The Fraud: The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller

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This is an ambitious piece of writing, and an ambitious read!! I hate to DNF an ARC, but I cannot spend another three hours of my one short life in this treacle. Pithy, richly detailed. . . Smith’s sixth novel explores themes of race, class, power and loss. . . in many ways, The Fraud has much in common with Smith’s contemporary novels in its deft portrayal of metropolitan society and the entangled lives within. . . as this novel shows, there is no better guide to people and their bottomlessness than Smith herself.”— The i

Zadie Smith is a gifted storyteller and prose stylist. And The Fraud makes a compelling case that historical fiction can lie to tell the truth.” — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette The fraud is referencing The Tichborne Trial that is the lifeline of the novel, every other theme is springing from it, chosen by Smith perhaps because: I'm not the world's biggest fan of Zadie Smith. I liked White Teeth, but that's the only one I was able to finish. The other ones were... not to my taste. However, this new one, historical fiction set in the Victorian era about fraud, identity, and the shadow of colonialism? That's my cup of tea, baby! More often, though, the book’s structure is uneven. One wishes, for instance, that the chapters would signal their time jumps more consistently, so that one wasn’t wondering if one was with the Eliza of the 1830s or the 1870s. But these infelicities stop mattering when we are deep into the trial and the book turns into a portrait of people with thwarted ambitions, of people who, like Ainsworth, become frauds without knowing it.If you had a riot of a time at such a gathering, then by all means, you might adore this mash-up (I cannot call it a novel, it is three disparate novels rather unconvincingly pasted together around the edges). It is hard indeed to judge a respectable woman on her source of income, Mr Cruikshank, when so very few means of procuring an income are open to her.’ In the 1860s, a butcher with a shadowy past claimed that he was Sir Roger Tichborne, the presumed-dead son of Lady Tichborne and the heir to a vast fortune. The evidence against the butcher seemed overwhelming: He could not remember his supposed classmates, could not recall basic facts of a gentleman’s education and could not even speak French, Tichborne’s first language. More damning, details about his “missing years” at sea were shown to be false. And yet for many thousands of devoted fans, the very audaciousness of his claim argued in its favor.

It is 1873. Mrs Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper - and cousin by marriage - of a once famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.One of Tichborne’s supporters was Andrew Bogle, a former slave who knew Roger Tichborne as a child. His unwavering conviction that The Claimant was really Tichborne represents another form of truth, and Eliza’s discussions with him open the window on the economic and racial interactions between England and Jamaica. The theme of imprisonment: 1. Slavery in Jamaica; 2. Arthur Orton, the man on trial; 3. Eliza, as a woman and as a Catholic; 4. the poor in England. Yet this book has a lot to offer, it’s well researched and though it’s my first Zadie Smith, it won’t be the last. In addition to the whole idea of “what is truth” is the idea of freedom. Not just the slaves, but women of the day. Eliza is invisible due to her sex and her age. She’s smarter than William, but she’s constrained by her sex. I did like what it had to say about who is a fraud. Not just Castro, but also Ainsworth and even Eliza herself.

Even though the last one is about Ainsworths, it reminded me of reading David Copperfield and Shirley. Then we have another two strands - that of a celebrated case of the time - the Tichborne case where a claimant spends years trying to prove that he was the missing peer Sir Roger Tichborne believed lost at sea.

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Il libro della settimana: L'impostore di Zadie Smith (Mondadori) | Il cacciatore di libri | con Alessandra Tedesco | Radio 24 Zadie Smith’s funny, almost flawless new novel examines identity, the notion of truth and 19th century England and Jamaica in flux. . . . Smith presents a coruscating picture of twin societies in flux, the ways in which 19th-century England and Jamaica were ‘two sides of the same problem, profoundly intertwined,’ joined at the hip by Andrew Bogle’s ‘secret word’: slavery.”— The Observer Smith’s characteristically expansive new novel, The Fraud, works by indirection. . .Some of what The Fraud says about our own time is troubling and meant to be so. But Smith is never solemn. . .Her curiosity seems endless, she’s willing to let the past surprise her, and though the book doesn’t offer a new form of historical fiction, I would bet that it does represent a new moment in the career of Zadie Smith.” —Michael Gorra, The New York Review of Books

But no story captured her quite like the saga of the Tichborne Claimant. It had everything: toffs, Catholics, money, sex, mistaken identity, an inheritance, High Court Judges, snobbery, exotic locations, ‘the struggle of the honest working man’ – as opposed to the ‘undeserving poor’ – and ‘the power of a mother’s love’.” I would get caught up in Eliza Touchet's story and then would be jerked away to the trial of The Claimant, a man who claimed to be Robert Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne estate. Touchet is the narrator of the book, both of the author salons she was witness to and the trial. I often wondered what she felt was the more important story! I did love Eliza's character and Zadie did a marvelous job of voicing her. Zadie Smith is clever enough to make anything sound plausible, but the most outrageous elements of her new novel, “The Fraud,” are actually true. la storia della vita di Andrew Bogle, un ex schiavo che fu uno dei testimoni del processo Tichborne. It’s difficult to give any idea of how extraordinary this book is. One of the great historical novels, certainly. But has any historical novel ever combined such brilliantly researched and detailed history with such intensely imagined fiction? Or such a range of living, breathing, surprising characters with such an idiosyncratically structured narrative?’ Michael FraynSorry this is so long, but it’s either “This is a great book!” - or the full version that follows. :-) Zadie Smith’s first foray into historical fiction is both splendidly modern and authentically old. . . Smith, in the way of a Victorian stereoscope, ties together bountiful images, personalities and dramas into a single dazzling, three-dimensional picture. The Fraud is the genuine article.”— The Independent