The Fraud by Zadie Smith - 2023

 The novels of Zadie Smith in the order in which I like them:

• Swing Time

• White Teeth

• On Beauty

• NW

• The Autograph Man

The Fraud is a strong challenger for first place .

I have also read, posted upon and enjoyed several of her short stores.  Additionally I have enjoyed  and learned from articles in both of her essay collections.  I have listened to a number of lectures on YouTube.  For sure I see a Nobel Prize in her future.

"ABOUT THE FRAUD

The New York Times bestseller • One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year • One of NPR’s Best Books of the Year • Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and BookPage • One of Oprah Daily’s Best Novels of 2023

“[A] brilliant new entry in Smith’s catalog . . . The Fraud is not a change for Smith, but a demonstration of how expansive her talents are.” —Los Angeles Times

From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed

It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.

Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.

The “Tichborne Trial”—wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title—captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. . . .

Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.” " from Penquin Press - the Publisher 

The Fraud vividly depicts the poor of London seen through the eyes of the affluent.  The account of the cruelty of  the lives of slaves on sugar producing islands is  very powerful. Smith shows us how enslaved persons, especially women, rely on magic, old beliefs to maintain an identity.  Enslaved women, when young, often are subject to sexual imposition by owners or their surrogates.  .

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.

The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith - 2002

Here is my list of the five novels of Zadie Smith in the order in which I like them:

1. Swing Time
2. White Teeth
3. On Beauty
4. NW
5. The Autograph Man

I have read, posted upon and enjoyed several of her short stores.  Additionally I have enjoyed  and learned from essays in both of her essay collections.  I have listened to a number of lectures on YouTube.  For sure I see a Nobel Prize in her future.

All of her novels are at least partially based in London.  I am very behind on posts I want to get done in April so this will be mercifully brief.

The central character makes his living buying and selling autographs.  Ethnographically he is Chinese and Jewish, from London.  He has some celebrity crushes and is in contact with other Autograph and celebrity memorabilia collectors and dealers.  As I read this book I imagined how much this business has been changed since the pre-internet days.  

Here is the publisher’s description (a bit of a hype, of course)

“When twelve-year old Alex Li-Tandem meets Joseph Klein at a wrestling match in London, he couldn’t have possibly predicted that their conversation about collecting autographs would change the course of his life. Alex grows up to be an Autograph Man, making a living buying and selling famous names, obsessively pursuing the very rare autograph of 1940s Hollywood movie star, Kitty Alexander. 

But Alex’s life is a shambles. He’s wrecked his car during an acid trip, injuring (and alienating) his girlfriend Esther; his friends are mad at him; and he’s still grieving over the death of his father, Li-Jin. His friends, Adam and Rabbi Rubenfine, want him to say the Kaddish for his father on the fifteenth anniversary of his death, but Alex sees that as nothing more than an empty gesture, a ritual he can’t believe in. His girlfriend Esther wants him to grow up and stop being so selfish. But all Alex seems to want is the autograph of Kitty Alexander. He has written her hundreds of letters over the years, all of them unanswered. Until the fateful day when his wish is miraculously granted with the arrival of a signed photo. Now he plans to find her. And thus ensues a wild trip to New York, where he is guided by the “famous whore” Honey Smith, and where he finally meets the woman behind the name he has sought for so long. 

Smart, hip, daringly imaginative, The Autograph Man gives readers a vivid glimpse of the signs (and signatures) of the times, and shows once again why Zadie Smith is one of our most admired young writers.”

Anyway, I’m suggesting those new to Smith, read her novels in the order I listed.    

Her essays are a delight.

Mel u

White Teeth by Zadie Smith - her debut novel - 1999

“White Teeth” was the debut novel of Zadie Smith.  It turned her into a literary superstar.  I have previously posted on three of her novels, Swing Time, On Beauty, and NW as well as several of her great short stories.  I have also read a few of her essays.  Her new essay collection, Feel Free, is getting rave notices.

I am getting a bit behind in my posting so I will be keeping this to a reading journal format.  

Set in working class London, it revolves around two men, one from Bangladesh and one London, who served together in the British Army, in Italy, during World War Two.  There adventures in the war are fun and exciting.  Back in London we follow them and their families for many years.  All in all a wonderful read full of delightful prose and sharply observed social insights

I hope to read her Autograph Man soon.

