There But For The

by Ali Smith

Ebook, 2011

Library's rating

Library's review

~~This book is about~~ ... No.
~~When I read this book~~ ... No.
~~The thing about this book is~~ ... No.

Every time I think about trying to sum up or explain this book I come to a stuttering halt. There's a storyline, yes of course there is. A man goes to a dinner party and partway through he goes upstairs and

locks himself in the spare bedroom. But while that sounds somewhat interesting it doesn't sound like much to hang a book on, does it? And yet, Ali Smith took that simple premise and crafted a work of art that made me smile with delight to the very last page. The story is told from several points of view, which can be a mess if not done right but in this case works perfectly as each person fills in a little bit of the story that you don't get from the other perspectives. And throughout there is delightful wordplay and puns and an all-around joyful celebration of the English language that I've seldom experienced. This isn't a typical linear story, which usually sets alarm bells ringing in my stodgy brain, but in this book for me the experimental aspects only served to enhance the story that Smith is telling instead of shouting "look at me! aren't I clever!". My only regret is that I'll never be able to read it again and experience that delighted confused happiness again for the first time.

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Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collections

Your library, eBooks, Read in 2016

Description

At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table midway through the meal, locks himself in an upstairs room, and refuses to leave. An eclectic group of neighbors and friends slowly gathers around the house, and Miles' story is told from the points of view of four of them: Anna, a woman in her forties; Mark, a man in his sixties; May, a woman in her eighties; and a ten-year-old named Brooke. The thing is, none of these people knows Miles more than slightly. How much is it possible for us to know about a stranger? And what are the consequences of even the most casual, fleeting moments we share every day with one another?

Media reviews

New York Times Sunday Book Review

This lively, moving narrative is filled with such details, with historical and musical lore and, above all, with puns. All the likable characters in “There but for the” enjoy a good verbal game, most happily with someone else. It is as though playing with language is what enables them to make

their way through a complicated world. It’s a knack that might also be picked up, most enjoyably, by reading Ali Smith.

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— 3 more

The Globe and Mail

This is why I … hmm … ruminate. In dragging out this tedious, dated conversation – our only insight into Miles’s actions – is Smith trying to make the reader feel what Miles felt? Is it satire? Are the other guests merely symbolic of the world’s evils? Smith is a deeply moral writer who

can’t always resist moralizing, but the truth is the job of revealing truth is better done with rounded, surprising characters, such as Michael Smart in The Accidental – the student-bonking professor who teaches a seminar on cliché – and not these wearying stereotypes. But everything else I expect from Ali Smith, and love, is here: the helium quality of her prose, its playful grab-bagginess (it includes a pair of cryptic stories separate from the main narrative, as well as instructions from the author to the typesetters), how she manages to write so lightly about subjects that are by no means trivial – time, memory, history and their relationship to language. And also what perhaps sums up her whole oeuvre, from her novels to her many collections of highly inventive short stories, the long answer to this short question: “What’s the point of human beings? I mean, what are we for?”

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The Guardian

In her new novel, There but for the, Ali Smith deploys the conceit to satirise contemporary culture – and to ask difficult questions about history, time, epistemology and narrative. The result is a playfully serious, or seriously playful, novel full of wit and pleasure, with some premeditated

frustrations thrown in for good measure.

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New York Times

Symbol alert! Ali Smith’s new novel opens with a perplexing prologue: a story within a story about a man on an exercise bike whose eyes and mouth are covered by what look like mailbox flaps....The plot borrows a device Ms. Smith, a Scottish author who has been shortlisted for both the Orange and

Booker prizes, used in an earlier novel, “The Accidental,” in which a stranger invites herself along on a family’s summer vacation...Yet there is a thematic point to all this showing off, or to most of it, anyway. “There but for the” is ultimately a book about loss and retention: about what we forget and what we remember, about the people who pass through our lives and what bits of them cling to our consciousness.

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