white teeth by zadie smith

finished White Teeth (2000). I would give it a 8.5/10. a masterclass in writing about immigration without reducing a story to immigrant cliches. (even if I did not care much for the recurring spiels on history as ball-and-chain -- not because I disagree but because that was the most 'borrowed' part of the book.) part of that is because it's wall-to-wall, 24/7, hardcore satire and political commentary. it doesn't make the quest towards representation and stop there; I felt like I learned something new about London's sociopolitical nuances even reading this in 2025. the other part is also that, thank god, Smith is able to write about a great latitude of lives that are not her own. I liked her awareness of WW2 history, The Great Partition, the Kingston earthquake, Jehovah Witness cultism, English colonialism in the Caribbean, new-gen Islamic fundamentalists, and more. she is very very observant. what was not so great: her impressionistic and at times stereotypical sketches of Bangladesh. 

the ending was what-the-hell, but I expected that going in, and it was formally innovative enough that I enjoyed reading just for the experience. I was astonished afterwards to learn that Zadie Smith wrote it when she was 23 - 25! also, the way she described her own writing is hysterical:

When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.

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