”The Lazy River”. - A Short Story by Zadie Smith - December 18 and 25, in The New Yorker

“The Lazy River” by Zadie Smith

Anytime I’m presented with the opportunity to read a new short story by Zadie Smith, I avail myself of it.  So far I have read and posted on three of her five novels and several of her short stories. I have also read a number of her essays without posting upon them.  

“The Lazy River” can be read in several levels.  It is a very clever way a gentle satire on literary analysis.  I think it can also be seen as mocking the insular propensity of the English, going on vacation to a resort in Spain but staying strictly in the confines of English culture.  Maybe on it can be seen as making light of the kinds of British voters who voted in favour of leaving the European Union, people with a sense of cultural inferiority.

The opening paragraph gives a perfect feel for the story:

“

The Lazy River is a metaphor and at the same time a real body of artificial water, in an all-inclusive hotel, in Almería, somewhere in southern Spain. We do not leave the hotel (except to buy flotation devices). The plan is to beat our hotel at its own game. What you do is you do this: you drink so much alcohol that your accommodation is effectively free. (Only the most vulgar among us speak this plan aloud but we are all on board.) For in this hotel we are all British, we are en masse, we are unashamed. We enjoy one another’s company. There is nobody French or German here to see us at the buffet, rejecting paella and swordfish in favor of sausages and chips, nor anyone to judge us as we lie on our loungers, turning from the concept of literature toward the reality of sudoku. One of our tribe, an older gentleman, has a portrait of Amy Winehouse on each shin, and we do not judge him, not at all, how could we? “

At the link above you can read the story and enjoy Smith’s Podcast of the story.

The New Yorker often takes stories of the free webpage after a while.

Mel u

“Two Men Arrive in a Village”. - A Short Story By Zadie Smith - from The New Yorker June 6, 2016

Click Here for the story and podcast

Zadie Smith’s Website.

Zadie Smith is one of my favourite contemporary writers.  So far I have posted upon three of her novels, Swing Time, On Beauty and NW as well as several of her short stories.  I am currently slowly working my way through two of her essay collections.  I hope and predict she will when the Nobel Prize one day.

“Two Men Arrive in a Village” can be read online on the webpage of The New Yorker (see link above). There is also a podcast of Smith reading the story (run time twelve minutes).  I suggest reading it first, then listen to the elegant podcast, there is something special about listening to an author read her work.

My main purpose this morning is to just record a few thoughts on the story and to let anyone into Zadie Smith know that she has another great short story online .

The story reads almost like a parable, it is set in sub equatorial Africa in recent history, it could be many other places.  Two armed men enter a Village just as the sun sets,  they try to make themselves initially liked.  The villagers know 

 they are there to steal and will feel entitled to have sex with the young women of their picking, claiming they want to breed future warriors. 

Smith made me feel I was there, trying to be calm and brave but above all praying for them to be gone.  I don’t want to tell more of the events of the story.  I found it moving and honest.  It is a tale for five thousand years ago and from a next week CNN feature.

Mel u, Director and Founder

The Reading Life

On Beauty- A Novel by Zadie Smith (2005, 432 pages

Five hundred years ago London was the home of the greatest writer in the world, 500 years from today it still will be.  I dedicate this post to the people of London

A Very Good Review in The Guardian by James Landun

Zadie Smith on The Reading Life




Last month I read Zadie Smith's latest novel Swing Time.  I loved it and decided i wanted to read all five of her novels (I have also read and posted upon several of her wonderful short stories).  I was delighted when I received notice that the Kindle edition of her third novel, On Beauty, was for sale for $1.95.

The Guardian has a very good review of On Beauty (link above) so I will keep my remarks brief.  Bottom line, I'm now aiming at reading her three remaining novels in 2017.  That said, Swing Time is the superior work as Smith gets better at her art. (I am looking forward to the movie based on it.)

On Beauty is set in Massachusetts.  It centers on the Belsep family.  The husband is a professor of art history, his wife was a hospital administrator. He is white, she an African American.  There have two sons, one is a devout Christian, the other an aspiring rapper.  Smith skillfully lets us see the struggles of the sons to stay in touch with their maternal heritage.  It is also a very acute at times hilarious satire of university politics.  The plot, as pointed out in the Guardian review, is loosely structured based on the plot of Howard's End by E. F. Forster.

