weiße zähne

i just finished zadie smith's novel, white teeth. a friend shared with me a while back something smith herself said about the book in retrospect:

This kind of precocity in so young a writer has one half of the audience standing to applaud and the other half wishing, as with child performers of the past (Shirley Temple, Bonnie Langford et al), she would just stay still and shut up. White Teeth is the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing 10-year-old.


i think understood vaguely what she meant by that, before i even picked up the book at bookman/bookwoman (7.95$ could be considered a bargain if i didn't love libraries so much--very much my father's son, i am.). by the end of the first chapter i didn't see anything remarkable about the storytelling, but it was interesting and i don't put books down. now in retrospect, it's pretty clear. rough, though it was, still a fun read. the past plays such a huge role in shaping every character's actions and reactions--sometimes it felt like more of the later was going on than the former, but i suppose that's real life (more on reactionism later)? also, every character was so very deep. compared to so many personalities, both real and fictional, none of the rest really seem to have such an extremely detailed history or carefully molded personalities. even the first, most boring character "whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things" is nicely summed up in the "familiar ratios:/ Pebble:Beach./ Raindrop:Ocean./ Needle:Haystack," is interesting in that he is just so vapid. it might have been around here when i first saw the awkward dance through the new book haze. much sarcasm, vulgarity, and some 25 years of painful family drama (maybe i can be 'nephew/cousin of shame'--maybe i already am! ...just imagine that said by margaret cho!) the end (evening 31 dec 1992--i was 7 and probably in bed already) finally comes. for a book that places so much emphasis on the past and everything leading up to the final climax (at least most of the 2nd half was building up to it), i was a little scared to see that there were only 5 pages left and no sign of the apocalyptic clash that was promised. but it came (and went) and turned everything over. in the end, i was pretty happy with it. felt good to end it though. in a relief kind of way. for the poor characters, at least.

there was one particular sentiment that i liked: homeland. "The well-wooded and watered place. Where things spring from the soil riotously and without supervision..."--talking here about jamaica, but it reminded me of a certain pastoral idealization of far-off places like europe and japan and hawaii that i might harbor and occasionally actively nourish (miyazaki movies anyone?).

"homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into the language. ... And the particular magic of homeland, it's particular spell over Irie (angry teenager), was that it sounded like a beginning. The beginningest of beginnings. Like the first morning of Eden and the day after apocalypse. A blank page."

i think i really like that thought on homeland. a good portion of the book deals with an immigrant family from bangladesh who moved to london and an immigrant family from jamaica who was taken there. it's funny, because i feel like i identify with them sometimes, even though i've never (until last year) lived out of the state of tennessee. and it isn't just that tennessee doesn't feel like home. quite the contrary. as much as i loved california and i love germany, i genuinely miss tennessee, or at least the representation of tennessee i hold deep in my memory from around age 7. but there is that longing for a homeland. somewhere that feels more like home than land and a house. and i think for me a new beginning might be what it is all about. a place with no past, no legacy of sadness or grudges or regrets--a vague idea somehow imprinted in the genes, making it seem like a memory. my homeland is an eternal place of quiet refuge. no intruders or meddlers. just home. if you could have it, would you take it?

i'm still not done!! but for now i'm just going to post and let this simmer. more to come.