White Teeth

Title: White Teeth
Author: Zadie Smith
Published: 2001 by Penguin Books (orig. in 2000)
Genre: Family chronicle kinda thing
Pages: 542


 Ooh, I've been wanting to read this one for yeaaars. Why I haven't gone and bought it off the big internet book store I don't know, but I finally found it in a used book shop in Helsinki. Yay! The miniseries from this came out in 2002, and I saw it when it was shown on Finnish telly. So, about ten years. Yeah.

So, in White Teeth, we get to follow two (no, wait, three!) families through two-and-then-some generations, from Jamaica to India through poorer parts of London. There's the Joneses, and the Iqbals. Archie Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal met during WWII, and 30 years later end up living in the same neighbourhood, with their new, young wives. White Teeth is a great book about mixing and clashing cultures, families and religions, leaving your roots and trying to plant new ones, and how all this affects not only the one building a new home but also the generations to come. But it's also very funny and sweet, and I'm already missing the characters. Recommendations, and I'm gonna have to check out Ms. Smith's other books as well!


A dark line would now be drawn underneath the whole incident, underneath the whole sorry day, had not something happened that led to the transformation of Archie Jones in every particular that a man can be transformed; and not due to any particular effort on his part, but by means of the entirely random, anventitious collision of one person with another. Something happened by accident. That accident was Clara Bowden.