As if it were a marketing stunt!

But then this champion of ''the synthesis of disparate things''was raised to enjoy plurality. ''What you're born into is obviouslywhat's natural to you,'' she recalls. ''It was always strange to meto go round to other people's houses, and everybody seemed to bethe same colour.'' From her grudging teenage acceptance that the African Americannovelist Zora Neale Hurston had a quality of ''soul'' that couldspeak to the black-female side even of this pigeonhole-dodgingyoung Londoner, to her investigation of Kafka's lonely convictionthat ''the impossible thing was collectivity itself'', severalpieces turn on Smith's sceptical view of belonging. ''I can't sign up to any collectivity which is immediate andunthinking,'' she insists. ''There are communities of Buffylovers [for her, the Vampire Slayer embodied a peak of televisualart], there are communities of people who adore Kafka. Those arereal communities to me, which are motivated by care and interestand personal involvement. I can't assume a collectivity of feelingwith millions of people I don't know on the basis of geneticindicators.'' If Smith escapes every stifling box, she needs her readers tobreak free as well. ''It is extraordinary how difficult it is toget people who are white to see plurality in people who aren'twhite,'' she frets. She was often asked: '' 'Why do you keep on writing about allthese multi-cultural people?' As if it were a marketing stunt! It'sfascinating - the idea that if you write about non-white peopleit's an angle. You would have to be white to ask thatquestion.'' Yet she will leave the missionary work to others. ''There arepeople who devote their writing lives to banging away at that wall.I can't do it because there are too many other things I'd like todo.'' Those many other things include the appreciation of comedy:''One of the things in English life that I've loved most, and Rosetta Stone software thinkof as most English.'' This passion became personal when her youngerbrother, Ben, mutated into the stand-up ''Doc Brown''. For his proud sister, it ''made me think about what comedy hadmeant to us as children - and part of it is definitely a kind ofdefence, if there's some question mark about who you are or whereyou fit in. Being funny was for both of us a way of smoothing oversome rough edges''. For Smith, Rome meant the chance to change her mind by joiningEurope. Not only did she acquire another language, she immersedherself in current Continental writing, surrounded by a thrivingcounter-culture of artistic rebels. ''In England, you're always co-opted. In Italy, if you want tostay sane, you have to completely and utterly separateyourself.'' That move abroad as a reader of fiction confirmed her in abelief that, in recent times, ''The European tradition is sodivorced from the English - we're at cross purposes at everypoint.'' An essay that contrasts the solid humanism of JosephO'Neill's Netherland with the playful subversion ofnarrative and personality in Tom McCarthy's much more ''European''novel, Remainder, allows Smith to expand on the yawning gulfthat she perceives. ''There's a great positivism and common sense which rules theAnglo-American tradition. For myself, it's not that you abandon thetradition, but just to be mentally abroad is the most refreshingthing.'' A fear of becoming ''entrenched'' peppers her conversation. Shebows to the 92-year-old Diana Athill as open-minded proof that''calcification'' need not arrive with age. And she deplores thepost-9/11 slide into ''a decade of binaries'', as a hopeless notiontakes hold that ''Difference can't be sustained - not just inpolitics and communities, but in the arts as well''.

Posted in: Rosetta Stone,Rosetta Stone Outlet,rosetta stone software,Rosetta Stone V3