London NW

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London NW (English original title NW ) is a 2012 novel by the British writer Zadie Smith . The title refers to the postcode of north-west London , the location of the novel. The experimental narrative alternates between four perspectives, portrayed by a first-person narrator or in the third person. Smith uses stream of consciousness , indirect speech , script dialogue, and other storytelling techniques that aim to capture the polyphony of contemporary urban life. The New York Times named the novel in the Top 10 Novels of 2012. The novel was nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2013. In 2014 the novel was published in German by Tanja Handels by Kiepenheuer & Witsch .

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At the center of the novel are four 30-year-old Londoners who have gone very different ways since childhood in the Caldwell social housing estate in north-west London and whose lives cross fatefully once more.

Part 1: Leah Hanwell falls for a con artist who one day rings her doorbell and asks for financial support in an emergency. The encounter with the fraudster leads her to question her own knowledge of human nature and the trust in the people in the neighborhood.

Part 2: Felix Cooper is well on his way to overcoming his alcoholism and drug addiction. He wants to start a new life with his new girlfriend Grace, buys a new car and meets his still drug-addicted ex-lover one last time to say goodbye. On the way home he is killed in an armed robbery.

Part 3: Natalie Blake achieved everything she set out to do. Successful in her job as a lawyer, married to an equally successful investment banker from a rich family, with whom she has two children, she made it from the social housing to one of the most expensive areas of London. Their regular secret meetings with couples with whom they meet online for anonymous sex fit less well into the image of the model family.

Part 4: Natalie's husband discovers her online account, which she uses for their affairs, and confronts her. Disturbed by the confrontation, Natalie flees into the night and wanders aimlessly through the streets. She meets her youth crush Nathan Bogle, who is now apparently financed by dubious machinations for his drug addiction. Natalie is about to throw herself off a bridge, but Nathan prevents her from doing so.

Part 5 : Natalie's friend Leah and her husband Michel have also had a marital crisis: Michel has found out that, contrary to the original agreement, Leah has never stopped using her contraceptives and refuses to have children. The argument is interrupted by Natalie's visit. She wants to consult with Leah about her experience with Nathan. The news of an armed robbery with fatalities casts a new light on the nocturnal encounter. Natalie and Leah conclude that Nathan was involved in the murder and decide to notify the police.

characters

Leah Hanwel : Her parents come from Ireland and offered her a comparatively well-protected childhood. Never particularly ambitious, she now works for an organization that distributes state lottery money for social projects. Her husband Michel, a Frenchman with Algerian roots, with whom Leah is still in love as on the first day, desperately wants children - a wish that Leah does not share. She continues to use the pill without informing Michel about it. She is basically satisfied with her life and does not want to change anything, but still suffers from the comparison with her now rich childhood friend Natalie.

Felix Cooper : After years of drug addiction, he is in the process of getting his life back on track. He frees himself from negative influences in his environment and envisages a film career. The courage to do so is given by his new girlfriend Grace, whose optimistic attitude to life infects him.

Natalie Blake : Natalie has Jamaican roots. She gave up her baptismal name Keisha during her studies in order to better fit into the upper class that is now open to her. As a successful lawyer who is married to an equally successful investment banker, she was the only member of her family to achieve social advancement. So she is able to support the criminally convicted younger brother and the large older sister financially. Nevertheless, she is repeatedly accused of being like a coconut - brown on the outside, white on the inside; someone who denies his origins in order to ingratiate himself with the ruling class. Natalie feels increasingly alienated from her original social environment and can no longer open herself fully to Leah, her best friend from her youth.

Nathan Bogle : In his youth he showed great potential as a footballer, which he was unable to realize due to his drug addiction. He now makes a living from criminal activities that he carries out from a house on Leah's Street.

subjects

A central theme of the novel is the reorganization of British class society . The color of the skin is increasingly changing from an element of identity to pure externality and, as can be seen in Natalie's example, no longer automatically leads to an assignment to a certain milieu. Still, society has not necessarily become more egalitarian. In a society geared towards merciless competition, belonging to a common cultural minority is no longer an automatic guarantee of solidarity. Individual ambitious immigrants may achieve status and prosperity, but this does not reduce the social tensions between rich and poor. And even if the color of the skin no longer determines the life course to the same extent as it used to, ethnic patterns still often determine how people are perceived. Skin color remains a relevant aspect even in post-ethnic society, but it is becoming increasingly open to interpretation.

