今週のNew YorkerではZadie Smithの短編が読めます

アラフォー世代で実力派の作家として必ず名前があがるであろうZadie Smithが今週のNew Yorkerで短編を発表しています。定期購読者ではなくても全文読むことができます。また、アプリでは彼女の朗読を聞くこともできます。

FICTION
MOONLIT LANDSCAPE WITH BRIDGE
BY ZADIE SMITH
FEBRUARY 10, 2014

FEBRUARY 3, 2014
THIS WEEK IN FICTION: ZADIE SMITH
POSTED BY CRESSIDA LEYSHON

英語圏の言語と文化 (放送大学教材) (2011/03) 井口 篤、バーナード ウィルソン 他 商品詳細を見る

2012年にはNWという小説がニューヨークタイムズのベストブックの10冊として選ばれています。また、On Beautyは放送大学のテキストとして使われています。

NW
By Zadie Smith.
The Penguin Press, $26.95.
Smith’s piercing new novel, her first in seven years, traces the friendship of two women who grew up in a housing project in northwest London, their lives disrupted by fateful choices and the brutal efficiency of chance. The narrative edges forward in fragments, uncovering truths about identity and money and sex with incandescent language that, for all of its formal experimentation, is intimate and searingly direct.




“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool?… A billion dollars.”

短編小説に関しては興味がある方に読んでいただくとして、Facebook10周年を迎えた今、映画The Social Networkを批評して話題になった以下の2010年に発表されたレビューをご紹介します。

Generation Why?
Zadie Smith
The Social Network
a film directed by David Fincher, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
by Jaron Lanier
Knopf, 209 pp., $24.95

Words checked = [5487]
Words in Oxford 3000™ = [85%]

抜粋したのは、ザッカーバーグのモチベーションがお金でも女の子ではないとしたら、どういうものがあるだろうと考察しているところです。

If it’s not for money and it’s not for girls—what is it for? With Zuckerberg we have a real American mystery. Maybe it’s not mysterious and he’s just playing the long game, holding out: not a billion dollars but a hundred billion dollars. Or is it possible he just loves programming? No doubt the filmmakers considered this option, but you can see their dilemma: how to convey the pleasure of programming—if such a pleasure exists—in a way that is both cinematic and comprehensible? Movies are notoriously bad at showing the pleasures and rigors of art-making, even when the medium is familiar.

Programming is a whole new kind of problem. Fincher makes a brave stab at showing the intensity of programming in action (“He’s wired in,” people say to other people to stop them disturbing a third person who sits before a laptop wearing noise-reducing earphones) and there’s a “vodka-shots-and-programming” party in Zuckerberg’s dorm room that gives us some clue of the pleasures. But even if we spent half the film looking at those busy screens (and we do get glimpses), most of us would be none the wiser. Watching this movie, even though you know Sorkin wants your disapproval, you can’t help feel a little swell of pride in this 2.0 generation. They’ve spent a decade being berated for not making the right sorts of paintings or novels or music or politics. Turns out the brightest 2.0 kids have been doing something else extraordinary. They’ve been making a world.

World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: How can I do it? Zuckerberg solved that one in about three weeks. The other question, the ethical question, he came to later: Why? Why Facebook? Why this format? Why do it like that? Why not do it another way? The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the “Why” of Facebook. He uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the site helps everyone connect with people and share information with the people they want to stay connected with….” Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits—none of this is important. That a lot of social networking software explicitly encourages people to make weak, superficial connections with each other (as Malcolm Gladwell has recently argued1), and that this might not be an entirely positive thing, seem to never have occurred to him.

こういうしっかりとしたレビューを読むことも英語の学習になると思います。