Grand Union: Stories (urspr publ 2019; utgåvan 2019)

In a Zadie Smith story, even when the characters are cussing they sound posh. I don't know if that's just me. Her voice is so careful, precise, & carries a kind of deliberate humour that makes me feel like she can't step out of her brain and just... release. Feel. I felt like the only story where I felt a kind of release was "For The King" & that's cause the whole story happens in 'one-take' following a friend meeting a friend & the conversation they have till they go home. So it's less controlled in that sense, plus Zadie Smith's dialogue is always stellar.

With this kind of precision and tightness, some stories work far better than others. When it works it's powerful as with the story "Two Men Arrive in A Village" which read like a tense, terrifying parable & shows Smith's intense intelligence & observation on human intent & behaviour. This bit moved me most in the whole book:

"But there is such a thing as physical courage, real, persistent, very hard to explain, existing in tiny pockets here, there, and everywhere, and though almost always useless it is still something you don't easily forget once you've seen it—like a very beautiful face or a giant mountain range, it sets a limit somehow on your own hopes for yourself—and, sensing this, maybe, the tall, dim one raise his gleaming machete and, with the same fluid yet effortless gesture with which you might take the head off a flower, separate the boy from his life."

But a lot of times the stories read a little too 'perfectly' & therefore I felt like I could not find their soul. So once in a while when I felt a kind of release, it's like getting gold. For example in a story that was a kind of humorous riff on cancel culture, I guess ("Now More Than Ever") we get this passage:

"To the suffering person, suffering is solely suffering. It is only for others, as a symbol, that suffering takes on any meaning or purpose. No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil rights movement. They just shook, suffered, screamed, and died. Pain is the least symbolic thing there is." ( )

DNF at page 42.

There's almost an element of stream of consciousness to these short tales. They feel more like someone's idle musings than actual stories. Soft and elegant words with the appearance of hidden depth ultimately take you nowhere and are utterly unmemorable. ( )

I have enjoyed all of Zadie Smith's books so maybe I'm biased, but I thought these stories were great, too. Some of them felt more like essays or just musings, but I liked the variety of styles and subject matter, and as a New Yorker, it was fun seeing some of them set in New York around the NYU campus. I liked seeing her explore seeds of ideas that wouldn't be enough for a novel, but were just right a story. ( )

read Kelso the week after George Floyd was murdered - she knows ( )

This is my first Zadie Smith book, a collection of short stories, most of which are quite short. The first one hit me well:

“In a matriarchy, you’d hear women boasting to their mates: ‘I subsumed him in my anus. I really made his penis disappear. I just stole it away and hid it deep inside myself until he didn’t even exist.’ ”

It's all in the middle of a story that is obviously written by a person who didn't exploit the material for the sake of igniting shock and awe; in other words, Smith is far away from Bret Easton Ellis and his ilk.

My son asked me if the young man was “sick in the head” which is our downtown euphemism for batshit crazy, but my daughter 01 who is very, very savvy said, “No way—look at his clothes!” I thought that was an interesting answer. It meant she was becoming an American. It meant she now refused to believe rich people can be batshit crazy.

Some of the conversations between Americans and Jamaicans were good to read. The lack of obvious plot felt fresh and lovely. On the other hand, I'm left with a feeling that I breezed through the stories. They were easily read, for sure, but I won't remember many of them, only the sentiment that this collection left me with. It's a good feeling and I will read Smith again. ( )