Winner of the ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION 2006
shortlisted for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2005
"Wonderfully funny,An outstanding novelist with a powerful understanding both of what the brain knows and what love knows"
--- the Observer
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful," muses a character in Smith's third novel, an intrepid attempt to explore the sad stuff of adult life, 21st century–style: adultery, identity crises and emotional suffocation, interracial and intraracial global conflicts and religious zealotry. Like Smith's smash debut, White Teeth (2000), this work gathers narrative steam from the clash between two radically different families, with a plot that explicitly parallels Howards End. A failed romance between the evangelical son of the messy, liberal Belseys;Howard is Anglo-WASP and Kiki African-American;and the gorgeous daughter of the staid, conservative, Anglo-Caribbean Kipps leads to a soulful, transatlantic understanding between the families' matriarchs, Kiki and Carlene, even as their respective husbands, the art professors Howard and Monty, amass matériel for the culture wars at a fictional Massachusetts university. Meanwhile, Howard and Kiki must deal with Howard's extramarital affair, as their other son, Levi, moves from religion to politics. Everyone theorizes about art, and everyone searches for connections, sexual and otherwise. A very simple but very funny joke;that Howard, a Rembrandt scholar, hates Rembrandt;allows Smith to discourse majestically on some of the master's finest paintings. The articulate portrait of daughter Zora depicts the struggle to incorporate intellectual values into action. The elaborate Forster homage, as well as a too-neat alignment between characters, concerns and foils, threaten Smith's insightful probing of what makes life complicated (and beautiful), but those insights eventually add up. "There is such a shelter in each other," Carlene tells Kiki; it's a take on Forster's "Only Connect;," but one that finds new substance here.
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發表於2025-02-26
On Beauty 2025 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載
英國女作傢紮笛·史密斯(Zadie Smith)的小說《論美》(On beauty)是近幾年來我迫不及待想要閱讀的唯一一本文學作品。在《世界文學》2007年第5期上讀到其節譯後,我就決心一定要弄到原文全本,而且我也已經相信,這位作傢將是我今後忠實追看的對象。 《論美》齣版於2005年,...
評分還好,感覺翻譯問題不大,讀的滿順利的,隻有少許彆扭之處。我一直要求自己不要輕易因為翻譯問而錯過1本好書。 另外,作者好年輕啊。
評分 評分圖書標籤: 小說 黑色幽默 英國文學 英國 zadie smith
A bit too much like Howards End.....
評分A bit too much like Howards End.....
評分A bit too much like Howards End.....
評分A bit too much like Howards End.....
評分A bit too much like Howards End.....
On Beauty 2025 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載