The long, lazy Sunday morning read

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One of the greatest pleasures of my Sunday is the waking up at the crack of dawn. Perhaps it is sheer perversity but knowing that I have nowhere to go, nothing to do induces a ceratin pleasure in lying in and reading. Most often, it would be a book I began on Saturday. And a slightly hefty tome at that. For even after getting up, one has the pleasure of a lazy long morning to sit with a book and allow myself an uninterrupted read. Thus it happened that I finally picked up a much overdue big book waiting in my ‘to read shelf’.

In my advertising days, each time we made a campaign presentation, I often wished for a client as represented by an individual rather than a committee. While an individual could only be accused of being whimsical, with a committee you were condemned to the fact that the principle of lowest common factor often worked... it’s perhaps the hallmark of committees that mediocrity is so often saluted simply because it pleases all and demands nothing more. Anything that is singular and exceptional is often dismissed as being too lateral... Naturally with Zadies Smith’s On Beauty, I went to it with a certain degree of skepticism, even more so knowing that the book had been on the Booker Short list for that year. The committee had approved. Oh hell, I thought.

You could accuse me of prejudice then. And serious prejudice too. For some years ago I had reviewed Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Much had been made of that book. Much has been made even more of its author. Salman Rushdie had blurbed it as a book with bite. Other reviewers taking their cues from Rushdie had gushed, oohed and aahed.

Zadie Smith is immensely talented. There was no doubt about that. Even by reading the first few paragraphs of White Teeth, I knew that. Here was a distinct voice. Here was a style that was full of verve and vigour. Here was a writer who would someday find her place among the greats. But it was not to be with White Teeth, for me, at least. The self-indulgent ramblings, the completely unnecessary meanderings, the cuteness (that reviewers labelled as precocious) which was fun to read in small doses became tedious.