Samad works at an Indian restaurant, and Alsana sews clothing for an S&M shop. Samad and Archie met when they served together in World War II, and are best friends. In 1975, Archie and Clara are married as Samad and Alsana Iqbal look on. While riding on his scooter, they crashed into a tree, knocking out Clara's upper teeth. Ironically, Ryan eventually became a Jehovah's Witness and tried to win Clara back to the Church. She strayed from her religion when she began dating a boy named Ryan Topps. Smith takes us to Clara's teenage years, when she was an awkward and unattractive Jehovah's Witness. Although Archie is twice Clara's age, the two wed soon after this first meeting. In his new spirit of enthusiasm, Archie joins an End of the World party at a commune where he meets Clara Bowden, a gorgeous and captivating Jamaican woman who is missing her upper teeth. The butcher, Mo Hussein-Ishmael, saves Archie, and for the first time in his life, he feels worthwhile. On New Year's Day, 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones (Archie) attempts to gas himself to death in his car. White Teeth is set mainly in Willesden, North London. In Smith's novel, past is not just prologue as the preface suggests, but is sometimes barely distinguishable from the present. In the style of hysterical realism, Smith cuts between incidents, points of view, and eras with movie-like deftness, weaving these disparate stories into one narrative. The novel's main story spans the years 1975 to 2000, but in a flashback reaches as far back as 1907 and beyond. In that sense, the preface credits all the authors who have inspired Smith to write this, her first novel. Thus, the ideas she examines in the next 500 pages have developed out of her own personal consideration of the past.
By letting the wise words of the past speak before her, Smith acknowledges that "What is past is prologue" applies to writers as well.
The preface suggests that the past is inescapable, and encourages attention to details. Some characters, such as Samad, cling to the past obsessively, while others, such as Magid, attempt to reject it.
This statement sets the thematic mood for the novel, in which three different families of mixed ethnicity struggle with issues of heritage and legacy. Zadie Smith prefaces White Teeth with the following quote: "What is past is prologue"- Inscription in Washington, D.C., museum.
0 kommentar(er)
