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Cambiare Idea (2010)

by Zadie Smith(Favorite Author)

3.77 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

8875212724 (ISBN13: 9788875212728)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Minimum Fax

review 1: Oblivious to Ms Smith's literary outings, I picked this up on a whim and found myself absolutely entranced by both the range and the readability. She dons many hats: of a literary criticism professor, a film reviewer, a diarist, a travelogue writer and a lecturing writer, and manages to suffuse all the ensuing discourse with wit, erudition and generosity that frankly had me by the collar.It's her large heartedness and passion for all things literary that I could dip readily into the deep waters of deconstructing literary doyens like Eliot, Forster, Kafka, Nabokov Foster Wallace among others. She let me peek into the rhythms of novel-creation and imagination with her tonal and thematic inspirations commencing with her misgivings for "Black" literature.The common thread of a... morell her essays is relevance to her development as a reader and writer, and they are all spiced-up by colloquial and emotional reactions which always engaged. With her infectious love for the written word, she takes apart the concept of what being "lettered" really means to her and with piercing intelligence articulates what multiplicity of roots and tongues mean in the larger realm of literature and modern politics, extending from Shakespeare to Obama.When departing from literary criticism, she is humane and observant when documenting her time in Liberia, thoroughly funny as she foxily bisects the bowels of the showbiz world on her Oscar weekend trip and positively jumping off the page with glee when writing about her screen idols Hepburn and Garbo. Her movie reviews from the 2006 award season are soaked in equal parts commentary and self portraiture which lead wonderfully to the final few pieces of unabashed, disinhibited autobiographical essays on her reactions to her father's demise and brother's foray into stand-up comedy.With not a pinch of affectation or egoism, you see her owning up to her frailties and prejudices in matters of real and created worlds, and yet managing to inform you with her analytical faculty with levity that is seldom seen in her breed. If I can end this with an indelicate confession, I found myself a little bit in love with Ms Smith.
review 2: It is with some annoyance that I have to note this collection isn't that good. Most of it comprises very high interest topics, like an insanely long defense of E.M. Forster as a human being, let alone a writer; or a day-by-day report of a trip she took to Liberia, in which she reported in detail that it's pretty terrible in Liberia. The best essays were the ones I've already read elsewhere and skipped: her remarks on Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo and her essay on code switching are far more insightful and much less academic in nature.I also greatly enjoyed her collection of film reviews. I hadn't seen many of the films, but I knew of them, and anyone with a cursory understanding of film at this point in history would enjoy them. Zadie Smith is often at her best when she's being derisively funny. I skipped two more essays in this set: one on English comedy and another on David Foster Wallace. I know little about English comedy (excepting Monty Python) and even less about David Foster Wallace, so I dismissed them out of hand.I used the term "high interest" above to describe some of these essays, because they fall short of being insiderish, which I consider elitist and deliberately smacking of name drops. Zadie Smith doesn't want E.M. Forster or David Foster Wallace to be inaccessible. She tries to fill in the gaps for those not in the know without condescension. It's just that if you don't know or care about these topics, there's no reason to read them. Her essay on family Christmas gatherings, while easy to relate to, however, also fell short merely because it wasn't particularly in-depth. However, her essay on her father's war service was filled with pathos.Criminally, my favorite essay by Smith was not included in this set, collected in 2008. The humorously tragic reason behind this is because she hadn't written it yet! Her essay on joy, which comes dangerously close to romanticizing an outing on ecstasy, is juxtaposed with moments of happiness she can't articulate, such as the birth of her daughter. That is hands down her best essay. If only this set had been collected five years later! less

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