This book of essays is planted completely in the realm of lockdown, still the themes expand and feel relevant not only in a nostalgic sense, but also looking forward.
Zadie Smith writes about politics, gender, race, love and writing in an introspective way that allows the reader to feel with the writer. It isn’t inaccessible, despite her confident and well executed writing technique, it is still entirely approachable.
Each essay broaches its own subject. Peonies takes a look at what it means to be a woman, and how there are biological markers of a woman’s life. How we are expected to follow a certain path that ends in either the Being or Not Being a mother. It also examines what this can mean in an unprecedented time, such as during the pandemic, where every schedule was thrown out the window.
In Something to Do, Smith gives words to the experience I myself, and many other writers likely feel. How writing is as unpretentious as it is pretentious. Again Smith uses the specific dimensions afforded by lockdown to bare her own soul, to express a truth universal to her, now narrowed into the scope of a pandemic. Everyone was at once searching for something to do. Something writers have become adept to.
The most heart-shattering essay, in my opinion, is Postscript: Contempt as a Virus. It speaks on classism and sexism, and how the world has been shaped by this contempt for others. The very last paragraph gripped me most. It speaks of hope, lost. It’s a devastating as it is real. So much has been experienced over the last few years, so much widely spread and seen by everyone, that there is an underlying exhaustion of hope that things could get better.
Overall, I found myself gripped to Zadie’s writing, agreeing and reflecting on myself as I read. Something I think is a mark of a great essayist. There is a poignancy in her tone of voice that makes me excited to read more of her works. And I would recommend Intimations to anyone.
Comments