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Intimations zadie smith review5/31/2023 ![]() The collision of this ‘global humbling’ with another global watershed moment, the proliferation of the Black Lives Matter protest movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, is not coincidental. In ‘The American Exception’, the collection’s sole formerly published essay (in which Smith succeeds in writing of the current US president without naming him – a quiet act of thumbing her nose), she laments, ‘we are great with death – we are mighty with it’. Within the present there exist further subdivisions of pasts and presents marked by social distancing, mandatory mask-wearing, hopefulness.Įven in Melbourne, we are more likely than not to be thankful that we are not living in the United States or the United Kingdom or India or Brazil. ![]() We mark time as belonging to a pre-Covid era or the present reality. Midway through the city’s second week of Lockdown 2.0, there is a nebulous feeling of dispiritedness. ![]() Since then the daily tolls have risen alarmingly. On the July afternoon when I first read Intimations, novelist and prolific essayist Zadie Smith’s new book of essays, Melbourne registered its highest number of Covid-19 cases – 484 positives, with two deaths. ![]()
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