What Bath was to Austen, or Paris to Balzac, Willesden is to Zadie Smith. With every new book, Smith returns to northwest London to fill in another detail of the canvas that she began with White Teeth in 2000. The Embassy of Cambodia centres on Fatou, an immigrant from the Ivory Coast who works for a Pakistani family, the Derawals, as a maid. We follow Fatou’s day-to-day life as she goes swimming, chats with her church friend, Andrew, and becomes increasingly fascinated by the Embassy of Cambodia, not far from her home.
This book is no more than a long short story, but it contains more small pleasures per page than most novels. Few writers are better at capturing how people speak. Smith knows how to wield a question mark—“Yeah… that’s not really how it works?” says an unhelpful receptionist—and she has a gift for the comic rhythms of speech. “If Nigeria plays Ivory Coast and we beat you into the ground, I’m laughing, man!” says Andrew. “I can’t lie. I’m celebrating. Stomp! Stomp!”
The mundane and the tragic hover side-by-side throughout. Fatou and Andrew discuss the Holocaust, God and the devil, but their conversation is riddled with amusing mistakes. Fatou saves the life of the Derawals’ youngest child and then instantly worries about getting the washing done. The story is narrated in the grand voice of “we, the people of Willesden,” almost like a Greek chorus, but what is described is everyday. The effect is strange and haunting, like one of Kafka’s elusive parables.
