How to be both

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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 humour 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. Please Note- This book has a dual structure and can be read in two ways. There are two stories in the book and they can be read in either order.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Consider this moral conundrum for a moment, George's mother says to George who's sitting in the front passenger seat. Not says. Said. George's mother is dead. What moral conundrum? George says. The passenger seat in the hire car is strange, being on the side the driver's seat is on at home. This must be a bit like driving is, except without the actual, you know, driving. Okay. You're an artist, her mother says. Am I? George says. Since when? And is that a moral conundrum? Ha ha, her mother says. Humour me. Imagine it. You're an artist. This conversation is happening last May, when George's mother is still alive, obviously. She's been dead since September. Now it's January, to be more precise it's just past midnight on New Year's Eve, which means it has just become the year after the year in which George's mother died. George's father is out. It is better than him being at home, standing maudlin in the kitchen or going round the house switching things off and on. Henry is asleep. She just went in and checked on him; he was dead to the world, though not as dead as the word dead literally means when it means, you know, dead. This will be the first year her mother hasn't been alive since the year her mother was born. That is so obvious that it is stupid even to think it and yet so terrible that you can't not think it. Both at once. Anyway George is spending the first minutes of the new year looking up the lyrics of an old song. Let's Twist Again. Lyrics by Kal Mann. The words are pretty bad. Let's twist again like we did last summer. Let's twist again like we did last year. Then there's a really bad rhyme, a rhyme that isn't, properly speaking, even a rhyme. Do you remember when Things were really hummin'. Hummin' doesn't rhyme with summer, the line doesn't end in a question mark, and is it meant to mean, literally, do you remember that time when things smelt really bad? Then Let's twist again, twisting time is here. Or, as all the sites say, twistin' time. At least they've used an apostrophe, the George from before her mother died says. I do not give a fuck about whether some site on the internet attends to grammatical correctness, the George from after says. That before and after thing is about mourning, is what people keep saying. They keep talking about how grief has stages. There's some dispute about how many stages of grief there are. There are three, or five, or some people say seven. It's quite like the songwriter actually couldn't be bothered to think of words. Maybe he was in one of the three, five or seven stages of mourning too. Stage nine (or twenty three or a hundred and twenty three or ad infinitum, because nothing will ever not be like this again): in this stage you will no longer be bothered with whether songwords mean anything. In fact you will hate almost all songs. But George has to find a song to which you can do this specific dance. It being so apparently contradictory and meaningless is no doubt a bonus. It will be precisely why the song sold so many copies and was such a big deal at the time. People like things not to be too meaningful. Okay, I'm imagining, George in the passenger seat last May in Italy says at exactly the same time as George at home in England the following January stares at the meaninglessness of the words of an old song. Outside the car window Italy unfurls round and over them so hot and yellow it looks like it's been sandblasted. In the back Henry snuffles lightly, his eyes closed, his mouth open. The band of the seatbelt is over his forehead because he is so small. You're an artist, her mother says, and you're working on a project with a lot of other artists. And everybody on the project is getting the same amount, salary-wise. But you believe that what you're doing is worth more than everyone on the project, including you, is getting paid. So you write a letter to the man who's commissioned the work and you ask him to give you more money than everyone else is getting. Am I worth more? George says. Am I better than the other artists? Does that matter? her mother says. Is that what matters? Is it me or is it the work that's worth more? George says. Good. Keep going, her mother says. Is this real? George says. Is it hypothetical? Does that matter? her mother says. Excerpted from How to Be Both by Ali Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Smith's (Artful) new novel is made up of two parts-one section called CAMERA, from the point of view of George, a current-day teenager who has just lost her mother, and another section called EYES, from the point of view of a 15th-century artist who seems to have come back to George's time and location as a ghost. With her characteristically playful love of language, Smith has written a book that was designed to be produced in two versions, so the section that comes first depends on a listener's (or reader's) particular copy. What results is a challenging listen, as bits of each story reveal themselves from one section to the next, presuming the listener's intelligence and yielding a pleasure in the puzzle that elevates the book beyond passive entertainment. The theme of art as both charm and balm weaves through both sections and is masterfully balanced with lovingly drawn characters and dialog that rings true regardless of its setting. The choice of a male reader, John Banks, is interesting given the prevalence of female characters and works well given the themes of the book. VERDICT This work is inventive and thought provoking but best of all moving and beautiful as well. ["Smith presents two extraordinary books for the price of one": LJ 11/15/14 starred review of the Pantheon hc.]-Heather Malcolm, Bow, WA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

