Enquanto estava a folhear a minha Bíblia para ver o que dizia sobre o Mario Puzo (vá-se lá saber porquê, não é verdade, Jenny?), encontrei dois 'artigos', chamemos-lhe assim, sobre o White Teeth e o On Beauty da Zadie Smith (também descobri que o nome verdadeiro é Sadie). Sobre o On Beauty, diz isto:
"This is a novel about art, love, race, class, family, England and America, and the beautiful and the ugly. The plot turns around the relations between the Kipps and the Belseys, two families who have directly opposing views on art, politics, and religion. The Belseys are a secular ramshackle of a family, anti-war, anti-state religion, anti the idealization of art. The Kippses are right-wing Christians, impassioned by traditional family values, devout in their belief that art is a gift from God. The tension between these two families crystallizes around a disagreement about Rembrandt, as both Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps are academics writing books about the painter.
"This is a novel about art, love, race, class, family, England and America, and the beautiful and the ugly. The plot turns around the relations between the Kipps and the Belseys, two families who have directly opposing views on art, politics, and religion. The Belseys are a secular ramshackle of a family, anti-war, anti-state religion, anti the idealization of art. The Kippses are right-wing Christians, impassioned by traditional family values, devout in their belief that art is a gift from God. The tension between these two families crystallizes around a disagreement about Rembrandt, as both Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps are academics writing books about the painter.
The beauty of the novel is that, whilst it is organized around a set of apparently stable oppositions, Smith's prose is subtle and nuanced enough to seek out those places where such oppositions are unsettled. At the heart of the novel is a moving relationship between two women, the wives of the egotistical academics Howard and Monty. Their relationship stretches across all of the divides that the novel charts, but they find, to their own constant surprise, that they are able to find some common ground. This novel is a virtual rewriting of Forster's Howard's End, a work in which Forster urges us to "only connect". In rewriting Forster for the new millennium, Zadie Smith has given us some new ways to connect, some new ways to reconcile the differences that separate and define us."
- 1001 Books ..., Peter Boxall.
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