“I myself have no ‘survival instinct,’” Smith writes, but nevertheless she has, “in my passive way,” decided to leave the city. In the guilt-laced “Screencrabs (After Berger, before the virus),” she develops precise and loving sketches of some of the characters of the New York City neighborhood she is leaving behind to shelter in London. “Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual - it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like ‘privilege.’” In “Suffering Like Mel Gibson,” Smith riffs ably on the familiar meme of Mel Gibson talking to Jesus to grapple with how to talk about personal suffering during this time of universal anguish. And when the subject is her own interiority, the essays fairly gleam with precision. Organize them Smith has, with her characteristic lucidity and novelistic sense of character. Instead, the six essays that make up Intimations are her attempt to “organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed.” So she isn’t trying to write a “comprehensive account” of 2020. “The year isn’t halfway done,” Smith allows in her brief foreword. And as I read it, I couldn’t help but wish she’d waited five years to do so. Zadie Smith wrote and published her new collection of essays, the slim and polished Intimations, entirely during the pandemic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |