The Fraud by Zadie Smith
The Fraud (2023) by Zadie Smith was on many “best of” lists last year. I’d already read On Beauty by Smith, which I really enjoyed. I was hoping for more of the same with The Fraud. Unfortunately for me, I had a hard time getting into this one. I felt like Smith was intentionally writing a book that was difficult to follow, and if you didn’t have a strong knowledge of English history, then you were missing out. This was a bit of a slog […]
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Howard Belsey is a white Englishman married to a Black American woman. He teaches art history at a fancy pants liberal arts college in Massachusetts and has been readying his Rembrandt book for publication for years with little progress. He and his wife, Kiki, have three children. Jerome, a recent convert to Christianity, is a student at Brown. His sister, Zora, is a self-serious academic type who takes after her father and is enrolled at the school were he teaches. Youngest child Levi is a […]
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
It’s perhaps emblematic of the problems with The Fraud that I had so much trouble figuring out how to describe it to you. The Fraud of the title most obviously refers to the real-life court case inspiring the narrative, in which a man arrives in London claiming to be the long-lost Sir Roger Tichborne and demanding his inheritance. To most people, the claimant is a transparent fraud, whose story doesn’t hold up to the smallest amount of scrutiny. However, he becomes a cause celebre among […]
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
I’ve heard a lot about Zadie Smith over the years. I was gifted a copy of White Teeth on my 13th birthday courtesy of an overeager salesman. I had high hopes at the time because the only other person I knew who had read it, LOVED it. She also happened to be five years older than me and had already transitioned into a Full Fledged adult. I didn’t get through the first chapter. I have always meant to go back to White Teeth. At the […]
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Edinburg by Alexander Chee CBR15: Sex True fact, when someone British asked me what I was reading I pronounced this “Edin-BERG” and to their credit they didn’t laugh but instead asked, with some horrified sincerity, if that’s how Americans say it. It’s not! At least, not on purpose. It’s just how can the English language claim to have been invented in a country that seems to not have grasped even a shred of understanding of how the various letters in it work? I digress. This is […]
The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith
“You’re either for me or against me, thought Alex-Li Tandem, referring to the daylight, and more generally, to the day.” Apparently I initially published without my review! Crazy! This is a reread for me. I first read this soon after it came out and soon after I devoured Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth. At the time, I wasn’t really sure what to make of this book, and I think I have a better sense of it now, maybe because I am older or maybe […]
