Review of 'Artful' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Smith wraps a story told by a narrator who has just lost her lover around a series of four lectures she (Smith) gave in a comparative literature course at Oxford. The lover has left notes for four comparative literature lectures she was going to give, and the narrator reflects on the notes. Lectures within lectures I suppose. The themes are time, form, edge, and offer and reflection. But Smith's lectures sure aren't like any comparative literature lectures I ever had.
I found some of this difficult. It's Smith's genius to create rapid fire connections that the rest of us don't easily make. The narrator loves films, the lost lover loved books and poetry, and the number of deep references to poems, art, movies, music, fiction and non-fiction books that fill the book is head spinning. Some of the references I had to read over and over to get. One I …
Smith wraps a story told by a narrator who has just lost her lover around a series of four lectures she (Smith) gave in a comparative literature course at Oxford. The lover has left notes for four comparative literature lectures she was going to give, and the narrator reflects on the notes. Lectures within lectures I suppose. The themes are time, form, edge, and offer and reflection. But Smith's lectures sure aren't like any comparative literature lectures I ever had.
I found some of this difficult. It's Smith's genius to create rapid fire connections that the rest of us don't easily make. The narrator loves films, the lost lover loved books and poetry, and the number of deep references to poems, art, movies, music, fiction and non-fiction books that fill the book is head spinning. Some of the references I had to read over and over to get. One I love, that's part of a paragraph that alludes to both Robert Burns and Charlie Chaplin:
"This is part empathy, part thievery. Empathy in art, is art's part-exchange with us, its inclusivity, at once a kindness, a going beyond the self, and a pick-pocketing of our responses, which is why giving and taking are bound up with the goods, with the gods, with respect, with deep-seated understanding about the complex cultural place where kindness, thievery, bartering, and gift-giving all meet, make their exchanges, and by exchange reveal real worth."
I believe she is talking about the essential generosity of good literature. It's ability to reach all types of readers, to help us know, to go beyond ourselves. With this book she helps us understand the give and take of art which, of course, is what Smith achieves in her own fiction.