The depiction of the relationship between the couple, married for thirty years, is really masterful.  The husband has had an affair which infuriated the wife, perhaps more so as the other woman was white.  The passion in their relationship moved me.

I greatly enjoyed this book.

Please share your experience with Zadie Smith with us.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith (2016)

Dance Lessons for Writers from Dancers by Zadie Smith - A Most Interesting Essay

Taiye Selasi's Review of Swing Time (author of Ghana Must Go)



Swing Time is the first novel by Zadie Smith I have read, I have posted on four of her short stories.  Swing Time has received well deserved rave reviews all over the book blog world and in the press.  I was very happy to be given a review copy.  (I am keeping my post brief partially because the review by Taiye Elasi, author of Ghana Must go and whose debut short story, "African Girls Sex Life Begins With Uncle" I posted upon several years ago, I link to above is far better than one I could do and also I am feeling a bit lazy.)

My bottom line is Swing Time is a wonderful work of art, if you worry about the future of the novel, this will end your worries.  It is above all a tremendously fun book.  On a personal note as the father of three girls 18, 21, and 23, growing up in a mega city bigger than London where Swing Time begins, it gave me a bit more insight into their world in which social media, pop stars I have never heard about and the all important peer group play a huge factor.

Swing Time is the story of two girls born in the poor side of London.  They meet at a neighborhood dance and initially bond over their admiration of great dancers from the past.  One girl is studious and focused on bettering herself, she narrates the story.  The other girl is rebellious, hard for her mother to control, her dad is in prison, sexually an early starter.  The narrator becomes a personal assistant for a super pop star from Australia. We follow the girls for many years, flashing back and forth in time.  One travels the world first class, helps build a school in Ghana, the other never gets out of the neighborhood and has kids by multiple men.

Swing Time very intelligently focuses on issues of racial identity, class and gender.  It is a pure delight

Zadie Smith has four earlier novels and I hope to read them all.

Mel u

"Crazy They Call Me" by Zadie Smith (February 27, 2017 in The New Yorker)

You can experience "Crazy They Call Me" here

Haunting Video of "Strange Fruit"          

A Very Interesting Article from N P R on Abel Meeropol, composer of ""Strange Fruit"

"Billie Holiday, who gave voice to loneliness both personal and institutional, who lived and died inside it, a life short on love and brutalised by racism. Billie Holiday, who was called Blackie to her face and made to take the back door even in venues where she was herself the headline act, wounds that she attempted to medicate with the poisonous ameliorators of alcohol and heroin. Billie Holiday, who in the summer of 1959 collapsed in her room on West 87th Street while eating custard and oatmeal, and who was taken first to the Knickerbocker and then to the Metropolitan Hospital in Harlem, where she was left –as so many AIDS patients would be in the years that followed, particularly if they too had black or brown skin –on a gurney in a corridor, just another dope case."  From The Lonely City Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Lang

"Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop."  - Strange Fruit

Frank O'Connor famously proclaimed that the short stories of the masters of the form are about outsiders, those with no one to speak for them, marginalized persons. Of course like most all sweeping literary generalizations this cannot be "proved" but it is an illuminating remark.  In January I read a book I wish I could have read fifty years ago, The Lonely City  Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Lang.  Billie Holiday is one of the figures Lang talks about. Not all into the reading life will agree or relate but for others will see deep connections between an immersion in the reading life and being alone and loneliness.  Numerous book bloggers as well as authors have spoken about being an odd seeming child who retreated into a world of books.  The more they read, the more remote from others many became.  Some, maybe most, childhood readers slowly give it up but others keep going, building worlds for themselves, carrying less about the mundane world.  

"They Call Me Crazy" by Zadie Smith (which you can both read online and hear the author read the story for free on the webpage of The New Yorker is a wonderful story told in the person of Billie Holiday.  My main purpose in this post is to let my readers know of this story and to add it to my reading journal. To Lang Billie Holiday exemplifies loneliness in the big city.  She was African American in a time of legalized racism, a drug user, and occasional bisexual.  She never found a
world in which she could be at home.  "They Call Me Crazy" is sort of about her reaction to the people who came to hers her sing in nightclubs in New York City, mostly affluent Caucasians.  Her iconic song, about the Lynching of Black men in the American south was beyond the understanding of most of her audience.  We see her losing herself in opiate drugs, drugs of deep inwardness and retreat.  

