Book Notes, Fiction # White Teeth By Zadie Smith (2000) ★★★★☆ First read in July 2022 --- This is a proper novel, it's what I would think of if asked to think of a novel. A very novel-like novel. A big novel. Big bold novel. Very novel-like, novel-y. Not a bad novel, actually. ## Unedited notes I thought Doctor Sick was a funny pun. The character of Dr Sick, and how the nickname came to be, from broken Bulgarian English and the broken, partial understanding of what's going on in the house on the hill and broken half truths and rumours about who the man in that house was.  ** Immigrants and clashes of cultures. It's still weird how Samad and Archie are friends. Still weird how Archie married a black girl. Why are they friends? Maybe because they're both uneducated people, victims of various propaganda, guilty of bigger or smaller evils towards themselves, towards their children. ** Samad.. ugh, he's horrible, you can see thrughout the story how he just picks and chooses only those "truths" that serve him at any particular time. Why the heck not go back himself, why the heck would he kidnap his own kid, send him back to a third world country that he now idealises and idolises but that *he himself fucking left* in the first place, to go to England?! -- My favourite passage in the book is the one that captures the essence between surviving and living. _"To Alsana's mind, the real difference between people was not colour..."_ This whole section is very good. It talks about what it means to move from one existence to another in the course of one single lifetime - which is what happens to most adult first generation immigrants. And what is, I think, responsible for much tragedy - for when our entire selves have been constructed in response to threat, what remains when threat is taken away, when it's no longer there? What remains of the self then? (a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end? (b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split? (c) Is there a chance (and please check the box no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason? .. if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair's breadth from the withing hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable, like a key or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go mad, go gibbering thorugh the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There's nothing to stop you-- or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That's the real difference in a life." ## Other quotes "Self hatred makes a man turn to the first person he sees." =="Now, how do the young prepare to meet the old? The same way the old prepare to meet the young: with a little condescension; with low expectation of the other's rationality."== "A neutral place. There are no neutral places anymore. The sheer quantity of shit that must be wiped off the slate if we are to start again as new. Race. Land. Ownership. Faith, Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more." 'In a vision, Irie has seen a time, a time not far from now, when roots won’t matter any more because they can’t because they mustn’t because they’re too long and they’re too tortuous and they’re just buried too damn deep. She looks forward to it.' “Did you know this is how other families are?... What a peaceful existence. What a joy their lives must be. They open a door and all they've got behind it is a bathroom or living room. Just neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and everybody's old historical shit all over the place. They don't mind what their kids do in life as long as they're reasonably, you know, healthy. Happy. And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be. Go on, ask them. And they'll tell you. No mosque. Maybe a little church. Hardly any sin. Plenty of forgiveness. No attics. No shit in attics. No skeletons in cupboards. No great-grandfathers. I will put twenty quid down now that Samad is the only person in here who knows the inside bloody leg measurement of his great-grandfather. And you know why they don't know? Because it doesn't fucking matter. As far as they're concerned, it's the past. This is what it's like in other families." (Irie) --- `Just carbon and water. Just atoms and the void.` ---