the autograph man
Kitty took a deep, exasperated breath. "Oh, no, no, no, no, she said with amazement. "You must know I don't care for any of this. Pfui! You write better than you speak, I think. But of course our dear Sirin said this was true of all the great writers, and he should've known. He was a great friend of my third husband."(...)
Alex got on a bus to the Mulberry synagogue and sat on the front seats of the top deck enjoying that charming childhood illusion that he was flying down the street....
"HELLO, BEAUTIFUL!" he shouted, sticking his arm out of the narrow window and waving at a schoolgirl.
"Piss off, Humbert," she called back, hitching her rucksack up her back, the better to give the two-fingered salute.
white teeth
To be more precise, Millat hadn't read it. Millat knew nothing about the writer, nothing about the book; could not identify the book if it lay in a pile of other books; could not pick out the writer in a lineup of other writers (irresistible, this lineup of offending writers: Socrates, Protagoras, Ovid and Juvenal, Raddclyffe Hall, Boris Pasternak, D.H. Lawrence, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, all holding up their numbers for the mug shot, squinting in the flashbulb).See also the epigraph to "Irie 1990, 1907"
picnic, lightning
The title is a reference to Lolita (duly credited with a parenthetical comment at the beginning of the story: "(apologies to Nabokov)") -- see the Billy Collins entry if you're wondering why. Aside from that, this very funny story is vaguely Nabokovian throughout, and thoroughly gimlet-eyed and Humbert-esque in its treatment of murder. Here is a Nabokov-ish excerpt:Clara may have hidden depths but they were not literary. Bogs. But I suppose when I found Juliette 'beautiful' I could find no other word but that to repeat and repeat until people tried casually to start other conversations. You can always count on love to ruin your prose. (Whatever will be, will be.)
- Many thanks for Nicholas Laughlin and the Nabokov-L Forum for the Autograph bits.
- Read Zadie Smith's Picnic, Lightning online.
- More information on Zadie Smith.
- Zadie Smith's Wikipedia entry.
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