The last lines of Smith's story transcend brilliance.  I loved it and so will you.  I read it first, then I listened to Smith's reading of it (16 minutes).  I also suggest after reading the story you listen to a recording by Holiday of "Strange Fruit" (on You Tube).

I have read and posted upon a few of Zadie Smith's short stories but have not yet ventured into her novels.  

Mel u

"The Embassy of Cambodia" by Zadie Smith (in The New Yorker, Feb.11, 2013)

My Posts on Zadie Smith

This is the third story by Zadie Smith I have read. I hope to read many more. There are two of her short stories in the archives of The New Yorker (open for a while).  Each her stories I have so far read took me deeply into the lives of their subjects in just a few pages.  My main purpose in this post is to keep a record of having read this story and to,give my readers a link where this story can be read. 

"The Embassy of Cambodia", set in London,  centers on a woman from Ghanna, working as a maid for a couple from Pakistan.  She tells herself she is not a slave like a woman she read about in the newspaper.  Her employers keep most of her wages for her room and board and the wife has only slapped her twice.  The two children scream at her when they want something.  Cambodia has recently moved their embassy to a house in their neighborhood.  Her biggest pleasure in life is using a guest pass to swim at a sports club where are employers have a membership.  She also has a sort of boyfriend she has coffee with.  We learn a lot about her life back in Ghanna.  We feel what it might be like to be a servant for people who barely see you as human.  

"The Embassy of Cambodia" is a first rate short story very much worth the few minutes it will take to read it.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/11/the-embassy-of-cambodia

Please share your experience with Zadie Smith with us.

Mel u

"Big Week" by Zadie Smith (Paris Review, Issue 209, Summer, 2014)

My post on "Miss Adele Among the Corsets" by Zadie Smith

I was very happy to see The Paris Review has generously allowed non-subscribers to read online a story by Zadie Smith (UK, 1975) in the just published Summer of 2014 issue.  In the Spring 2014 issue they published a wonderful story by Smith about a performer in a transvestite show, "Miss Adele Among the  Corsets" which I greatly enjoyed.  

"Big Week" is a very moving and insightful story focusing on a fifty six year old ex-Boston policeman of Irish parentage.  He works as a bartender and drives a limo sometimes.   He has three grown sons.  He talks about how one has a Korean girlfriend, one is married to an African American woman, and one is currently without a girlfriend but he jokingly says maybe he will round things out by hooking up with a Chinese woman.  He is getting divorced butthe tells his son his thirty years with his wife was the greatest part of his life.  

The story has a kind of second half when he picks up a woman from Uganda at the airport, in Boston to speak at a conference on architecture.  You can tell the woman is not really interested in talking to him but he goes on anyway to his captive audience.  You can see his is trying hard to force his spirits up, his divorce is this week.  We learn the pathetically sad reason he lost his job and his police pension.

This is an excellant story.  I have a copy of her novel NW and hope to read it soon.

You can read "Big Week" at this link

http://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/6315/big-week-zadie-smith

Mel u

"Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets" by Zadie Smith (from The Paris Review, Spring, 2014)

I was really happy yesterday to read on the Facebook page of The Paris Review, that for a limited time  only, they have a new short story by Zadie Smith (London, 1975) on the public area of their web page.  "Miss Adele Admist the Corsets" is my first encounter with the work of Smith but will most certainly not be my last.  I have been given a free copy of her recent novel NW and will now prioritize reading that highly regarded novel.  

My main purpose in this post is to let my readers know they can read this story (but The Paris Review will take it down once issue 209 comes out so if you are interested, read it soon) online.   The story centers on a  46 year old transvestite man of color who works in a cross dressing show in New York City. It is really about finding a way a way to deal with all the prejuduces faced by those a bit different. It is about being different in the big city.  Smith really brings the man to life for us.  She lets us  figure out for ourselves that he is a gay man who dresses up as a woman for a living.  He is facing the fact that he is getting a bit old for this.  His once pristine body is not what it used to be.  He needs to buy a new corset to hold him into shape for the shows.  The very real fun and power of the story begins at the corset shop.  The shop owners are a couple, maybe they are Muslims, maybe Orthodox Jews, as seen through the eyes of Adele.  It is a comedy of incorrect mutual perceptions that sends Miss Adele off the deep end.

This is a very enjoyable, perceptive story.  I am very glad I read it.

You can read it here

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/04/15/read-zadie-smiths-story-from-our-spring-issue/