Almost one year after Covid19 entered our precarious lives, more or less indirectly, I haven´t read more than articles and a couple of essays about it. The big literary stories taking place during pandemic times are still to be written probably and I am waiting to read them, hopefully soon.
Zadie Smith´s Intimations was published in July, when the world was taking a deceptive break from the Covid19 before the new waves were stumbling over. I love her writing since spending one weekend day many years ago reading in one sit White Teeth, a literary marathon that besides revealing a great writer, it reminded me after many years of denial that my love for fiction was not diminished by the years of exclusive focus on history and political science reading.
I kept reading almost everything that Zadie Smith wrote although the sparkle was not always there.
This latest collection of 6 essays inspired by the outburst of the virus was though one of those occurences when the sparkle dissipated completely. The writings is easygoing - maybe too easy - and one can easily read them in less than two hours. The topics are simple yet with a dramatic impact in the everyday life. She touches upon subjects like loneliness, loneliness within loneliness, the inequalities widened and revealed by the virus during the pandemic, particularly in America, the condition of the creator.
I wrote ´touches upon´ on purpose, because sadly, all those topics are mentioned like needed to eff them from a list of required topics expected to read in a book written during pandemic but sadly it does not go beyond the honorary mentions. There is no ´cri du coeur´. Those essays are less than a journalistic report and much less than a Marcus Aurelius-inspired kind of meditations. I would call them harshly sidenotes from a pandemic, but there are so drafty that I can hardly believe that they were turned into a collection of essays.
Rating: 2 stars
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