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"SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real--and all life's givens get given a second chance"-- "The brilliant Booker-nominated novel from one of our finest authors: How to Be Both is a daring, inventive tale that intertwines the stories of a defiant Renaissance painter and a modern teenage girl. How can one be both--near and far, past and present, male and female? In Ali Smith's new novel, two extraordinary characters inhabit the spaces between categories. In one half of the book, we follow the story of Francescho del Cossa, a Renaissance painter in fifteenth-century Italy who assumes a duel identity, living as both a man and a woman. In the novel's other half, George, a contemporary English teenage girl, is in mourning after the death of her brilliant, rebellious mother. As she struggles to fill the void in her life, George finds her thoughts circling again and again around a whimsical trip she and her mother once made to Italy, to see a certain Renaissance fresco... These two stories call out to each other in surprising and deeply resonant ways to form a veritable literary double-take, bending the conventions of genre, storytelling, and our own preconceptions"--… (more)
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The famous gimmick of the book, of course, was that the narrative came in two parts, one from the point of view of George, a modern teenage girl grieving for her dead mother, and the other from that of the long-dead and almost forgotten 15th century Bolognese painter, Francesco del Cossa. Half the copies (including the one I read) were printed with George first, the other half with Francesco first, and it was pure chance which you got. Fun, but an odd sort of experiment, because unless you buy multiple copies or read a review, you won't even know that it's going on...
It's a very visual book, referring frequently and in detail to images - not just Francesco's paintings, but also posters and photographs, including the iconic picture of the 60s French singers Françoise Hardy and Sylvie Vartan (by Jean-Marie Périer) that is on the front cover. For other images mentioned in the text, you're going to have to do some Googling, and I think that's also part of the experimental nature of the book (in the George narrative, Smith helpfully tells us some of the search keywords we need to use). But there's also a lot of linguistic play going on, and plenty of literary allusion too, including a number of indirect references to Giorgio Bassani's novels set in Ferrara and Bologna. Another famous son of Ferrara, the film director Michelangelo Antonioni, also gets a few mentions. Not a book that allows you to doze off!
I was particularly impressed by how convincing I found Smith's portrayal of George - it would be interesting to know whether a modern teenager would be equally convinced, of course! But the key thing obviously isn't that she's tuned into the way kids of the smartphone generation think, but rather that she's so in touch with what it felt like to be an adolescent herself that she can map that experience onto a contemporary setting without us ever noticing that there was any trickery involved. Obviously, with Francesco she doesn't have the same difficulties, since no-one has set a standard for how dead 15th-century painters should talk when they find themselves observing modern Britain (the only book I recall that uses a similar narrative trick is Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen, and Korean royals are not at all the same thing as Italian painters...).
And then suddenly I was in the other story -- Francesco's -- and moving seamlessly from the Renaissance period to the present day. Where George's story is written in a fairly straightforward narrative, Francesco's is stream of consciousness, and sometimes a bit like poetry. There are numerous connections between the two novellas, some of which are only alluded to and I'm still trying to piece together. And there are more obvious themes about duality, especially regarding gender and sexual identity.
It's tempting now to re-read George's story to pick up new details. But instead I find myself holding it in my imagination, savoring what I've just read, and leaving details suspended forever somehow seems just right.
So. Like I said, I'm hard pressed to describe what made this such a great read. Just give it a try, and see what you think.
This review probably doesn't seem to say much that is concrete; as I said, How to Be Both--both Franchesco and George, both then and now, both male and female, both alive and dead, both here and there--is a book to be experienced as well as read. Lovely writing for each distinct character's voice, a creative and philosophical stretch that offers not only pleasure but hope.
The language that matters to her is not the literary but the everyday -- the slang, the new words, the popular songs of different eras, even the conflict between proper grammar and customary usage. She plays with it, using it to draw or outline the characters and their world. Sometimes she physically arranges words like drawing on the page, as when sentence fragments run like lines of poetry across a page or two. Parenthetical phrases like “(ouch)” are visual, too, like a pictograph in effect. Of course drawing and writing are tangled up in our language: a line is not just a pencil stroke depicting the curve of a horse’s hind quarter, but also a line of text. And the final product of lines can be a drawing or a book. Or both.
But How to Be Both, while a book, is not a storybook. At least, not as we usually encounter those. It’s stories, intertwined — one under the other under the other. As if it’s a fresco. It’s stories assembled, broken and rebuilt. As if it’s a wall. It’s connections no one sees, to things unremembered or unremarked, and an accumulation of memory and forgetting. Like a life, or lives. It’s history and modern life. It’s art. And more. I’m leaving out so much: it touches on gender, motherhood, daughterhood, and so much more. This book is a whole world.
