There is nothing easy about Zadie Smith’s NW!

When I began reading ‘NW’ by Zadie Smith last year, I soon felt the urge to put down the book after a few pages. Reading the opening of NW, where you are thrown out to a Woolf-style stream-of-consciousness, I instantly knew the book is going to be quite a work and less of leisure, that it is going to be a panorama and not stuck in a substantive plot, but I finally did submit to its style. I believe writing any book is ultimately about making people feel. Plot, structure, techniques, theme, perspectives really doesn’t bother me much. And that’s why NW appealed a lot to me as a reader.

For a few pages I was puzzled by the style and language in the book, but soon the linguistics of London got me, somehow it felt familiar. Maybe it is the stunning originality that each element brings in, from her characters, Leah, Felix, Keisha, Nathan to the neighbourhood they were all raised in, from the way cultures clash around in each of their lives to the difficulty in fixating an easy ethnicity to all of them! It does leave you dazed as of what to make of it., but then isn’t that what sense of living in a city is like? Do we ever really know what to make out of it?

It is quite redundant to try and see NW as a kaleidoscope of city life. For me, NW is more about experiencing direct, primary thoughts, about getting to know the retreating lines of private and social lives and constantly finding yourselves in her different characters! Isn’t that the best way an author can tell a story about the place she grew up placing it on a very real map? By making the reader always conscious of a very real map out there, a map that is rooted in the insecurities, prejudices and ambitions of north-west Londoners, one that provides us with a multitudes of vision

I really see the beauty of fragmentation in her writing. The way sentences slide here and there, like our thoughts, without attempting to make many connections, not much overwhelmed by their meanings. I am that kind of reader who would not want everything single details to be written for me, I would like to have my bits of imagination here and there while I read and I appreciate how Zadie has left pockets of spaces for the reader to fill in.

NW requires you to not just be conscious of the questions of race, female experiences and working-class life, but you subjectively encounter and live through their changing contexts and locations. I don’t understand how else can one can see through the ideas of identity, its invention, execution and completion. Smith’s diverse narrative techniques, at least for me, made this kind of reading possible.

One of NW’s review rightly describes the fiction as ‘the art of line-crossing’. There is a line-crossing of all sorts and kind. You do not get a strict structure or a single narrative mode, instead, you are presented with a screenplay, snippets, IM chats, food menu, and yes, very choppy language too. Easily one of Zadie’s best work and one of my favourites!