similar epic structure, a novel like Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing does include moments that do not mesh with the overall narrative, instead of every instance being significant and at times, heavy-handed. I won't go further in my critique in order to avoid plot-related spoilers. As a quick note, I was taken aback with how much NSFW content was present. I do not mind the occasional sex scene but the focus on masturbation dominated some of Samad's narration.

All in all, similar content to the Riz MC song Englistan, but not as catchy. Sampled: On this little island / Where we're all surviving / Politeness mixed with violence / This is England - Riz MC

There need to be more books like this in the world. Little bit cocky, little bit sharp, written within my lifetime by someone with little to no representation in the halls of esteemed literature by means of race and gender and what have you and does not give a flying fuck about it. The setting may be the well worn island of merry old 20th century England for the most part, but the reality is that of the 21st. Smorgasbord where white men get as proper a representation in the wider plain of reality as demonstrated by their worldy demographic percentages, rather than the plague of pretense sludging its way out of the past and into modern day entertainment maintaining against all odds that women are objects and people of color haven't been invented yet? Yes please.

I've noticed a common tone of grimaces and smirks at the college days of dorm room philosophizing, BYOB's galore in the booze and bong and Bourdieu, and I have to say, why? Shell out thousands for tuition, break your back and brain on everything so that you may make a living and never live it for the rest of your days, so that we may scoff at and scorn the few moments youthful selves stretched out their mind out of their own true volition? For if that's your habitus, you're not going to like this book at all.

There's no college here, mind you, nor the slightest hint of academic satire beyond the teachers and the parents and the volcanic smoldering that is the thousands of fags smoked in every courtyard of a colonial workhouse turned school. Rather, there's that periodic expounding on the smaller things in view of the bigger and vice versa, the sociopolitical/cultural/religious -isms galore in tidbits between plot and character and the standard rest, enough that I've just gone back to shove that four star up to a dazzling five because fuck it, I'd have to read ten of the classics to get the amount of true and glorious angry pointing out the lies and filth and prejudice of our world, our times. You say Middlemarch, I say been there, loved that, but these days of mine are played to the tune of "It's a Small Cosmopolitan World After All", and ivory towers just aren't going to cut it any more, no matter how well intentioned or lucky in hotfooting it out of hell. Heard of the Bechdel Test? Try the variant for people of color, or perhaps the Mako Mori Test. True, the book didn't pass the Russo Test, but there's a reason why I'm on the lookout for more Zadie titles to grace my shelves.

Now, since one side of my family has been in area of the later named United States since the 1600's, while the other is claimed to have been wandering around since the 1500's by an especially fervent Great Aunt, my sense of being an immigrant is nigh nonexistent. Thus, I'm not going to do anything inane like compare this work to the likes of Lahiri and Kogawa and other variations in the theme and said that the way the subject was handled felt more or less real to me. However, if you couldn't tell by my rant above, Zadie seized on the true and utter consequences of the people perceived as other migrating to and living in the country of the "self" perceivers and got angry about it. The result is an admittedly hilarious and corkscrew escapade across a multivarious cast of at least four generations, but the righteous fury is there, enough that I'm amazed I haven't come across one of those reviews decrying it for being "too political" or whatever the term is for authors mixing their Entertainment with Truth.

Regarding said reviews, I have seen ones dismissing the characters as unsympathetic caricatures, bemoaning the conclusion, wielding hedge clippers at the plot, what have you. To that I say...ehh. It's been a while since my baseline lay along those particular lines, and seeing how this reading turned out niggling doubts and annoyance free, I'd say I'm the better for it.

En White Teeth, Zadie Smith trata con agudeza temas tan sensibles y discutidos como la inmigración y el nacionalismo. Racismo, crisis de identidad basadas en historia y tradición, lealtad hacia ideales tanto religiosos como humanos, fundamentalismo y un profundo y marcado anhelo de hallar un hogar en un mundo siempre ajeno a uno mismo son algunos de los elementos que componen White Teeth.

White Teeth empieza con la historia de dos familias de inmigrantes conviviendo en Inglaterra con culturas y creencias diferentes; los Iqbal, provenientes de Bangladesh, y los Jones, parte jamaicanos y parte británicos. Estas familias tratan de hacerse valer a través de sus respectivos pasados en una sociedad que no coincide con sus costumbres. Lo esencial en esto es que, a pesar de dichas diferencias, estas dos familias se relacionan entre sí sin mayores inconvenientes, hasta incluso encuentran pertenencia de forma cruzada.

