![]() ![]() She uses Kierkegaard to illuminate her obsession with Joni Mitchell. She examines the isolating fame suffered by pop’s preening boy-king Justin Bieber through the lens of philosopher Martin Buber’s theories of I-Thou and I-It. Over the course of these essays, she moves balletically between highbrow and popular art, politics, identity, and philosophy. Later, she demurs, ‘I am a laywoman … a dilettante novelist, a non-expert.’ You could be forgiven for writing off such claims as disingenuous, coming from a boldface name who writes for The New Yorker and Harper’s – hardly the bush league.īy the end of Feel Free, I came to see these caveats not as false modesty, but rather as Smith’s declaration that she won’t heed jurisdictional boundaries. Not a philosopher or sociologist, not a real professor of literature or film,’ she says in her foreword. From the outset, Smith repeatedly attempts to ditch the mantle of authority: ‘I have no real qualifications to write as I do. Shades of this chariness about the personal pronoun still persist in her non-fiction today, which is markedly self-effacing. ‘When I was younger even the appearance of “I” on the page made me feel a bit ill,’ Zadie Smith confesses in her new book of essays, Feel Free. ![]()
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