Epic in scale and intimate in approach, White Teeth is a formidably ambitious debut. First novelist Zadie Smith takes on race, sex, class, history, and the minefield of gender politics, and such is her wit and inventiveness that these weighty subjects seem effortlessly light. She also has an impressive geographical range, guiding the reader from Jamaica to Turkey to Bangladesh and back again. Still, the book's home base is a scrubby North London borough, where we encounter Smith's unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal, who served together in the so-called Buggered Battalion during World War II. In the ensuing decades, both have gone forth and multiplied: Archie marries beautiful, bucktoothed Clara--who's on the run from her Jehovah's Witness mother--and fathers a daughter. Samad marries stroppy Alsana, who gives birth to twin sons. Here is multiculturalism in its most elemental form: "Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks."
SMITH ZADIE
Zadie Smith Londres, 1975 estudió Filología Inglesa en la Universidad de Cambridge. Miembro de la Royal Society of Literature y la American Academy of Arts and Letters, es profesora de narrativa en la Universidad de Nueva York y colabora habitualmente en The New Yorker y en The New York Review of Books. En Salamandra ha publicado las novelas Dientes blancos, El cazador de autógrafos, Sobre la belleza, NW London y Tiempos de swing, los ensayos Cambiar de idea, Contemplaciones y Con total libertad, y las recopilaciones de relatos El libro de los otros y Grand Union.
