Superb. Smith is capable of writing dialogue for anyone; regardless of background, she brings them to life. This is mastery, no question. She creates these group scenes: multiple characters all talking at once, or seeming to, yet the narrative thread is pulled neatly through. To think she published this 450-pager when she was 24! It's clear she's learned much from Martin Amis — particularly from The Information. That's not a criticism; every novelist has his or her models. Anyway, and this is hardly breaking news, but a dazzling first novel. Halfway through it hit me, there's not a single male character here who isn't a loony. Henri de Montherlant famously said happiness writes white. Zadie Smith surprisingly refutes that claim in several passages of this wonderful book. I'm on to On Beauty next. It's rare to find someone who makes you eager to read their entire oeuvre.

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.

Prvýkrát som o tejto knihe počula od Zuzy Fialovej v Kušnierikových Slovách_FM. Obaja ju náramne chválili, tak som si zapísala netypické britské meno autorky a zvláštny názov románu. Kým som sa dostala k tejto vypredanej knihe, stihla som prečítala NW aj Kambodžskú ambasádu a nadchýnala sa nad rozprávačským talentom spisovateľky. Všetci mi však hovorili najmä o Bielych zuboch. Zadie Smith román napísala, keď mala 25 (!) a opísala v ňom dve rodiny prisťahovalcov, ktorí žijú v sivom a upršanom meste a snívajú o lepšom živote pre seba aj pre svoje deti.

"V súčasnosti mám pocit, že keď človek do tejto krajiny vkročí, uzavrie zmluvu s diablom. Úradníkovi pri pulte odovzdáš pas, dostaneš razítko, chceš si zarobiť nejaké peniaze, nejako začať... nakoniec sa ale chceš vrátiť! Kto by tu chcel zostávať? Zima, mokro, bieda; strašné jedlo, noviny plné hrozných udalostí - kto by tu chcel zostávať? Na mieste, kde o teba nikto nestojí, len ťa tolerujú. Ako keby si bol zviera, ktoré nakoniec naučili čistotnosti. Kto by tu chcel zostávať? Ty si ale uzavrel zmluvu s diablom... vtiahne ťa to a nakoniec sa už k návratu nehodíš, vlastné deti ťa nespoznávajú, nepatríš nikam."

Biele zuby sú románom o priateľstve, láske, rodine aj o obyčajných problémoch v multikultúrnom meste plnom migrantov, dvojposchodových autobusov a meškajúcich vlakoch.

"Imigrant sa však musí smiať, keď počuje o obavách nacionalistov, vydesených z infekcií, infiltrácie, miešania rás, zatiaľčo toto je len prkotina v porovnaní s tým, čoho sa boja imigranti - s rozkladom a zmiznutím."

Ak ste nečítali, čítajte. Bez ohľadu na to, či je v Európe utečenecká kríza alebo teroristické útoky. Lebo veď všetci sem-tam chodíme na kebab alebo do indickej reštaurácie, no o čašníkoch, ktorí nás obsluhujú, nevieme vôbec nič.

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.

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.

Rating: 3.5

Hilariously complex characters. It's insane to think Zadie was practically my age when she began writing this book. How she pulled off accurately depicting 3 different cultures is beyond me, but she did it with wit and grit.

By no means is the book perfection, but it is wonderful. I assure you, it's unlike anything you've ever read. There is an air of confidence Zadie writes with which I loved. The story overall is funny but it does deal with complex topics such as culture clash, identity crisis, immigrant experiences, parenting etc. Thankfully the dialogue makes it easy to get through quick. (I took a decade bc I was reading it off/on).

My only issue was the ending, it climaxed then fell into a mush of nothingness for me. Maybe it's just me not grasping the ending, maybe it is clever in an odd way BUT I JUST DIDN'T GET IT. If the book closed off better, this would've been a 5 star read for me.

I definitely would recommend this to others!

If you have been (or your parent has been) an immigrant, White Teeth will probably speak to you. My father was the first member of his family born in Canada. He desperately felt the need to fit in, to be Canadian. As a result, when his parents spoke in Danish at home, he always answered them in English. In later life, he could understand Danish, but not speak it, a situation which was sometimes frustrating when dealing with relatives who only spoke Danish. My grandfather came to Canada first, alone, and started out working in the lumber camps of Northern Alberta. He was a religious man and was mortified when he learned that the first English words that he acquired were cuss words. My grandmother is my hero—she came by boat to Quebec and then boarded a train to come to Western Canada. She spoke no English and no French, had 3 small children, a bag of apples, and no money. And yet they all made it to Athabasca to meet Grandpa.

Now, you may think that Danish immigrants would have felt a warm welcome in Canada in the late 1920s/early 1930s. Still, they didn’t fit in because they didn’t yet speak English and they had some different customs. Also, the Danes and the Ukrainians settled in the same area and there was some kind of weird rivalry between the two ethnic groups. Several generations later, and both groups of immigrants fit into Canada like they have always been here. It’s hardest for the first two generations.

