There’s misunderstanding and alienation, sadness and loss. And as the blurb suggests, this can cause problems. The past – as the book keeps on reminding us – is always also in the present, even if we don’t quite comprehend what it is doing there. The children of these immigrants, in turn, have little real feeling for the experiences and histories of their parents. Smith describes first-generation immigrants who look back on their old lives, and the lives of their parents in Bangladesh and the Caribbean, with a mixture of perplexity and fear. Smith is reminding us that the past is a foreign country, where things are done differently. Eighties allusions fattened books such as The Northern Clemency and The Line of Beauty at the start of this millennium, but White Teeth is not just ramming in pop-culture. White Teeth spans a period from the mid-1970s until the late 1990s (give or take a few excursions into the more distant past) – so the past the book describes is often closer to the time when Smith was writing than 2000 is to our own present. To read such nostalgia for old objects and customs, evoked with such enthusiasm, is haunting.
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