And what kind of artist is Ali Smith? I think she hopes to make people see more carefully, more respectfully. And perhaps people who see (and see others) better will become better people. That seems the way out of the labyrinth, the way to survive the Minotaur. Not with the unseeing, uncaring mechanical surveillance of the powerful, but with the careful and human attention required of the small and powerless.
She herself focuses mostly on the overlooked, the unseen, the forgotten: the little known fresco artist from the 15th Century, the slave wearing tattered clothes, the underage girl in a porn film, the girl who gave Theseus the thread to find his way out. She wants us to see them, too. She wants justice, but her justice is artistic. “Attention must be paid.” And a silent, deliberate witnessing (or a bearing witness to) can be justice enough. Alliances between individuals make a little change for the better, a little shelter from the rain, and sometimes love.
I hope that this remarkable book brings her work the attention it deserves.
There's a lot going on in here, in each story there is a case of uncertain gender and/or sexuality. It is integral to both stories. In Francesco's case, so little is known that the possibility that this was a woman in a man's world may be fiction, but cannot be disounted. The evocation of grief as a teenager is haunting, as is the gradual emergence back into life.
The book is very visual, with Francesco's paintings and Georgia's photomontages both being essential components. The image on the fornt cover of the 2 french singers is described on more than occasion. The visual descriptions are not incidental to the story and this meshing of the visual description within the written story is very effective.
I enjoyed the first half slightly more than the second. There are a great many links between the two sections, which made this a whole book, when it could easily have appeared as two disparate halves.
The second half of the book I read was a story set in the present. It follows about six months in the life of 16 year old Georgia, sometimes called Georgie, but more often called George. George is a precocious teen living in Cambridge, with excessive verbal skills and a sardonic wit well-nurtured by her mother, Carol. George’s mother is an academic, a writer, a subversive artist, a target for government spies perhaps, and a great new enthusiast for some frescos painted by Francesco del Cossa. She is also dead. And George, Georgie, Georgia is going through however many stages of mourning it takes to resurface after her mother’s death. George is full of reminiscences of their time together, but especially of the past summer when her mother took her and her younger brother, Henry, to Italy to see the del Cossa frescos. Smith writes teenage girls so convincingly, so intelligently, that everything here is completely believable and completely unanticipated. Georgia comes to life. She has a burgeoning friendship with Helena which might be something more but doesn’t get fully developed before the story reaches a natural conclusion.
Both stories are beautifully written but I confess that I much preferred the 21st century story of George. Partly that is because there was less need for artifice in linking George’s story to something in Francesco del Cossa’s. The frescos and the one painting in the National Gallery more than serve that purpose. By contrast, Smith needs to turn Francesco into some kind of purgatorial spirit in order for him/her to witness a few events in the life Georgia. There is no way for this not to feel clunky.
What I like best about Smith’s writing here and elsewhere is that she challenges her readers to think, to use the novel as a crucible for ideas, whether these are socio-political or philosophical. I like the fact that Smith takes risks. And I don’t always find that she succeeds, especially when, as here, she is pushing a particular metaphysical line. But, equally, I don’t find that my philosophical disagreement with a point she is elaborating diminishes at all my admiration for her writing or my keen desire to read whatever else she may write. That’s unusual. And so despite some reservations on the architecture of this doubled novel and a more particular disagreement about the philosophical position she advances, I find that I want to heartily recommend this book. And who knows, perhaps if your printed version is the other way round, maybe even the architecture linking the two stories might work better for you than it has for me. Recommended.
But the first thing we see, her mother said, and most times the only thing we see, is the one on the surface. So
The structure of this novel plays with this idea – which part comes first? There are two sections to the novel, Eyes and Camera, and the print edition was issued with the sections in two different orders. The ebook edition contains both versions of the novel, and I chose to read it in the order Camera – Eyes. In one sense, the events of Eyes take place before the events of Camera, but in another sense, Eyes takes place after Camera. It's the old chicken and egg question in novel format. The author and publisher say that the novel works equally well in either order. I'm not convinced of that. I think most readers will find Eyes easier to understand if they've read Camera first. What Smith has done with this novel is impressive, but I never became absorbed enough in the writing to lose awareness of its mechanics. So, my verdict is good but not great.
�ó¢ who is being both what?
äó¢ was Francescho really Francescha?
äó¢
äó¢ is Francesco the "ghost" watching George and Henry? Or just random kids of his own time, more or less? Wouldn't he have noticed all that is so different (say....cars).
äó¢ is the Francesco chapter really George and Helena working on their project about his life?
Urgh. So confused.
The words line up one after the other, but they also reach out, silently,
Time merges. The book somehow begins to escape time, to transcend it, to weave a fabric.
”Past or present? George says. Male or female? It can’t be both. It must be one or the other.
Who says? Why must it? Her mother says.”This is my pick for the Booker winner.