So I could identify in a small way with the situation in White Teeth where people trace their heritage back to Jamaica and Bangladesh and are trying to fit into an overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon society.

n  But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts compared to what the immigrant fears—dissolution, disappearance.n

When your culture is very different from the new country (like Samad and Alsana’s Islamic life), you dread your children acclimatizing to their new surroundings—the religion that you cherish has potential to be lost (Magid) or changed until its unrecognizable (Millat). Contrast that with ever-so-Anglo-Saxon Archie, who ends up with a black daughter. Irie will always be considered foreign, even though she has just as many English ancestors as many Caucasian English, and she really feels her foreign-ness despite being born in North London. Hence her romantic notions of “the homeland” of Jamaica.

It’s amusing to watch Archie—unworthy recipient of white male privilege—seemingly unaware of all the ramifications of racial and class politics that swirl around him. Samad is the intellectual of the two and his intelligence is rarely recognized, while stolid, thick Archie wanders through life seemingly without impediment. Samad is torn between wanting the pleasurable things of life and being a devout Muslim. He literally tears his twin sons apart, sending Magid back to Bangladesh to become a “good boy” and leaving Millat in London, taking on the bad-boy half of the equation (and in many ways, living out some of his father’s desires).

There are lots of good things and many shrewd observations in WT, but to my way of thinking there were too many ideas being bandied about. It seemed to try to tackle everything: colonization, migration, class, race, prejudice, history, genetics—all intertwined, but maybe a bite that is just a little too big to chew. No wonder the book is over 400 pages.

Two weeks ago, I went to our university’s distinguished lecturer series to hear the author, Zadie Smith, speak. As a result, I having been hearing her lovely voice in my mind’s ear as I read, as if she is reading the novel to me. If you ever get a chance to hear her in person, go, do it. She is every bit as direct and funny as her prose would lead you to believe. I think she would be a lot of fun to have lunch with!

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.

I started this book back in September and finishing it in November. Granted I did take a 17 day vacation and set this one aside during that break, but this was a huge struggle for me to get through.

This is a character study, with religious themes and historical references. Two men, who find themselves alone during the war become best friends-- Archibald Jones and Samad Iqbal. Generational in nature and how certain events shaped their lives in the most odd way. Different cultures are introduced, characters from Jamaica, Bengal and those passionate about leaflets and witnesses. I enjoyed the generational nature of how these families crossed paths and how each decision led to the most ridiculous set of events.

The writing was amazing, at time the book was hilarious, sarcastic and poignant. The research Smith must have done to find out about all these different cultures and religions and political events during the 1970s-1990s was spot on. Why was this such a slog for me? I cannot pinpoint it except to say too long, too many paragraphs and pages of philosophical meandering. While there were small sections of plot, it felt like nothing happened. The ending felt rushed and slightly disappointed. I could put this down for weeks and never want to pick it back up again. Each time I did pick it up, I enjoyed it more than I thought. This is a hard one to rate, therefore I'm going with a 2 as GR calls that "It was ok". I would say that this book reminded me of JK Rowling's "A Casual Vacancy" and parts of "A Prayer for Owen Meany" (maybe just the religious parts). Overall, I'm glad I read this one, couldn't recommend it for every reader and I'm so glad I'm finished with it.

ჩემი ყველაფერი მოვ**ან ეს ქალი თუ ნორმალური იყოს (ქალი, რა, გოგო იყო მაშინ).
ეს რაები დაატრიალა, საიდან სადამდე გვათრია მკითხველი. ღმერთო დიდებულო. პირი მაქვს გამშრალი და ხმა ჩამწყდარი გამოუთქმელი ემოციებისგან.
წარმოუდგენელი წიგნია. სრულიად ფანტასტიური და დაუჯერებელი.
და შეიძლება იფიქროს ვინმემ, რომ რადგან ამწამს დავასრულე, იმიტომ ვარ ასეთ დღეში, მაგრამ არამც და არამც, 20 დღეა ერთად ვცხოვრობთ მე და ეს წიგნი.
მარა, აი, არ მჯერა, მაინც, არ მჯერა.

Critically acclaimed and multiple award winning and quite rightly so. 'White Teeth' was the brilliant debut novel from the accomplished pen of Zadie Smith - not to be missed.

There was some interesting quirkiness, but only some. There were a few stimulating sentences, but only a few. There was a bit of humor, but only a bit. I can see that Smith is dealing with important social/cultural/racial issues, but how much depth is there really, especially when the Rushdie affair gets squeezed into a small scene? Alas, there are many other books calling my name and after reading half of this I'm going to have to dub the experience a disappointment. I was expecting more from someone who calls DFW their literary hero. I wish I could have enjoyed this as much as others here on Goodreads....