British author Smith (There but for The), a playful, highly imaginative literary iconoclast, surpasses her previous efforts in this inventive double novel that deals with gender issues, moral questions, the mystery of death, the value of art, the mutability of time, and several other important topics. Two books coexist under the same title, each presenting largely the same material arranged differently and with different emphases; which narrative one reads first depends on chance, as different copies of the book have been printed with different opening chapters. In one version, the androgynous adolescent character George (for Georgia) is mourning the sudden death of her mother following a family trip to Italy, where they viewed a painting by the obscure Renaissance artist Francesco del Cossa. The alternate volume begins with Francesco, recounting stories of the painter's youth and the ongoing creation of a fresco in a palazzo in Ferrara, a process described in vibrant detail. Francesco's secret is disclosed in both sections-teasingly in one, overtly in the other. The narratives are captivating, challenging, and often puzzling, as the prose varies among contemporary vernacular English, archaic 15th-century rhetoric interposed with fragments of poetry, and unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness narration. Clever puns and word games abound. George's mother accurately identifies the subtext when she says, "Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen." Smith's two-in-one novel is a provocative reevaluation of the form. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In this era of extolling genre fiction and the joys of story, Smith's latest novel makes a case for experimental, literary fiction. One half of this daring novel is the mostly conventional tale of a precocious teen struggling with the death of her arty, brilliant mother. George, née Georgia, is still living in a kind of stunned stupor. She sees a school counselor but is mostly helped by her first crush, the alluring H, who starts to pull her out of her shell. The other half of the novel is narrated by the disembodied voice of a fifteenth-century painter caught in the wave-laden air of twentieth-century Britain. As the spirit observes the contemporary world, with its votive tablets (iPhones), she casts back to her own life disguised as a boy in order to practice her art. Along the way, we learn of a teenager's bratty ways with her smart but sometimes overbearing parents, the power politics of Renaissance Italy, the best places to procure blue pigment, and how everyone, everywhere, must come to terms with the passage of time and the grief of loss. And we learn how to be both: male and female, artist and businessperson, rememberer and forgiver, reader of tales and literary adventurer. Lucky us.--Weber, Lynn Copyright 2014 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

This adventurous, entertaining writer offers two distinctive takes on youth, art and deathand even two different editions of the book.George, short for Georgia, is 16, whip-smart and seeking ways to honor her dead mother. She vows to dance the twist every day, as her mother did, and to wear something black for a year. She also inhabits a memory, a visit to Italy they made together to view a 15th-century mural her mother admired, and studies a painting by the same artist in London's National Gallery. There, she sees a woman her mother knew and tries to study her as well. In the book's other half, the ghost of the 15th-century artist pushes up through the earth to the present and finds himself in the museum behind George as she studies his painting and just before she spots the mystery woman. The painter's own memories travel through his youth and apprenticeship in a voice utterly different from and as delightful as George's. Hethough gender is bending here tooalso loses his mother when young and learns, like George, of the pain and joy of early friendship. He provides an intimate history for the mural in Italy and offers a very foreign take on George and modern times. The book is being published simultaneously in two editionsone begins with George's half, and the other begins with the painter's, which might be slightly more challenging for its diction and historical trappings. Both are remarkable depictions of the treasures of memory and the rich perceptions and creativity of youth, of how we see what's around us and within us. Comical, insightful and clever, Smith (There But for The, 2011, etc.) builds a thoughtful fun house with her many dualities and then risks being obvious in her structural mischief, but it adds perhaps the perfect frame to this marvelous diptych. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.