Resumiendo, en su primera novela Zadie Smith ha sabido desarrollar una historia estupenda, con personajes complejos y entrañables, mucho humor, emoción e inteligencia, todo esto sin ignorar la escritura, que es magistral. Multiculturalismo y conexión humana en su estado más puro.

How Zadie Smith could write a book like this at the age of 22 it terrifies me.
Wonderful

Video review

The most glorious 500-page buildup-to-a-punchline ever written.

Anno fortunato per me, questo. Aggiungo un'altra perla ai miei romanzi preferiti di sempre, questo scoppiettante Denti bianchi di Zadie Smith. Di motivi per cui ho amato follemente questo libro ce ne sono tanti, per cui provo a tirare le somme:

- Lo stile della Smith, che ho trovato molto simile a quello di John Irving per invenzione, comicità, tratteggio dei personaggi;
- I personaggi, appunto, che ho amato dal primo all'ultimo anche se la medaglia d'oro va sicuramente a Samad, l'incazzoso bengalese che cerca disperatamente di tenere vivo il fuoco sacro della tradizione nonostante tutto gli remi contro;
- L'ambientazione, una Londra multietnica pre 11 settembre, tra pub, case popolari e periferie, con le aspettative, le angosce e le superstizioni che suscitava l'arrivo del nuovo millennio;
- La geniale costruzione dello scontro/confronto tra etnie e culture, soprattutto sul piano pedagogico e educativo, intessuta in dialoghi sempre alleggeriti da un magnifico humour; e stavolta non parliamo del caro vecchio humour british ma di un nuovo, frizzante humour anglo-caraibico;
- L'intelligente sottolineatura dello scontro tra generazioni, vera arena del clash culturale dove ogni contrapposizione deve fare i conti anche con l'ineludibile legame affettivo;
- La stupenda parabola dell' assurdità di ogni estremismo, che mettendo alla berlina l'invasamento religioso e quello scientista conduce ogni tesi alla supremazia della semplicità;

Ogni parte di questo libro è un piccolo capolavoro, tanto di contenuti quanto di spiccata originalità lessicale; lode e onore dunque alla traduzione dall'inglese - e dal cockney, e dalle inflessioni gergali d'ogni dove - perchè la narrazione regge che è una meraviglia dalla prima all'ultima pagina.

Zadie Smith is a consummate literary artist. I am continually amazed by her ability to weave a complex tapestry of words and characters. And I am dumbfounded that she wrote this book when she was twenty-four (:brain exploding:).

This book started out so strong, but I felt like the story lost steam along the way. She created so many amazing story-lines and characters, but as the book progressed, she seemed to focus on the wrong ones. It was like watching a movie and wishing the director had selected different shots--different angles.

Especially toward the end, HUGE plot points occurred without the necessary amount of emotional detail. Instead, a writing style that seemed witty and humorous to me toward the beginning of the book began to feel more and more pedantic.

And as we rushed toward the book's denouement, I found myself bored by Zadie Smith's literary decisions--why focus on the animal rights group? Tell me more about Alsana and Clara, Magid and Millat, and Irie. I finished this book and I wasn't satisfied with the ending (why???), but I did love the vibrant, nuanced characters and the precise, intelligent prose.

This book started bad for me and just got worse. I found the characters to be boring and two-dimensional. Actually, even worse, the author tried to build up the characters in most cases (though doing a poor job, I'd say), but then later reduced their roles to caricatures. So even those I was inclined to like wound up irritating me every time they opened their mouths.

Further, Smith's style is all over the place. At times I found it indulgent and pretentious, others fawningly resembling other authors, and the style would sometimes change abruptly from one paragraph to the next.

I find what what often at least partially redeems books like this is an interesting plot. Not so in White Teeth! There's no real story arc to hold the book together. The plot kind of twisted along for a while and I couldn't really tell where it was going. Then it ends in this bizarre attempt to draw all of the characters and threads together which totally fails as a climax. I would have been more irritated about this particular point but I was so happy I was done with the book, I was inclined to forgive it more than was deserved.