Although both halves were gratifying in their own way, the first half seemed fuller in story. I say “the first half,” but as I've heard the two halves were switched in some copies of the novel, perhaps it is better to say the half which focused on Francesco. I wonder what my experience would've been had I read George's section first, as some readers have. And though I didn't fall madly in love with this novel, I did want to reread Francesco's section after George's, this before I'd even learned many copies were published this way. I'm not one to reread books, especially immediately after finishing one, but I do have a strange impulse to reread this one. Perhaps that urge is what makes How to be both so enjoyable. There's something about the two halves mirroring one another yet being so distinct that invites further study. We're drawn to symmetry, are we not? Like I said, it's difficult to put my finger on it.
Although I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the Man Booker winner for 2014, I would not have been disappointed had How to be both claimed the prize. The Narrow Road... was a well-written, tragic tale, a suitable, more accessible winner; How to be both would likely not have reached as many readers with its literary devices, but it surely would have lived on as a worthy victor had it taken home the prize. Regardless of outcome, I look forward to reading more from the very clever Ali Smith.
This book explores duality. This idea is explored via gender, life and death, the present and the past, and the appearance versus the true nature of a person or object. For example, when George and her mother are in Italy, George says she is “appalled by history, its only redeeming feature being that it tends to be well and truly over.” Her mother then questions her, “Do things that happened not exist or stop existing, just because we can’t see them happening in front of us?”
Each main character recalls memories, tells them in a stream-of-consciousness style, and these form the narrative arc. Each novella stands alone but taken together also forms a whole novel – another take on duality. I enjoyed George’s story more since it is told in a more straight-forward manner and is easier to follow. Francesco’s story is fragmented and non-linear. This is likely intentional on the author’s part due to the fact that the painter is in a liminal state between life and death. The writing is playful, philosophical, and clever.
The other way I experience Smith’s books, is that they’re pure gold. At those times, I feel like she’s actually been in my head, reading my thoughts, and then she’s able to write in the same wonderfully bizarre way that I think and experience this world. In all my decades of reading, feeling like an author’s prose is that personal, that it’s clicking right along with my thoughts and reflecting my mind, has happened very, very few times.
The book tells two stories of love and injustice, by telling of Franchescho, an Italian fresco painter from the 1460s, as well as George, a troubled child of a child of the 1960s. Smith loves to play with the form of her prose as she winds time and characters all around with her delicious writing. Time also becomes more fluid and less defined in her writing. As she writes, “Writing can be like falling in love, too“ [When] it starts to happen, and it’s kind of invigorating. It means that time disappears, it’s the same as when you’re reading something that takes you out of time. It’s also very like love, actually. It’s one of those things where time disappears and you look at the clock and you’re like, what happened to the rest of that day?” And then Smith brings in another artist with this, “’I paint flowers so they will not die,’ Frida Kahlo once said, speaking for many an artist driven to wrestle with mortality yet also escape the time-bound realm.” And while we’re on perception, I love the beautiful simplicity of the following. “Can we never get to go beyond ourselves?’ her mother says. “Never get to be more than ourselves? Will I ever, as far as you’re concerned, be allowed to be anything other than your mother?”
This novel won the 2015 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was a Man Booker Prize finalist, and much loved by her fans and reviewers. Besides toying with time, Smith writes with such beauty about gender fluidity in both stories—far beyond the teenage girl named George who is exploring her sexuality, and Franchescho, who was born a girl, but binds her chest and lives as a man.
I didn’t discover another thing about the book until I caught it in a review. The book was issued in what her publishers called a "literary double-take," with two editions—sharing the same cover—but the order of the two stories is flipped. In one edition, it begins with that contemporary story about George, a highly intelligent English teenager, caught up in the recent death of his intelligent, feminist mother. That’s followed by a time-bending story of a troubled Italian Renaissance painter. Read the other edition and the stories are reversed. This all takes me back to the first LP I played that had two recordings on the same side, what you heard simply depended on which groove your needle dropped into.
No matter how I feel about a particular Ali Smith novel at the moment, I always love the beauty of her writing, as this passage shows. “George looks at her mother. Her mother looks at George. A yellow-white flower drops, brushes past her mother’s nose, catches in her hair and comes to rest on her collarbone. Her mother laughs. George feels the urge to laugh too, though she is still wearing her guilt – fury scowl. Half her mouth turns up. The other half holds its downward shape.”
When her books connect, they are so magically golden that any number of mis-readings—where my mind wasn’t in the right place—are fine by me. But possibly, instead of another novel right now, I’ll wait for that promising short story collection that I have on order to come, and take that for a ride.
Just not what I would describe as a successful experiment; more a failed gimmick. "George"'s androgyny and Francesco's response to it probably sounded good in 2010 or so, as the book was being planned, but it comes across as queer-baiting in 2020. Also, connections reaching
I loved the main female character in Part 1 and in Part 2, they had such individuality and were not afraid to be different. George was particularly likeable especially in the way she coped with the grief on losing her Mother, and virtually took over the care of her little brother.
