Expansive, dense and long. There is so much conversation and information about the multitude of characters that you are not only exhausted keeping up but you are also forced to care. I felt like alot of this was a “slog” to get through. I love Zadie Smith’s humorous writing style, that’s the reason I got to the end. But I can’t deny that I was happy when I finally reached that last chapter.

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.

1 Star - No

I absolutely hate giving books one stars and I hate to say this, but if I could I would give denote this book as zero stars.

If someone was to ask me what the plot is, I couldn’t answer it. The book rambles as it follows families through the decades. The end left me asking, what was the point?

Zadie Smith is a good writer, I’ll concede that, but this book just rambles on and on. It just wasn’t good. It should have been edited better. I found myself drifting while reading and I didn’t care enough to go back and reread what I had technically read but not absorbed; in fact, that was most of the book.

I don’t think there’s much more to say, other than skip this one.

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.

Such a hard slog to get through but you know me, I hate not finishing something. Like a certain Paul Bryant I was grinding my teeth throughout - although quite often for different reasons....It had a few quotes I found worthwhile underlining, but nothing that sticks in my mind right now that I could tell you. kind of ho hum and reminds me of some whacky 70's books where anything and everything is thrown in to make it exciting. Didn't work for me, found so much of it tedious and I jumped whole pages that just didn't interest me one jot. Some touching moments at times ~ relating race discrimination, but also so sterotypical I thought it insulting in parts. A mish mash in my opinion.. I might add i nearly threw it across the room several times was so bored with it, but then I've had pneumonia for several weeks and didn't feel like getting up to find another book.

Don't let my review of this put you off reading The Autograph Man - which I loved.




$3 today!. Bought on the strength of a friend's say so.

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.

The more I think about this book, the more I marvel at what Zadie Smith was able to create through it. I seriously almost didn't make it through this read, and it is only in the looking back that I see just how brilliant it is. Smith starts with two characters, then links character after character to them.

It all starts with two men lost in WWI, having no real role in it, and discover it has ended without their knowledge. They capture a war architect after the war and invent stories in some attempt to claim true manhood. There is so much story in between. Two twin brothers, one who is sent back to the Middle East in hopes of retaining the Muslim ways. The other fully engaged in all things secular.

Smith does a lot of meandering, but in the end, what do a fundamentalist Muslim, a Jehovah's Witness, and ardent animal rights activists have in common? Sounds like a joke, but as it turns out, quite a lot.

A few things this book had me thinking about.
-How science and religion have become polarized.
-How different one generation is from the next, and how this impacts both.
-Many things are not at all what we expect.
-What defines manhood.
-How black and white thinking is so dangerous.
-How one action leads to unforeseen others, and all of life seems connected.

My only real problem with this read was the length of the meandering narratives.

Zadie Smith's prose style here is notably different from her later books. It's like she read all Martin Amis' early novels and to a large extent replicated his distinctive rhythms into her prose. So too is the emphasis on comedy much heavier here than in later books. She's making more effort to charm - which, I suppose, is only natural for a young unpublished author.

White Teeth is full of fabulous insight into the immigrant's experience of England. Zadie Smith has her finger on cultural pulses like few other writers. You always want to hear what she has to say about everyday cultural life. And especially she provides insights into the germs of terrorism. I loved her rendition of Jamaican speech patterns. She's fantastic at evoking the inventive vitality of improvisations of the English language.

At times it can be a novel that revels in its own silliness. As if Zadie gets carried away with her own youthful zest. And the ending is a bit of a damp squid. She orchestrates all her characters to gather in the same room at the end of the novel, all bursting with their conflicting imperatives and somehow manages to create a denouement that is both a bit daft and highly unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, lots to love here.

n  A past tense, future perfect kind of night.n

The first half of this novel was everything I wanted in a book this month. These compelling love stories of couples from different racial and socio-economic backgrounds was beguiling. Plus, the age factor. What reader wouldn't take the chance to peek into the soul of a couple with many years between them, right?

Clara, her energy and humor laced with patois, lured me. And Archie, what is it about the man that makes a reader so curious? I was willing to follow as the layers of his life were peeled apart.

Yet, as the structure took twists and turns, it became a bit much for my distracted thoughts to follow. These are stories within stories, subplots within plots. Layers of time that move backwards, forwards, sideways.

As usual, Zadie Smith's writing, the atmospheric mood of her books, don't disappoint; but the structure here is much different than, say, On Beauty, which I really liked. I'm now moving on to my next read of hers, Swing Time.

These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained.

Despite everything subsequent in Zadie's mad output, I still regard this a jewel. Following the dictum of Elvis Costello, Zadie distilled a lifetime into this first novel and had six months to write her second. I've said for over a decade that I am confident that people will read White Teeth one hundred years from now. I mean, narf, it has gen-mod lab mice, activists and AIDS, fry-ups and Jehovah's Witnesses, all the while speaking in accent about 'tangs and irie. Here's to aborted suicides, scooters and the marvels of our lives, whether we're bleseed with a twin, false teeth or neither.

Un libro sobre padres e hijos, inmigración, cultura y mucho humor.

One star? Of course this is not a one-star wretched ignominous failure, this is a mighty Dickensian epic about modern Britain. But not for me. It's a question of tone. I have now tried to read this one twice and each time I find I'm groaning quietly and grinding my teeth. Zadie Smith's omniscient narrator, alas for me, has an air of horrible smirkiness, like a friend who just can't help pointing out all the less than pleasant attributes of everyone else, all in the name of life-affirming humour, allegedly, but gradually wearing you down. Didn't anyone get sick of this apart from me? I hear this kind of humour in current British comedy all the time. When it's cranked up to the max and runs at 200 miles an hour, it's great, as in the recent political satire movie In the Loop (recommended) but when it's on a low leisurely level, as in a big sprawling novel, it just gets on my wick. It might be a symptom of the cultural cringe I discuss a propos The Age of Elegance - British writers can no longer take their country and culture that seriously, they feel somehow that it's just not very cool and so their default attitude is self-deprecation. You don't get this in big novels about modern America - "American Pastoral", "We Were the Mulvaneys" and "The Corrections" and "Freedom" spring to mind. Franzen, for instance, uses humour all the time and excoriates large areas of American society, but there's no perpetual undermining of his own characters for the sake of inexpensive laughs.
My head says I should like White Teeth but my heart says Zadie Smith was a literary ad-man's dream come true.
For a good, funny book about multicultural Britain, see "The Buddha of Suburbia" by Hanif Kureishi.
For a great review of White Teeth which eloquently puts the case against, whilst trying not to, see Ben's review here

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/....