melisabacioglu

by Zadie Smith.

Portraying two families and their intersecting microcosmos,  Smith shows how delicate and brittle yet persistent love is. Truly an amazing piece of work.

Below are a couple of quotes from the book which do no justice to the text overall but I am sure explain why I am so excited about her writing.

pp44

Jerome had not given his mother any details when it happened and he wasn’t going to give her any now. It was a matter of impossible translation- his mother wanted to know about a girl, but it wasn’t about a girl or, rather, it wasn’t about just the girl. Jerome had fallen in love with a family.

pp60

Jerome said, ‘’It’s like, a family doesn’t work any more when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone. You know?’’

pp69

Mozart’s Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit. The pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don’t know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don’t know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by the violins. The closer you get to the pit, the more you begin to have the sense that what awaits you there will be terrifying. Yet you experience this terror as a kind of blessing, a gift. Your long walk would have had no meaning were it not for for this pit at the end of it. You peer over the precipice: a burst of ethereal noise crashes over you. In the pit is a great choir, like the one you joined for two months in Wellington in which you were the only black woman. This choir is the heavenly host and simultaneously the devil’s army. It is also every person who has changed you during your time on this earth: your many lovers; your family; your enemies; the nameless, faceless woman who slept with your husband; the man you thought you were going to marry; the man you did. The job of this choir is judgement. The men sing first, and their judgement is very severe. And when the women join in there is no respite, the debate only grows louder and sterner. For it is a debate- you realize that now. The judgement is not yet decided. It is surprising how dramatic the fight for your measly soul turns out to be.

pp82

Levi sensed women getting ready all over New England: undressing, washing, dressing again, in cleaner sexier things; black girls in Boston oiling their legs and ironing their hair, club floors being swept, barmen turning up for work, DJs kneeling in their bedrooms, picking out records to be placed in thier heavy silver boxes- all of which imaginings, usually exciting to him, were made sour and sad by the knowledge that the only party he was going to tonight would be full of white people three times his own age.

pp88

‘’Chess?’’ Kiki heard Zora ask Howard. When she came back into the kitchen, she could see them setting up play in the lounge as if nothing at all had happened, as if they didn’t have a party to host, Murdoch happily ensconced in Howard’s lap.Chess? Is that what it’s like, wondered Kiki, to be an intellectual? Can the tuned mind tune everything else out? Kiki sat alone in the kitchen.

pp101

‘’Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes-‘’ read Kiki circumspectly, aware that she should know it. …”Is it Plath? That’s wrong isn’t it.’’

‘’It’s Shakespeare,’’ said Christian, wincing slightly. ‘’The Tempest. Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change, Into something rich and strange. Plath stripped it for parts’’.

‘’Shit’’ Kiki laughed. ‘’When in doubt, say Shakespeare. And when it’s sport, say Michael Jordan.’’

pp123

Howard watched his wife walk away with his great mistake.

pp145

He was having an odd parental rush, a blood surge that was also about blood and was presently hunting through Howard’s expansive intelligence to find words that would more effectively express something like don’t walk in front of cars take care and be good and don’t hurt or be hurt and don’t live in a way that makes you feel dead and don’t betray anybody or yourself and take care of what matters nd please don’t and please remember and make sure–

‘Hey, Howard?’ Those windows open only at the very top. Student precaution, ah guess. Suicide proof.’

pp146

But nothing in Jack French’s armoury of baroque sentences seemed sufficient for dealing with a girl who used language like an automatic weapon.

pp155

You could feel it, Howard could feel it, millions of things to say brewing in this room, so strong somtimes they seemed to shoot from the students telepathically and bounce off the furniture. … When he first began teaching he had tried, stupidly, to coax them out of this fear- now he positively relished it. The fear was respect, the respect, fear. If you didn’t have the fear you had nothing. …His own questions kept him mentally occupied as he rolled Rembrandt into a tight white stick. How much longer on the divan? Why does sex have to mean everything? OK, it can mean something, but why everything? Why do have thirty years have to go down the toilet because I wanted to touch somebody else? Am I missing something? Is this what it comes down to? Why does the sex have to mean everything?

pp162

Kiki laughed her big lovely laugh in the small store. People looked up from their specialty goods and smiled abstractedly, supporting the idea of pleasure even if they weren’t certain of the cause.

pp166

These children spend so much time demanding the status of adulthood from you- even when it isn’t in your power to bestow it- and then when the real shit hits the fan, when you need them to be adults, suddenly they are children again.

pp205

‘‘Oh, I’m so sorry your dick offends your intellectual sensibilities. It must be terrible.’’

pp209

She didn’t feel she had any real opinions, or at least not in the way other people seemed to have them. Once the class was finished she saw at once how she might have argued the thing just as viciously and succesfully the pother way around; defended Flaubert over Foucault; rescued Austen from insult instead of Adorno. Was anyone genuinely attached to anything? She had no idea.

pp214

Claire spoke often in her poetry of the ifea of ‘fittingness’: that is, when your chosen pursuit and your ability to achieve it- no matter how small or insignificant both might be- are matched exactly, are fitting. This, Claire argued, is when we become truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful. To swim when your body is made for swimming. To kneel when you feel humble. To drink water when you feel thirsty. …In Claire’s presence, you were not faulty or badly designed, no, not at all. You were the fitting receptacle and instrument of your talents and beliefs and desires.

pp215

Five languages, went the line in a very early poem, the kind of doggerel she wrote in the early seventies, And no way to say I love you.

pp219

They were having an intellectual argument. The table was excited. Lena bounced on her heels to keep the blood circulating. Claire felt very tired. She was a poet. How had she ever ended up here, in one of these institutions, these universities, where one must make an argument for everything, even an argument for wanting to write about a chestnut tree? 

and many many others that you should discover yourself when you read the book.