5/25/2023 0 Comments Intimations book![]() Joy and rigour were the same thing: if the whole choir was to get the benefit of ‘Bali Hai’ it would be by martial attention to each part of the whole. But I am also drawn to Number 5, Mr Rainbow, a teacher: ![]() The final piece is composed of 26 shards called ‘Debts and Lessons’, naming her parents, friends, writers and singers who she is indebted to, and culminating in the brilliant ‘Contingency’. I used to think there would one day be a vaccine: that if enough black people named the virus, explained it, demonstrated how it operates, videoed its effects … we might finally reach some kind of herd immunity. In the ferocious ‘Postscript: Contempt as a Virus’ the ‘virus’ is racism, as she explores its apparently ineradicable manifestations in America (‘Patient zero of this particular virus stood on a slave-ship four hundred years ago’): These are above all personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity.īut her reach is long and certainly not ‘small’: the pandemic, of course, with all the ways it has twisted our existence, and, associated with it, the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter. It is a book of the moment, written out of the intensity of the recent extraordinary months, weaving together the personal and the political (not that they can be distinguished at times). ![]() Intimations: six essays is just 81 pages long in small format paperback, but into these pages Smith packs an enormous amount. Zadie Smith’s new book is both slight and capacious. ![]()
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