Ali Smith is a beautiful writer and this is a thoroughly enjoyable book., but my advice is READ PART 2 FIRST.
The novel, which was listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Costa, was designed to not be linear, but to be layered. Some editions begin with Georgie, grieving for her talented, daring mother in present-day London. The other editions begin with the story of Francesco, child of a bricklayer whose mother also excelled at storytelling.
The last trip Georgie took with her mother and younger brother (while the always-distant dad stayed home for work) was to view Francesco's frescoes in Italy. Past and present, present and future, layers of what exists and what can be seen and what stays hidden are the essence of the novel. Georgie remembers events that once happened and has to keep changing the tense, from says to said, life to not life, from living to dead.
The word play, the tropes of tense, of layers, of hiding in plain sight or there being more just underneath the surface, serve to showcase "oh!" moments. Georgie, for example, is originally called George in the story but is a girl who identifies as a girl and does not like the fact she was named for a character in an old film (1966's Georgy Girl). Who another character is in other times and forms is a puzzle; although, like any well-designed painting that tells its story in allegory form, the clues are hiding in plain sight.
Although it is noted early in Georgie's section that "People like things not to be too meaningful", Smith knows better. Georgie becomes obsessed with a video of a young girl being used sexually and watches it over and over and over again. The girl, she decides, is everywhere, a representation of harm being done over and over again. To Georgie, watching it is paying tribute to the fact it has happened but, for someone who has not seen it, the act has not happened because that person doesn't know the act exists. It happens for the first time for that person when that person does see it.
In Italy with her mother, studying the frescoed walls that Francesco painted centuries earlier, it is noted the part of the work shows "how ordinary cruelty really is". The work was hidden for years under whitewash, meaning it did not exist for the people who knew about the room but did not know what was under the whitewash. That bothers George's younger brother enormously: "Could the room you were actually in get -- lost?"
Georgie does not want her mother to be forgotten because she is no longer there, just as the frescoes were forgotten because they were no longer seen. And the painter has been completely forgotten except for a letter in which more money is asked of the patron because of it is deserved (a letter which really does exist).
On that Italian trip, Georgie's mother sets these ideas into her head:
Do things just go away? her mother says. Do things that happened not exist, or stop existing, just because we can't see them happening in front of us? They do when they're over, George says. And what about the things we watch happening ... "
Well, what about them? Who sees them and how they see them and what the viewers bring to what they see to combine that knowledge with what is in front of them, well, it's never the same, is it?
What was there and what is there are part of something else Georgie's mother did: She was part of a group called the Subverts who delighted in subliminal and unexpected messages, such as "a box that would flash up on a politics page and it would have a picture in it or some stanzas of a poem, stuff like that".
Georgie's mother also tells her that "nothing's not connected" and therein lies the harsh truth and glorious beauty in Smith's novel. The struggle, as usual, is for us to take E.M. Forster's advice: "Only connect" even if it all seems a swirl at times and the way the pieces fall together doesn't seem at all clear.
Francesco's mother creates a different spin on the connections among all things. To her, anything created creates a ring, a ripple, just as a pebble dropped in water creates its rings. To that wife of a Renaissance bricklayer, the ring encompasses everything. And if everything is encompassed, it is contained together. It is connected.
And so it is in this novel. Whether one reads Georgie's story first or Francesco's, parts of the painter's story are prelude to Georgie's and parts of it reverberate in the present.
In the spirit of Smith's novel, it does not matter which part one reads first. Because they fit together.
This book is a complete and utter but strangely beautiful mess - at least structurally. But then there are different editions to this book and depending on which
No matter which one it starts with, both stories are intertwined and both stories - though very different - toy with the idea of how opposing concepts can be combined.
Luckily, my journey started with George. Luckily, because Smith's ambitious project would have confused me even more than it already did if the story had begun with Francescho's story and had lacked the introduction to the concept o duality that is introduced by George's dialogue with her mother.
"Past or present? George says. Male or female? It can’t be both. It must be one or the other. Who says? Why must it? her mother says."
In my copy,
The other half is a bolder departure, imagining the artist as a sort of spirit able to reminisce about the past while observing the modern world, and particularly the girl.
Sexual ambiguity is a recurring theme - the artist turns out to be woman masquerading as a man, which made the book very interesting to read just after reading Siri Hustvedt's "The Blazing world". Both parts are full of dazzling language, ideas, playfulness and observation.
A self-consciously clever novel, mirroring life - no tidy beginning or end, with the past always intruding on the present, constantly being reinvented.
I really should have
Could I have spent more time and got more out of it? Almost certainly. But I wasn't really feeling it, and the times when I put in the extra effort were interesting but not rewarding enough to keep at it.
I read it Eyes-Camera order, for the record.