Oct 3

Oct 3 How to Be Both

Author: Ali Smith
Publisher: Penguin (original US edition)
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: 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

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else. A true original, she is a one-of-a-kind literary sensation. Her novels consistently attract serious acclaim and discussion — and have won her a dedicated readership who are drawn again and again to the warmth, humanity and humor of her voice.

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.

TL;DR Review

How to Be Both is a fascinating novel broken into two parts, which can be read in any order. I enjoyed it and I’m eager to read more Ali Smith.

For you if: You like experimental literary fiction.

Full Review

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?
No, George says.
And why is that? her mother says.
Because you’re my mother, George says.
Ah, her mother says, I see.

I read How to Be Both as part of the #ReadingWomen challenge to get through all the past years’ winners of the Women’s Prize. This book won in 2015, and I can see why. It’s sort of cerebral, but also moving and curious and sweeping and beautiful. I really enjoyed it.

The book is broken into two parts: camera and eyes, which you can read in any order. Copies of the book are randomly printed so that sometimes camera comes first, and sometimes eyes comes first. For me, camera was first. It’s set in the present day and features a teenager named George (Georgia) whose mother recently passed away. She’s grappling with grief and a spark of romance with her friend, H (Helena). Eyes, on the other hand, is narrated by the spirit of George’s mother’s favorite artist, who’s been yanked to the present and spends time observing George and connecting what’s happening to their own life in the 1460s.

The more you read this one, the more its title makes sense. There’s so much there about duality. History or present? Metaphor or literal? Interpretation or rules? Truth or imagination? Past or present?

This book felt really intriguing from a craft perspective, something just a little experimental with Ali Smith’s genius peeking through to say hello. I’m really glad I read it, and it’s definitely made me want to read more of her work.