Today, I have the pleasure to present to you the new classic romantic novel "On Beauty" by the gifted 29 years old Zadie Smith already nominated for the 2005 Man BOOKER PRIZE. You have a lot to gain by collecting this classic book that is worth every price in gold. "On Beauty" is collector's item that should not be missing in your home.
'Beauty' before age: Zadie Smith beats veteran authors to a place on the Man Booker shortlist
By Louise Jury
09 September 2005
The high-flying young novelist Zadie Smith made it through to the final round of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for fiction while heavyweight rivals including previous winners - Salman Rushdie, J M Coetzee and Ian McEwan - were felled yesterday.
Announcing the six contenders for the 2005 award, Professor John Sutherland, chairman of the judges, admitted there was enough talent on the 17-strong longlist for two shortlists in a triumphant year for British and Irish fiction.
Only one previous winner, Kazuo Ishiguro, 50, with Never Let Me Go, remained in contention for the prestigious prize after a two-hour debate. The Japanese-born writer who moved to Britain at the age of six, said he was "very flattered".
But it was Julian Barnes, 59, twice previously shortlisted, who was immediately installed as the bookmakers' favourite with Arthur & George, a work which relies heavily on a true-life story involving the writer Arthur Conan Doyle.
Sebastian Barry, 50, was shortlisted for A Long Long Way and said he was "properly gobsmacked" at his inclusion in a year hailed as possibly the best in Booker history. "From almost every angle it's astonishing," he said. "Quite frankly, I didn't know where I'd find a parking space. There were 17 cars and six parking spaces. But somebody has very kindly given me a space."
Other contenders are John Banville, 59, who lives in Dublin, for his novel The Sea. He said he was surprised and extremely pleased, adding: "I didn't envy the judges their task this year. Obviously the novel is far from dead."
He joins Inverness-born Ali Smith, 43, shortlisted for The Accidental. Both writers have been shortlisted before.
Zadie Smith was the final name on the list with her third novel, On Beauty. At 29, she is the youngest of the six by some margin. She has been living and working in America and, in an interview with the latest New Yorker magazine, condemns British culture and its "general stupidity, madness, vulgarity" as "disgusting".
Professor Sutherland said: "A lot of very strong novels had regretfully to be excluded. There's no discredit not to be on this shortlist. The current view of British fiction, in my view, is immensely strong, immensely healthy, and one of the glories of our civilisation." If Britain could make cars as it produces novelists, it would beat the Japanese, he said.
The omission of Coetzee's Slow Man and Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black were also mentioned as particular regrets though Josephine Hart, the novelist and judge, stressed: "We were just."
David Sexton, a literary editor and one of the judges, said an indication of the strength of the year was the exclusion from the shortlist of McEwan's novel Saturday, which had been highly favoured by many. "You might think that Saturday is a stronger work than Amsterdam which won the Booker [in 1998]."
The winner will be announced on 10 October.
Literary editor Boyd Tonkin gives his verdict.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Ishiguro sends in the clones in his eerie school-story parable about children bred and farmed as organ donors. In adulthood, Kathy looks back in bewilderment on the hideous experiment in the dream-like, otherworldly idiom that Ishiguro has made his own. Mysterious and elusive, this novel shows in spades the enigmatic control of voice and emotion that this year's jurors seem to admire beyond all else.
William Hill odds: 3/1.
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Inspired by E M Forster (Howards End above all), Zadie Smith also draws with glee on the funds of satire and farce built up by the tradition of the campus novel. At an East Coast college, two rival clans of academics tussle over sex, art and politics. By a mile, it's the most exuberant and enjoyable novel on the list, although Smith gives her galloping talent an easy ride with some soft targets and familiar settings
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On Beauty: A Novel
by Zadie Smith
A Review by Joseph O'Neill
If, as Cyril Connolly suggested, success is the greatest of all the enemies of literature, few talents can have been more threatened than Zadie Smith's. And indeed White Teeth, her triumphant debut, was followed by The Autograph Man, an awkward, slightly chaotic novel that gave the impression of a writer disoriented by a cacophonic critical babble and trying to regain her bearings by asking herself (as Connolly might have counseled), Would it amuse Horace or Milton or Swift or Leopardi? Could it be read to Flaubert or Dave Eggers?
On Beauty, Smith's third novel, is by contrast an assured effort -- although Smith remains sufficiently self-conscious (and generous) to expressly acknowledge the influence of E. M. Forster: "He gave me a classy old frame, which I covered with new material as best I could." This material concerns a fateful year or so in the lives of the Belseys, a family living in the liberal splendor of a Massachusetts college town. The father (white, English) is a professor, the mother (African-American) is a hospital administrator, and they have three kids, all students. They are confronted with familiar enemies of familial happiness -- marital infidelity, creeping emotional isolation, coming-of-age hazards -- as well as the ideological and spiritual challenges arising from the arrival in town of the Kippses, an aggressively reactionary and religious Anglo-Caribbean family.
Smith displays all her strengths: satirical energy, imaginative breadth (she's equally engaging about the inner lives of a teenage boy and a middle-aged mother), and a sure and funny touch with jumbled ethnicities. And although the full, tragic dimensions of the human adventure may be missing -- an odd, sitcommy inconsequentiality colors the disasters that befall her characters -- there's no doubting the artistic conviction that underlies this unabashedly conventional novel. It's hard to say what Horace or Leopardi would have made of On Beauty, but it might well have amused Forster, at least.
Shortlisted Zadie Smith vents spleen over 'aspirational' England
Gerard Seenan
Friday September 9, 2005
The Guardian
Zadie Smith: 'not interested in being stared at in coffee shops'. Photo: Eamon McCabe
The following statement from Zadie Smith was issued by Penguin Books on September 9 2005:
"I have lived in England my entire life and have an enormous love of the place, a fact that is obvious to anyone who has read my fiction. English fiction is my first love and the joy of English culture and history infuses every aspect of my work. I live in the same street I grew up in and have no plans to leave. In the context of a phone conversation about modern England with a New York journalist, we both bemoaned the rise of bad reality TV shows and the obsession with wealth and celebrity that has gripped parts of our culture. I expressed a sadness about these things, and a sadness at the current atmosphere of fear and loathing on the tube which has been the inevitable result of the terrorist attacks upon London. Within the conversation we had, these opinions did not seem controversial. As a committed anglophile, it is really upsetting to see these comments twisted and quoted out of context. I said I had no 'f***ing chance' of getting on the Booker shortlist because it seemed to me that the longlist was of an incredibly high standard. I am amazed and delighted to have been shortlisted alongside British and Irish writers for whom I have nothing but respect."
Nice read!
ReplyDeleteThank you.
ReplyDeleteI hope you will collect the novel.