I truly don't understand what all the hype was over this book. There is lots I can forgive especially in a first novel, but there wasn't nearly enough here to convince me that Smith is a great writer who just needs some time to come into her own. There were a few interesting ideas and notions, but they were isolated and swamped by a thousand other boring ones, not to mention cliches, unclever witticisms, and tired plot devices.

I could go on, but I rather forget I ever read this! Gah!

Un formidabile romanzo d’esordio che descrive la società multiculturale contemporanea con quello che James Wood ha chiamato “realismo isterico”: la prosa caleidoscopica, esagerata ed esilarante si contrappone all’estrema minuzia e alla concretezza con cui si espongono i fatti storici, i nomi dei quartieri di Londra, la complessità del contesto socio-politico e culturale.

Queste 554 pagine ci fanno viaggiare nel tempo e nello spazio: si inizia a metà degli anni 70 per poi risalire ancora più indietro, alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale, ci catapulta poi negli anni 80 e infine una corsa impazzita fino agli anni 90. Ambientato in una Londra globalizzata, affollato crocevia di mille destini, perfetta per un romanzo globale che fa ribollire il suo melting pot narrativo.
Inglesi, giamaicani, bengalesi. Proletari, sottoproletari, borghesi. Adolescenti, adulti, vecchi. Uomini, donne, topi del futuro. Atei, fondamentalisti religiosi, testimoni di Geova, musulmani, animalisti. Un continuo scontro e una continua compenetrazione tra credenze opposte, tra culture diverse, tra idee inconciliabili. Gli esseri umani di Zadie Smith crescono come i denti all’interno della nostra bocca: costretti a stare vicini in uno spazio limitato, non tutti vengono su dritti e in fila, alcuni prendono posizioni diverse, altri saranno inevitabilmente storti. I denti sono come i figli, lo sviluppo è imprevedibile. Soprattutto quando – come i protagonisti di questo romanzo multigenerazionale – si ritrovano in un conflitto identitario perenne tra l’etnia della loro famiglia d’origine e la cultura della società “acquisita” in cui sono nati e cresciuti.

Attraverso la satira, Zadie Smith racconta, come nei migliori romanzi di Franzen, l’arrovellarsi interiore di padri e figli, di madri e figlie, divisi tra la tradizione e il desiderio di cambiare, tra ciò che è giusto e morale e ciò che corrompe lo spirito. Chi ha paura di perdersi, prova a ritornare alle sue radici. Chi non ha mai capito nemmeno quali fossero le sue radici, prova ad adattarsi, mimetizzandosi al caos della contemporaneità. Altri, fanno resistenza, negano tutto ciò che è diverso da loro e si arroccano in posizioni estreme. Altri ancora, semplicemente, diventano qualcun altro. Questo continuo incontro e scontro tra classi sociali e posizioni economiche diverse, tra colti e incolti, tra parenti e amici, tra famiglie ereditate e famiglie acquisite, tra scienza e fede, tra determinismo e casualità, tutto questo fiume in piena miracolosamente – nonostante un finale tremolante e la quantità di temi portati in tavola – riesce a trovare un equilibrio perfetto e a regalarci un banchetto sontuoso.

La prosa di Zadie Smith è una caramella che si scioglie in bocca e fa esplodere una cuccagna di sapori. L’ibridazione stilistica di Denti bianchi fa sfilare davanti al lettore, capitolo dopo capitolo, la caricatura satirica accanto al dramma, il genere della saga familiare con quello meta-storico, fino alla fantascienza. La scelta di macedonizzare il romanzo per temi e stile è il prodotto della lettura di certi maestri postmodernisti. In primis, Salman Rushdie. Sia per un certo gusto nel raccontare la storia dell’India, che fa capolino tra le pagine di Denti bianchi, ma soprattutto per l’uso vivacissimo delle digressioni, della lingua mescolata e per l’ironia funambolica. C’è anche qualcosa di Pynchon nell’uso umoristico delle sigle e degli acronimi (KEVIN e FATE). Ma soprattutto c’è la voce grintosa di Zadie Smith che pungola, commuove, azzarda.

È per merito di questa voce irresistibile da Sirena per cui le perdoniamo le troppe turbolenze narrative e le molte decisioni no-sense di personaggi mutevoli che portano la trama su un livello iperbolico nei capitoli finali. Ti perdoniamo, Zadie. Perché ti amiamo.