I read this essay collection on the strength of Zadie Smith’s later collection Dead and Alive. Although I didn’t enjoy Changing My Mind quite as much, it’s an entertaining and enjoyable read by an excellent essayist.
I particularly enjoyed the piece contrasting Roland Barthes’ and Vladimir Nabokov’s views on who gets final say on interpreting a piece of writing, the reader or the writer? There was also an excellent essay on Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo and the Golden Age of Hollywood, and I was astonished to find myself interested in a thoughtful piece about George Eliot and Middlemarch.
I wish more novelists would publish essay collections.
Recommended.
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