It is also a book about race and privilege. Swing Time is a book about dance, and about female friendships, and about living life as a shadow. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow. … A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I never had any light of my own. I felt I was losing track of my physical location, rising above my body, viewing my life from a very distant point, hovering over it. I’d lost my job, a certain version of my life, my privacy, yet all these things felt small and petty next to this joyful sense I had watching the dance, and following its precise rhythms in my own body. I felt a wonderful lightness in my body, a ridiculous happiness, it seemed to come from nowhere. Here is the narrator as she watches Fred Astaire dance with his own shadows: They build rhythmically, one clause piling on top of another, the commas like elegantly pointed toes delineating each step. The sentences in Swing Time, Zadie Smith’s new book, are like dancers.
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