This book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction. Apparently Zadie Smith is a scholar of EM Forster and has modeled her book to contain allusions to her “idol”, and yes, her book did remind me a bit of “Howard’s End”. She tells of a family in the US, and what happens as their lives intertwine with the lives of the family members of the patriach’s enemy. And of course, there has to be a confrontation between the two enemies, causing everything to unravel for a while, but get together again by the end of the book.
The characters were well-written, and the story went deep into some issues, but overall it didn’t have much of a wow effect on me, not as much as I’d expect from a prize winner. If you take away the Forster-ian undertones, it just ends up as a well-written story that can entertain for while, like most of the other books on the market. The writers of these other books should really catch on and jump on the bandwagon, and say that their books were modeled after so-and-so author – they might just make it onto a shortlist somewhere. And this is always good for business, because there’s always people like me, curious to see if the book is up to par.
Rating: ***out of 5
No comments:
Post a Comment