具体描述
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful," muses a character in Smith's third novel, an intrepid attempt to explore the sad stuff of adult life, 21st century–style: adultery, identity crises and emotional suffocation, interracial and intraracial global conflicts and religious zealotry. Like Smith's smash debut, White Teeth (2000), this work gathers narrative steam from the clash between two radically different families, with a plot that explicitly parallels Howards End. A failed romance between the evangelical son of the messy, liberal Belseys;Howard is Anglo-WASP and Kiki African-American;and the gorgeous daughter of the staid, conservative, Anglo-Caribbean Kipps leads to a soulful, transatlantic understanding between the families' matriarchs, Kiki and Carlene, even as their respective husbands, the art professors Howard and Monty, amass matériel for the culture wars at a fictional Massachusetts university. Meanwhile, Howard and Kiki must deal with Howard's extramarital affair, as their other son, Levi, moves from religion to politics. Everyone theorizes about art, and everyone searches for connections, sexual and otherwise. A very simple but very funny joke;that Howard, a Rembrandt scholar, hates Rembrandt;allows Smith to discourse majestically on some of the master's finest paintings. The articulate portrait of daughter Zora depicts the struggle to incorporate intellectual values into action. The elaborate Forster homage, as well as a too-neat alignment between characters, concerns and foils, threaten Smith's insightful probing of what makes life complicated (and beautiful), but those insights eventually add up. "There is such a shelter in each other," Carlene tells Kiki; it's a take on Forster's "Only Connect;," but one that finds new substance here.
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作者简介
Winner of the ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION 2006
shortlisted for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2005
"Wonderfully funny,An outstanding novelist with a powerful understanding both of what the brain knows and what love knows"
--- the Observer
目录信息
读后感
英国女作家扎笛·史密斯（Zadie Smith）的小说《论美》（On beauty）是近几年来我迫不及待想要阅读的唯一一本文学作品。在《世界文学》2007年第5期上读到其节译后，我就决心一定要弄到原文全本，而且我也已经相信，这位作家将是我今后忠实追看的对象。 《论美》出版于2005年，...
Zadie Smith本来可以写的温和些，但因为心中的愤怒，文字多刺，也便少了许多厚实，别看她文字这么多，书又这么厚。 但书确实很好。
用户评价
A bit too much like Howards End.....
A bit too much like Howards End.....
A bit too much like Howards End.....
A bit too much like Howards End.....
A bit too much like Howards End.....
