Zadie Smith: Swing Time
Another coming off age story, describing paths towards success, failure and something in-between in life.
Zadie Smith follows the lives of two colored girls from their childhood days to them being middle-aged women. Tracey and an unnamed narrator grow up in social housing in a disadvantaged quarter of London. Their childhood and teenage days are marked by the two girls' love for dance and their ambitions to become dancers. Tracey, however, seems significantly more gifted than the narrator when it comes to dancing.
While the two girls grow up in the same neighborhood with similar dreams, their social surroundings and later paths in life very much differ. The narrator's mother is a community activist who rises to become a member of parliament. Her daughter finds a job in music television and ultimately as the personal assistant of an Australian pop star, Aimee (seemingly modeled on Madonna). A significant part of the story is set in Africa, in a country resembling Gambia , where Aimee adopts a child and attempts to build a school in a village. Both Aimee and the narrator fall in love with the same man, Lamin, a local teacher in the African village, which ultimately leads to them falling out with each other.
The depiction of the later life of Tracey, on the other hand, is told through the lens of the increasingly sporadic encounters the narrator has with her. She becomes a dancer and manages to score roles in various musicals, but never manages to escape the environment she grew up in or establish herself professionally. A single mother, Tracey projects her personal failure on the narrator's mother, harassing her through a continuous series of hateful e-mails. The story implies that in the end Tracey and the narrator may manage to reestablish their relationship over the death of the narrator's mother.
A story of two girls growing up dreaming to become dancers is not necessarily the kind of story-line which immediately caught my interest. The book is also not as epic as Elena Ferrante's take on female friendship. Some of the background characters such as pop-star Aimee also felt kind of wooden. Still, in spite of those weaknesses, this is an absolutely captivating book. Smith's great strength seems to me her ability to portray different socio-cultural milieus in a graphic and utterly convincing manner, be it a 1980s disadvantaged neighborhood in London or a village in rural Eastern Africa. Overall, recommended.
Random pop-cultural reference:
Ballet...
Favorite quotes:
"As a fact it was in my mind at the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these." (the narrator about Tracey's claim that her father was a background dancer for Michael Jackson)
"A deep anxiety about being told off- for who they were, for what they had or hadn't done, and now for the deeds of their children- this fear never really left our mothers, many of whom had become our mothers when they were not much more than children themselves. And so 'Parents' Evening' was in their minds not so far from 'detention'".
"And all the labor she put into it, all the physical exercise, all the deliberate blindness, the innocence cultivated, the spiritual epiphanies she was able somehow to experience spontaneously, the very many ways she fell in and out of love, like a teenager- all of this came to seem to me effectively a form of energy in itself, a force capable of creating a dilation in time, as if she really were moving at the speed of light..." (the narrator about Aimee)
"If London was unreal, if New York was unreal, they were powerful stage shows: as soon as we were back inside them they not only seemed real but the only possible reality, and decisions made about the village from these locations always seemed to have a certain plausibility while we were making them, and only later, when one or other of us arrived back here, and crossed this river, did the potential absurdity of whatever it was become clear." (about making decisions about a development project from abroad)
"Only a few years earlier a break-up like this would have been only a minor setback to Aimee ...But I had noticed a change in her, her personal armor was no longer what it once was. Leaving and being left- these operations now affected her far more deeply, they were no longer water off a duck's back to her, she was actually wounded..."
"All in all the Illuminated Academy for Girls was not the shining, radically new , unprecedented incubator-of-the-future ... It was the 'Loomy Academy', as people called it locally, where many small but interesting things were happening, every day, which were then argued over and debated at the end of each week, in the village meetings, which led to further adaptations and changes..." (about the school Aimee built)
"Anyway, when somebody you care about gets ill, all the other business ... it just goes." (about the sickness of the narrator's mother)
Another coming off age story, describing paths towards success, failure and something in-between in life.
Zadie Smith follows the lives of two colored girls from their childhood days to them being middle-aged women. Tracey and an unnamed narrator grow up in social housing in a disadvantaged quarter of London. Their childhood and teenage days are marked by the two girls' love for dance and their ambitions to become dancers. Tracey, however, seems significantly more gifted than the narrator when it comes to dancing.
While the two girls grow up in the same neighborhood with similar dreams, their social surroundings and later paths in life very much differ. The narrator's mother is a community activist who rises to become a member of parliament. Her daughter finds a job in music television and ultimately as the personal assistant of an Australian pop star, Aimee (seemingly modeled on Madonna). A significant part of the story is set in Africa, in a country resembling Gambia , where Aimee adopts a child and attempts to build a school in a village. Both Aimee and the narrator fall in love with the same man, Lamin, a local teacher in the African village, which ultimately leads to them falling out with each other.
The depiction of the later life of Tracey, on the other hand, is told through the lens of the increasingly sporadic encounters the narrator has with her. She becomes a dancer and manages to score roles in various musicals, but never manages to escape the environment she grew up in or establish herself professionally. A single mother, Tracey projects her personal failure on the narrator's mother, harassing her through a continuous series of hateful e-mails. The story implies that in the end Tracey and the narrator may manage to reestablish their relationship over the death of the narrator's mother.
A story of two girls growing up dreaming to become dancers is not necessarily the kind of story-line which immediately caught my interest. The book is also not as epic as Elena Ferrante's take on female friendship. Some of the background characters such as pop-star Aimee also felt kind of wooden. Still, in spite of those weaknesses, this is an absolutely captivating book. Smith's great strength seems to me her ability to portray different socio-cultural milieus in a graphic and utterly convincing manner, be it a 1980s disadvantaged neighborhood in London or a village in rural Eastern Africa. Overall, recommended.
Random pop-cultural reference:
Ballet...
Favorite quotes:
"As a fact it was in my mind at the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these." (the narrator about Tracey's claim that her father was a background dancer for Michael Jackson)
"A deep anxiety about being told off- for who they were, for what they had or hadn't done, and now for the deeds of their children- this fear never really left our mothers, many of whom had become our mothers when they were not much more than children themselves. And so 'Parents' Evening' was in their minds not so far from 'detention'".
"And all the labor she put into it, all the physical exercise, all the deliberate blindness, the innocence cultivated, the spiritual epiphanies she was able somehow to experience spontaneously, the very many ways she fell in and out of love, like a teenager- all of this came to seem to me effectively a form of energy in itself, a force capable of creating a dilation in time, as if she really were moving at the speed of light..." (the narrator about Aimee)
"If London was unreal, if New York was unreal, they were powerful stage shows: as soon as we were back inside them they not only seemed real but the only possible reality, and decisions made about the village from these locations always seemed to have a certain plausibility while we were making them, and only later, when one or other of us arrived back here, and crossed this river, did the potential absurdity of whatever it was become clear." (about making decisions about a development project from abroad)
"Only a few years earlier a break-up like this would have been only a minor setback to Aimee ...But I had noticed a change in her, her personal armor was no longer what it once was. Leaving and being left- these operations now affected her far more deeply, they were no longer water off a duck's back to her, she was actually wounded..."
"All in all the Illuminated Academy for Girls was not the shining, radically new , unprecedented incubator-of-the-future ... It was the 'Loomy Academy', as people called it locally, where many small but interesting things were happening, every day, which were then argued over and debated at the end of each week, in the village meetings, which led to further adaptations and changes..." (about the school Aimee built)
"Anyway, when somebody you care about gets ill, all the other business ... it just goes." (about the sickness of the narrator's mother)
