One of the new Readers Book Lovers of the JUMP Team, Karine Von Beek born in Belgium but living and working in Soverato, proposed the new book trailer based on a novel of Zadie Smith titled “Swing time” which tells of the absolute and uneasy friendship between teenagers, the world of multicultural suburbia, and the uncanny attraction to those who are driven by talent and harbor a secret.
Karine is an adult woman, a teacher of German in the local cuisine college and also teacher of English for a small class of seniors of the Third Age University. JUMP involved them in 6 meetings during the months of October and November 2022 producing 4 new book trailers. Karine who is also smarter in using digital tools learnt how to use adobe express and created another excellent book trailer.
Born to a Jamaican mother and an English father, Zadie Smith grew up in the Brent neighborhood of Northwest London and attended public school there. At fourteen, she decided to change her name from Sadie to Zadie to add an exotic touch, creating a different identity for herself. She tap-danced for years, dreaming of becoming a musical dancer (“I stopped when I realized that musicals were no longer being done by anyone,” she said wryly), but at eighteen she moved to King’s College, Cambridge, to study English literature, with plans to become a journalist or university lecturer. She reads a great deal and studies her favorite authors: Kafka, George Eliot, Nabokov but especially Edward Morgan Forster, the greatest inspiration for her novels.
Their skin is the same shade of brown, they have freckles in the same places, and they are the same height. On that Saturday morning in 1982, they are still neither friends nor enemies; they barely speak to each other. Yet an invisible force connects them, on the threshold of their first dance class. Tracey and the narrator of this story are similar, but also different. Tracey has seductive curls gathered with satin ribbons, mini-skirts, and a bright smile. She has a luminous talent for dancing. The narrator has intelligence and a stern nose, a tendency to melancholy. She has flat feet but an anticipatory intuition for music.
Friends, accomplices, rivals. At their first dance class they arrive accompanied by their mothers, who could not be more opposite. One obese, dressed in rhinestones and flashy brands, loud and enthusiastic about her daughter’s talent, Tracey’s. The other so beautiful that she needed no makeup or jewelry, perhaps not even her own daughter, a feminist bent on making the social leap into the cultured, radical chic world. In spite of their mothers, the friendship between the two young girls grows, very close, fueled by an underground competition. Then suddenly it ends. They have grown up, each must come to terms with her talents: Tracey joins a prestigious dance troupe but life does not turn out to be as easy as it had been to dance at age seven; the narrator becomes an assistant to a tyrannical and magnetic famous singer. It is to follow the star’s philanthropic whims that the story moves to Africa, to a land where people travel back in time to find their roots and dance, just like Tracey. Zadie Smith returns to chronicle the absolute and uneasy friendship between teenagers, the world of multicultural suburbia, the uncanny attraction to those who are driven by talent and harbor a secret. The dance in these pages becomes Zadie Smith’s own writing, which has natural grace, never loses its rhythm, and knows how to narrate the ambitions and social injustices, the desires of teenagers and the dreams of our age. (Translated from https://www.ibs.it/swing-time-libro-zadie-smith/e/9788804675624#cc-anchor-descrizione)
Zadie Smith’s life is reported in the women’s encyclopedia http://www.enciclopediadelledonne.it/biografie/zadie-smith/. “Never attended a creative writing school in my life. They scare me; most of the time they are support groups for those people who think writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy. The best thing, the only training is to read other people’s books.”
Enjoy watching the book trailer “Swing Time” of Zodie Smith at this link
https://europeanbooktrailers.eu/trailer/swing-time/
This new book trailer means a lot for JUMP because it represents the continuation of the cooperation with the Third Age University of Soverato. We are very grateful for that and we will continue all 2023.
Article written by Erika Gerardini, the JUMP Team