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Cambiar De Idea (2009)

by Zadie Smith(Favorite Author)

3.77 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Anagrama

review 1: Smith is good company through out though the essays themselves go up and down quite a bit. The talk on craft and the essay on EM Forster stood out to me.A couple faves that seemed relevant to grad school and (that I realize now rest in large part on quotes from other writers.)On Kafka: "Begley, a fiction writer himself, has an eye for the way fiction writers obsessively preserve their personal space, even while seeming to give it away. You might say he has Kafka's number: "It's all there in a nutshell: the charm offensive Kafka commenced with the conquest of Felice as its goal; reflexive flight from that goal as soon as it is within reach; insistence on dealing with her and their future only on his terms; and self-denigration as a potent defence against intimacy that requi... moreres more than words."Notes on Oscar Weekend: "The atmosphere is civilized to the point of suffocation. In two aspects it is reminiscent of a party in a university town. First it is entirely self-referential. People talk about Hollywood in Hollywood as they speak of Harvard at Harvard. Second, there is a great fear of looking ridiculous. People take car not to say anything that might make them look foolish. This fear manifests itself in a strange impulse to narrate events as they happen and thereby hold fast to a shared understanding of their meaning. Jokes are not met with laughter but with the statement 'That's hilarious. That is so funny.'" ending with a Didion quote: "Flirtations between mean and women, like drinks after dinner, remain largely the luxury of character actors from New York, one shot-writers...and others who do not understand the mise of the local scene."
review 2: I am skimming this book now and am almost done (skipping essays on topics I do not have experience with like E.M. Foster and Kafka) and even though I still think she is extraordinary (fiction) writer with a sense of humor I could only dream of having and using, many of these essays left a bad taste in my mouth mostly because she holds disturbingly neoliberal personal beliefs on so many important things (although her critiques of colonialism and NGOs and the non-profit industrial complex in the essay "Liberia" were great). She, moreover, wrote a supremely cissexist and transmiosgynistic short essay about the film Transamerica (which was supremely cissexist and transmisogynistic in itself) in which she questioned the need for trans people to undergo gender-affirming surgeries. She posits that before the rise of modern medicine, trans people explored the boundaries and limits of gender without medical intervention (when we actually know that is not the case). I could go on...but it's a such a stereotypical misunderstanding of trans people and their bodily autonomy that it is not really worth it. less

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