How To Be Both
By "Ali Smith"
Blurb at the back: A renaissance artist of the 1460s. A child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, knowing gets mysterious, fiction gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.
By "Ali Smith"
Blurb at the back: A renaissance artist of the 1460s. A child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, knowing gets mysterious, fiction gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.
Just by that blurb alone, one should guess that it isn't an easy book to read. Not that it isn't an enjoyable one - when you can understand it, it is very fun and charming; however, what mostly plays against rather than for this novel is the difficulty to understand its playfulness and dual, contemporary/historic, narrative. I enjoyed the first half of the book because I mostly got the story and therefore wasn't confused and irritated, while being deeply charmed by Smith's witty and clever writing style, which I have not come across before.
The first half is easy to understand because it is contemporary, the characters are less and tightly connected (almost just a family of 4 people/ one dead but present), and also because you can follow the story without being interrupted by the playfulness of ideas and philosophical questionings which are a norm in this novel. Once you get a hold of the story and start tuning to the unique style of Smith's writing in this book, it becomes a really joyous and fun reading experience. I was intrinsically charmed by the spontaneous wit, cleverness and humor that is consistently put throughout the novel. Especially the sharp change from 'says' to 'said' whenever Georgie's mom's conversation is being told (because she is dead now) was both amusingly and cleverly executed every single time.
The grief in the first half was also handled beautifully. With their mother gone, Georgie and her father are in a very doleful state of being, since she was a lively presence and also educatively engaging with her daughter. Her philosophical and moral questions come across time and again in the retelling (or telling really) of their lives together. There are some innocently beautiful moments between Georgie and Henry (her younger brother), where Henry, being too young, cannot fathom the sudden disappearance of his mother. While another scene where Georgie is watching some French films which her friends had left her, and her father comes and has a short, but vulnerable conversation with her daughter, was a heartfelt one too.
However, by the very start of the second part, I couldn't succumb to the highly confusing plot of the second protagonist, a painter of the 15th century, in whom Georgie's mother was keenly interested. The reason why her mother was interested in this artist was because of the 'moral conundrum' where this painter asks for a higher pay than other painters because he thinks he paints better. There is a building up towards this half and as well as to the painter, Ferrera (and many other weird names he is associated with), however the narration of his story in the second half is a disjointed, confusing and ungraspable one as compared to the 1st. I simply couldn't get what the plot was even until the end of the book, and by then, I was already just skimming through. What came as a surprise to me as I read a summary on the internet to clear-out my confusion was that Ferrera was dead and in heaven and was summoned back to Earth, while I didn't have absolutely no such understanding of it having read most of the second half. It was then that I stopped putting any more effort into reading it.
It is on very rare occasions that I go online to get more knowledge about or around the book I am reading, for I want to have a pure reading experience where the book itself matters more than what is being written and told about it. Moreover, I want to improve my reading competency where I read from and for the understanding of my own ideas and perspectives. However, both the second half of this book and also my previous read 'The Handmaid's Tale' compelled me to go against this 'reading-rule' of mine. While holding this grudge against this novel is utterly personal, the experience of a confused and ambiguous reading was both objectively criticizable and subjectively distasteful.
There were however, a few (few!) lovely events in the second half that will remain with me as the 'book-memories' with which, in future, I will recall this novel by.
An Excerpt:
"It is both blatant and invisible. It is subtle and at
the same time the most unsubtle thing in the world.
so unsubtle it's subtle. Once you've seen it, you
can't not see it. It makes the handsome man's
intention completely clear. But only if you notice. If
you notice, it changes everything about the picture,
like a witty remark someone has been brave enough
to make out loud but which you only hear if your
ears are open to more than one thing happening. It
isn't lying about anything or feigning anything, and
even if you weren't to notice, it's there clear as
anything. It can just be rocks and landscape if
that's what you want it to be - but there's always more to see, if you look."
Anyone with a patient, relaxed, and open-to-new
mindset could read this book and enjoy it. For if you can grasp the plot and
flow with it, there is a lot to be amused by. The joys in this book, of which I
only felt few but felt intrinsically, are clever, witty, funny and thoughtfully
beautiful and explorative. It comes down to your experience of reading it.
My praise for the novel:
Full of wholesome charm and witty humor when understood,
When not - the playfulness overwhelms the reading experience.
Ratings: 3/5 ***
A review
by: Ejaz Hussain
February 22, 2020.
February 22, 2020.