In a world in which one can choose from an increasing variety of life plans, the subject of introspection is gaining in importance. Leah, who cannot do anything with a traditional mother's role and thus eludes the still widespread social expectations, sums up the new freedom: "I alone write the lexicon that defines me." This freedom goes to self-definition but also with an increasing responsibility. Those who can decide for themselves have to consider their decisions carefully and also have more cause for doubt. The possibility of being the author of your own life is portrayed as happiness and burden at the same time. In an interview with Deutschlandfunk, Zadie Smith emphasizes the challenges of this freedom, the responsibility of making a decision and the ambivalent feelings that it triggers in those affected: “Life is no longer hypothetical, we no longer become something, we already are . This is a terrifying feeling for most people because it robs them of choice and in the end they have to choose one thing. But that's exactly what it's about: Freedom is terrifying! "

However, introspection does not protect against self-deception . The multiple possibilities of self-definition can also lead to a self-presentation that no longer has much to do with the actual needs of the person. In contrast to Leah, Natalie tries hard to meet all imaginable social demands - be it in her roles as daughter, sister, mother, wife, lawyer, rich, poor, British or Jamaican. It is wiped out between the sometimes contradicting demands of these roles - each role requires its own disguise. Natalie's various roles ultimately become a prison for her, from which she tries to break out through swinger meetings with online acquaintances.

Another issue is the social pressure on childless women to become mothers. Through the characters Leah and Natalie, the novel shows different reactions to these social expectations. Leah ultimately does not give in to the pressure, but feels compelled to hide her fundamentally negative attitude towards the subject of reproduction for as long as possible. Natalie does not want to be impaired by children on her career path, but she also wants to meet social expectations - for her it is above all about the right time to achieve her professional and private goals as much as possible. The different approaches to bringing up children in the various milieus are also discussed, especially with regard to mothers' claims to perfection. “Anyone from Caldwell thought everything was fine as long as the child wasn't thrown down the stairs. Anyone who was not from Caldwell felt that nothing was best if everything wasn't done absolutely perfectly, and even then there was no guarantee. "

style

Instead of an authoritative narrator , Smith uses different writing styles and narrative forms to portray the peculiarities and complexity of the different perspectives of her four main characters. For example, the life story of Natalie, who is always efficiency-oriented, perfectly organized, is systematically processed in 185 clearly separated, numbered vignettes, while the rather aimless, serene Leah lets herself drift along in the flow of thoughts without points and commas in the part of the book dedicated to her. The stream of consciousness technique used by Smith in this context is reminiscent of James Joyce , Virginia Woolf, and John Dos Passos . Another echo of Joyce can be found in the portrayal of the plot - just like Joyce, Smith also uses a series of smells and sounds to conjure up the London borough of Kilburn in her novel as impressively as possible.

Even if the life stories of the protagonists seem independent of one another at first glance, a closer reading reveals contrasts and subtle references between the characters, which contribute to their characterization. Due to the different narrative techniques and the frequent change of perspective, there is a strong tension between the inside and outside perspective of the different characters. While Smith relies heavily on the inner perspective with Leah, Natalie and Felix, with Nathan she deliberately refrains from channeling sympathy in his favor through the representation of his inner life. The figure should remain alien to the readers in order to confront them with their own reaction to the figure of the lonely, homeless junkie, who is often perceived as a threat. For Smith, she explains in an interview with Deutschlandfunk, it is about "preserving his otherness and not domesticated him".

