Review of 'Spring' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
A second read, this time for book group. This is my least favorite Ali Smith book, but I still liked a lot about it: art references to Tacita Dean and her monumental avalanche drawings on chalkboard; political references to Brexit, Trump, and British immigration and detention centers; literary references to Katherine Mansfield, Rainer Maria Rilke and Pericles by Shakespeare; the warm, connected dialogue between filmmaker Richard Lease and his dying scriptwriter friend Paddy Heal.
Smith's usual light touch with politics is a little heavier than usual, and feels a bit more lecturey than I like in a novel, but the magical 12 year old Florence, who weaves her way through the book and even gets an immigrant detention center to thoroughly clean its toilets, mitigates the polemics somewhat.
This story is stuffed with the myriad, connected wonders expected from a Smith title, and woven throughout is what I like best …
A second read, this time for book group. This is my least favorite Ali Smith book, but I still liked a lot about it: art references to Tacita Dean and her monumental avalanche drawings on chalkboard; political references to Brexit, Trump, and British immigration and detention centers; literary references to Katherine Mansfield, Rainer Maria Rilke and Pericles by Shakespeare; the warm, connected dialogue between filmmaker Richard Lease and his dying scriptwriter friend Paddy Heal.
Smith's usual light touch with politics is a little heavier than usual, and feels a bit more lecturey than I like in a novel, but the magical 12 year old Florence, who weaves her way through the book and even gets an immigrant detention center to thoroughly clean its toilets, mitigates the polemics somewhat.
This story is stuffed with the myriad, connected wonders expected from a Smith title, and woven throughout is what I like best about the novel: the moving story of the loss of a close friend. The conversations between Richard and Paddy, relaxed but also brilliant, seem absolutely authentic to me, and my favorite chapter is the one in which Richard visits Paddy five months before her death that he doesn't want to accept. He tells her about his rescue from his moribund directing career, in the form of a movie based on a mythical meeting between Rilke and Mansfield in Switzerland in 1922. In a sharp, smart dialogue, Paddy voices her opinion that the concept is a bad idea.
"Sex scenes? Paddy says.
He nods.
Between Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke? she says. In what did you say -- 1922?
In his tower, in her hotel room...in the hotel's gardens...in the hotel's billiard room on the billiear table...Comedy fuck, he says.
Paddy laughs out loud.
I'm not laughing at the comedy fuck, she says. I'm laughing because it's not just laughable, it's impossible. For one thing, Mansfield had fully developed TB by 1922. She died of it at the start of 1923."
Vivid, factual details married with fictional ones make the dialogue real and are what I love about Smith's writing. I can't wait to read another one.
