Autumn

by Ali Smith

Ebook, 2017

Library's rating

Library's review

The last line of my 2016 review of [There But For The] was 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.

Good news! Reading Autumn produced the same delighted confusion I first felt back then. Smith plays with

language the way a cat plays with a cricket (though the language fares better than the critter in the end). If you would have told me 10 years ago that I would adore a book written in an almost stream-of-consciousness style, without quotation marks around dialogue, that flits about the timeline like a hummingbird in a field of honeysuckle, I would have scoffed. I am a fan of linear storytelling, I would have said. Experimental nonsense is not for me. And yet. I loved this book, and I look forward with real anticipation to reading the next three in theSmith's "seasonal" quartet.

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Description

"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. Readers love Ali Smith's novels for their peerless innovation and their joyful celebration of language and life. Her newest, Autumn, has all of these qualities in spades, and--good news for fans!--is 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"--… (more)