A girl's friendship with an older neighbor stands at the center of this multifaceted meditation on aging, art, love, and affection.
"From the Man Booker-shortlisted and Baileys Prize-winning author of How to be both: a breathtakingly inventive new novel--about aging, time, love, and stories themselves--that launches an extraordinary quartet of books called Seasonal... The first installment in a quartet, Seasonal, comprised of four stand-alone books, separate yet interconnected and cyclical (as are the seasons), explores what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take and in our ways with narrative. Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy, and the color hit of Pop Art, Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what …
A girl's friendship with an older neighbor stands at the center of this multifaceted meditation on aging, art, love, and affection.
"From the Man Booker-shortlisted and Baileys Prize-winning author of How to be both: a breathtakingly inventive new novel--about aging, time, love, and stories themselves--that launches an extraordinary quartet of books called Seasonal... The first installment in a quartet, Seasonal, comprised of four stand-alone books, separate yet interconnected and cyclical (as are the seasons), explores what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take and in our ways with narrative. Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy, and the color hit of Pop Art, Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means"--
Inventive prose, timely politics, embedded in history
3 stars
Ali Smith's Autumn contains some truly gorgeous and inventive prose, which by itself makes it worth reading; and as an added bonus, there are frequent riffs on famous works of literature. The story is very much low drama, perhaps to contrast with the turmoil both recent (the Brexit vote has just happened and most of the contemporary characters are greatly shocked by it) and ancient (the 1963 Profumo affair also plays an important role). The novel is entertaining at every point, but the parts perhaps do not come together into something much greater than themselves. In that respect the second volume, Winter, which has a more coherent family drama at its core, is better.
This novel takes what could be rightly described as a stream-of-consciousness narrative and gives it substance, even something close to order. Concerned very much with the perception and passage of time, 'Autumn' may be mistakenly described as a novel without much of a plot, but I firmly believe that is exactly what Smith intended with it.
Dreamy and beautiful. If ever a book were written to be read and re-read this is it. Ali Smith has a way of captivating me through her diction and wordplay. I also thought distant and subtle way she approaches Brexit here is more effective than any direct approach could be. She went for lived tensions and lived complications.
This book has been extremely well-reviewed and was on the Man Booker Prize long list, so maybe it was just too abstract for me, or maybe I just can't get sufficiently emotionally invested in the Brexit vote given what a disaster things are here at home. But I found it scattered and frustrating, and was left wondering what the point was. The central relationship between the protagonist and her grandfather-figure neighbor was charming, but not enough to sustain it.
“We are living in a time when lies are sanctioned”, said Ali Smith recently in The Paris Review of Books.
Autumn 2016. Britain has voted to leave the European Union. A shocking event that revealed an ugly, deep rift in the British society. A result that turned the country into a different, unfamiliar place, in just a matter of days. “It was the worst of time, it was the worst of times. Again. That’s the thing about things. They fall apart, ..”
As Brexit starts to happen, Elisabeth Demand, a contract art history lecturer in London, returns to her mother’s house to visit Daniel Gluck, an elderly neighbour, 101 years old, who is now in a nearby care home, and asleep most of the time. Daniel is an immigrant, art enthusiast, and Elisabeth's unofficial babysitter when her single mother was absent. It is an extraordinary friendship, bound by their love …
“We are living in a time when lies are sanctioned”, said Ali Smith recently in The Paris Review of Books.
Autumn 2016. Britain has voted to leave the European Union. A shocking event that revealed an ugly, deep rift in the British society. A result that turned the country into a different, unfamiliar place, in just a matter of days. “It was the worst of time, it was the worst of times. Again. That’s the thing about things. They fall apart, ..”
As Brexit starts to happen, Elisabeth Demand, a contract art history lecturer in London, returns to her mother’s house to visit Daniel Gluck, an elderly neighbour, 101 years old, who is now in a nearby care home, and asleep most of the time. Daniel is an immigrant, art enthusiast, and Elisabeth's unofficial babysitter when her single mother was absent. It is an extraordinary friendship, bound by their love for art and the stories they read and share.
“It isn’t that kind of relationship,” Elisabeth says to a lover. “It isn’t even the least physical. It never has been. But it’s love. I can’t pretend it isn’t. “
In Autumn, Ali Smith plays with time. Daniel is old, then young, another life, another place, long-ago memories are still close and painful. Elisabeth as a child, is trying to make sense of the world through art and literature. Then she is a young woman waiting in the village’s post office to renew her passport. She has an absurd, Kafkaesque encounter with the post officers that seem determined to stop her from leaving the country.
Both have a shared interest, the sixties pop artist Pauline Boty, an extraordinary woman, the first female and one of the founders of the British pop art movement whose career was tragically cut short when she succumbed to cancer at the age of 28. Smith has incorporated her short life into the storyline; it is one of the most interesting stories of the book. Boty’s story remind me Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life: “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”
Autumn is a book about Britain now. It is about zero-hours work, about those with no ability to plan ahead, let alone apply for a mortgage. It is a book about Jo Cox, the racial abuse and hate crimes that followed the results of the Brexit referendum. It is also a book about the shortness of life, about love and friendship, about the beauty of art.