While Smith's earlier books relied on a smoothly continuous narrative flow, their style in NW is characterized by the staccato-like sequence of quick associations, often conveyed through short sentences, dialogues and individual scenes in a wild mixture of literary and street language. Nevertheless, the flow of reading is not impaired.

reception

The novel received high praise from critics, including James Wood , who included the novel in his 2012 list of Top Books. Wood values ​​Smith above all for the courage to turn away from earlier successful recipes to disturb her previous fans and attests to her a clear, steady, realistic spirit behind the stylistic experiments. Philip Henscher praises Smith for the virtuoso narrative technique and her ability to observe interpersonal behavior and describes the novel as a "joyful, optimistic, angry masterpiece". Ijoma Mangold is not entirely convinced of Smith's combination of empathic realism and controlled distance, but appreciates the novel's usefulness as a “reference work for discussions about globalized society and performance thinking”. While Mangold misses an authorial narrator who could have given the novel its own will, Nike Zafiris sees the particular claim of the novel in this resulting freedom of interpretation. Zafiris therefore does not find the criticism sometimes expressed against Smith that she shows too little empathy for her own characters appropriate here. This view is also shared by Hannah Pilarczyk , who attests Smith a sincere sympathy for the two female protagonists. While Smith's recurring themes of origin, migration, social advancement and exclusion, as well as the role of education in these processes in earlier novels often seemed a bit superfluous to her, she sees London NW as Smith's analytical, precise and at the same time most touching work. Johann Schloemann sees a certain risk that the characters will be instrumentalized for the mere illustration of socio-economic facts, and ultimately only finds a lack of perspective in the variety of perspectives, but recommends the novel simply because of its “sovereign, illusion-free, never sedate prose”.

filming

The novel was adapted for television by the BBC in 2016 . Directed by Saul Dibb ; the script was written by Rachel Bennette . The main roles were played by Nikki Amuka-Bird and Phoebe Fox . The series aired on BBC Two on November 14, 2016.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Tilman Spreckelsen: Zadie Smith: London NW: Your confession is pure selfishness, Natalie . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine . October 1, 2014, ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed May 21, 2019]).
  2. ↑ Julia Encke: New novel by Zadie Smith: brought to life . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine . December 22, 2012, ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed May 21, 2019]).
  3. ↑ Mark Brown: Women's prize for fiction reveals 'staggeringly strong' shortlist . In: The Guardian . April 16, 2013, ISSN  0261-3077 (English, theguardian.com [accessed May 17, 2019]).
  4. ↑ a b c d Johan Schloemann: Everything is a struggle here . In: sueddeutsche.de . January 9, 2014, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed May 21, 2019]).
  5. ↑ a b c d e f Ijoma Mangold: Zadie Smith: "Outside brown, inside white" . In: The time . January 9, 2014, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed on May 20, 2019]).
  6. ↑ a b c d Nike Zafiris: Zadie Smith: "London NW" - "Freedom is terrifying!" In: Deutschlandfunk. May 14, 2014, accessed on May 21, 2019 (German).
  7. ↑ a b James Wood: Books of the Year . December 17, 2012, ISSN  0028-792X (English, newyorker.com [accessed May 21, 2019]).
  8. ^ Philip Hensher: NW by Zadie Smith: review . September 3, 2012, ISSN  0307-1235 (English, telegraph.co.uk [accessed May 21, 2019]).
  9. ↑ Hannah Pilarczyk: "London NW" by Zadie Smith: Show your muscles . In: Spiegel Online . January 10, 2014 ( spiegel.de [accessed May 21, 2019]).
  10. ↑ Sam Wollaston: NW review - Zadie Smith's London tale has never felt so relevant . In: The Guardian . November 14, 2016, ISSN  0261-3077 (English, theguardian.com [accessed May 21, 2019]).
  11. ↑ Natasha Onwuemezi: Amuka-Bird and Fox to star in NW adaptation | The Bookseller. June 13, 2016, accessed May 21, 2019 .
  12. ↑ Tom Meltzer: NW star Nikki Amuka-Bird: 'Zadie is challenging the viewer' . In: The Guardian . November 14, 2016, ISSN  0261-3077 (English, theguardian.com [accessed May 21, 2019]).
  13. ^ Adrian Lobb: NW star Nikki Amuka-Bird: Bursting through the glass ceiling can cause damage. November 21, 2016, accessed May 21, 2019 .