On Beauty
What a wonderful writer Zadie Smith is. I enjoyed her first novel ‘White Teeth’ enormously and having purchased a copy of ‘On Beauty’ from the Turunç Cat’s Protection League stall I now fully appreciate why The Novel was short listed for the 2005 Booker Prize. Here is an excerpt:
“Mozart’s Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit. The pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right on its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don’t know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don’t know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by all the violins. The closer you get to the pit, the more you begin to have a sense that what awaits you will be terrifying. Yet you experience this terror as a kind of blessing, a gift. Your long walk would have had no meaning were it not for this pit at the end of it. You peer over the precipice: a burst of ethereal noise crashes over you. In the pit is a great choir, . . . . . The choir is the heavenly host and simultaneously the devil’s army. It is also every person who has changed you during your time on this earth: your many lovers; your family; your enemies . . . “
