Nov 19

Nov 19 Autumn (Seasonal Quartet, #1)

Author: Ali Smith
Publisher: Anchor
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Two old friends--Daniel, a centenarian, and Elisabeth, born in 1984--look to both the future and the past as the United Kingdom stands divided by a historic, once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand-in-hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.

A luminous meditation on the meaning of richness and harvest and worth, Autumn is the first installment of Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet, and it casts an eye over our own time: Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearean jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s pop art. Wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories, Autumn is an unforgettable story about aging and time and love--and stories themselves.

TL;DR Review

The first book in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet is a stunner, even if it makes you work a little bit for the payoff. Her prose is just so good and this book is beautiful.

For you if: You like the challenge of a novel that doesn’t have a straightforward plot.

Full Review

I’m long overdue for my journey with Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, so when my dear IRL friend and fellow bookstagrammer @caseys_chapters announced a year-long buddy read, I jumped at the chance. We read Autumn in November, and (as expected) I loved it.

The book is about a woman named Elisabeth who has been friends with an old man named Daniel, who lived next door to her mother, since she was a kid. They have a strong bond that was built on candor and curiosity and a love of art. We flash back between past conversations and the present, when Daniel is unconscious in a nursing home and Elisabeth visits regularly. The “present day” takes place amidst the Brexit vote, and the feeling prevalent in England at the time pervades the story.

As you might expect from the title, this book deals with themes of change, endings, and nostalgia. What Ali Smith does so well here (besides just like, everything about her prose) is mix the temperature of the nation in with British cultural references and banality and humor (see: the post office scene). This book evokes so much FEELING, even if sometimes you aren’t even sure why you’re feeling so much. You’ll also fall deeply in love with Elisabeth and Daniel’s relationship, as I did.

I will say that this isn’t a very super straightforward book, and it might not be for everyone. It’s almost poetic, but on a novel level vs a sentence level. I may have even read it too quickly myself to have gotten everything it has to offer, and I expect a reread would be super fulfilling.

Can’t wait to read the rest of the quartet!