On Beauty: A Novel
A family novel set between the university and the home, exploring art, politics, race, and class with wit and sharp observation.
Work Information
Intellectual rivalry and family tension drive a novel of love and culture-war collisions.
One of Zadie Smith’s signature novels, it follows two families on both sides of the Atlantic and shows how scholarship, belief, and love can wound one another with equal force.
Review Summaries
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Its balance of wit and feeling is praised, especially for how it turns family friction into a vivid picture of cultural conflict.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Penguin Books
- Published
- 2006-08-29
- Pages
- 464 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 21.34 x 13.97 x 2.79 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780143037743
- ISBN-10
- 0143037749
- Price
- 3177 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Family Saga
One of the New York Times ’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction, another bestselling masterwork from the celebrated author of Swing Time and White Teeth "Thoroughly original . . . A novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane." — Michiko Kakutani , The New York Times This wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth , The Autograph Man , On Beauty , NW , Swing Time , and The Fraud ; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia ; four collections of essays, Changing My Mind , Feel Free , Intimations , and Dead and Alive ; a collection of short stories, Grand Union ; and a play, The Wife of Willesden , adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People . Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.
Reviews
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登場人物たちがそれぞれおもいおもいに「いかにも典型的な英語」をしゃべる。
現代英語の多彩なスタイルがいきいき感じられる。 翻訳版とともに原著を併読する魅力が、たっぷりあります。
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日本人には理解しづらい部分がある
英国生まれの白人の大学教授のハワードと米国生まれの黒人の妻キキの夫婦とその子供達を軸に、米国ボストンの架空の大学を舞台に描かれた人間模様だ。 この物語には白人と黒人、米国と英国、そして豊かで知的な人とそうではない人との間の、カルチャーギャップから生まれる衝突と調和が描かれており、単なる家族物のコメディに留まらない奥深さを有している。登場人物は何れも一癖があって、喧嘩をしたり、浮気をしたりと人間の醜悪さが結構描かれており、題名のOn Beauty（美について）とそぐわない感じがするが、著者はそのような人間模様に美を見出しているのかも知れない。 アメリカ文化の中身を垣間見ることができるので興味がある人にはお勧めしたい。ただ、モノカルチャーに慣れている我々日本人にはちょっとついていけない部分があるのも事実。英語も結構難しいので、中上級者向けだと思います。
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満足。
三十年ぶりに、小説を堪能しました。 話は、超リベラルなベイズレー家と超保守派のキップス家を中心に、人種、セックス、階級、学問、家族、政治思想、宗教、と思いつけるすべての材料を盛り込んで、カラフルに、ユーモラスに、アイロニーたっぷりに読ませます。人生における「美」とはなにか、登場人物それぞれの視点から見えるそれぞれの美、愛、家族に、読者は共感をおぼえるでしょう。 美を象徴するモチーフのアート（絵画、詩、音楽）が、この作品をいっそう深く彩っています。それらに対する作者自身の愛情は、この小説を一貫してかなりの比重で表現されています。それは、文学を通して作り上げるスミス特有の美への賛美のようです。 450ページと、ちょっと長いですが、じっくり時間をかけてすべての文章（とくにダイアログ）を味わいたい小説です。
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Estado del libro
Llegó a tiempo pero maltratado de la pasta
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Five Stars
Good!
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On beautiful literature
Simply remarkable, witty writing. On Beauty is a subtle criticism of class-schemed academic microcosms, where nothing is what is seems. The more beautiful it looks, the worse it turns out to be when reading between the lines. Like Rambrandt's paintings that Howard and Monty keep intellectualizing about, there is always far more beneath the surface than the eye originally meets. In Smith's work, only the poor souls are pure and protected from corruption. Academics, intellectuals venture with their eyes closed into immoral affairs and the constant destruction of the basic principles from their education, though ground-landed as it was. Smith offers a dip inside a metisse commingling of things and people who were obviously never meant to get together in the first place, and the mess that comes out of it. I had a great time reading it, with boundless admiration for the writing.
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What an extraordinary book!!!
10/19/05 It is an honor to review ON BEAUTY, Zadie Smith. I read the book, putting it down only to walk the dog, talk with my husband and sleep. I regretted leaving the people in the book when it ended. On Beauty is full of characters; perhaps this is a flaw, but I found the people exciting and all were differentiated, most growing or changing in some way in the course of the book. The book begins with a BANG and ends with a bang and a whimper; how, I wonder, will the people go on with their lives? Reading On Beauty is similar to walking down a crowded street in lower Manhattan, a street filled with people of every nation, every color, all talking with or often at cross purposes to each other, but all, nonetheless, living full lives. If for no other reason than this next one, the book is worth reading: Zadie Smith has an absolutely accutely attuned ear for accents. She has captured, on paper, the accents of people from all economic, educational and social walks of life. It is amazing to hear people talking so clearly on paper. Who am I to say this, but I will take this chance: I do believe that 40, 50 years from now, when people want to know what life was like in 2005, they will just pick up this book and enter life in our present, their past. This book is about people in all our glorious, basic, stupid and fantastic selves, with hundreds of roads to take, but the one taken really does make a difference in peoples' lives. I think that you cannot skim this book. It is actually an easy read, but the book is so full of people and ideas and those marvellous accents, that only a careful reading will allow you to enter fully into this book. I can hardly wait until Smith's next book. I also read Smith's book, White Teeth, but truly, I feel that this book definitely tops White Teeth. Zadie Smith is only 30 years old--imagine what her "take" on life will be as she grows older???
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I loved it.
Richly flawed characters in an eloquent narrative makes for a very engaging read. I loved it.