Sometimes, I think authors write books to have a laugh at us. And I think that we as people think that because we don't get it, it must be profound. Which means it must be amazing. And then everyone just follows suit and insists this book is stellar. I didn't get it. I hated the style. I loathe authors that can't be bothered to make something readable (hello, quotation marks for defining speech sections). I mean I got it. But I didn't _get_ it. And so I gave up maybe a quarter of the way through...

My dear friend Cathrine is the reason I first read Ali Smith about ten years ago and she is the reason I was able to read this book as quickly as I did. She and Ali Smith will be forever linked in my mind. When she gave me this book, she told me copies of the novel have either one of the two sections first: you get what you get. (Unless of course you go to a bookstore and choose the one you want.) Not surprising to us, I received a copy different than hers: because, you see, we too (two) complem...

How to write a novel about art—everybody’s doing it—without revealing the amount of research that has gone into it. There’s the twist.Research is important in a novel written in the twenty first century but which is partly set in Renaissance Italy. The author needs to comb the archives but burn her notes after reading. She needs to walk the old town she’s writing about from one end to the other but then she needs to throw the guidebook away and leave with only her own impressions, any hard facts...

You could say the muse of this novel is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The mischievous, time travelling, gender crossing spirit of history who breaks down boundaries, reconciles opposites, defies death. I read the Francesco narrative first. Francesco is based on the real life painter Francesco del Cossa (who I had never heard of). The fresco which features large in this novel is a stunning piece of oddball invention and even if I’d hated this novel I’d be grateful to Smith for introducing me to it: F...

HOW TO READ BOTH This clever, very clever, novel is made out of the stuff of life. Here we have the usual suspects: time, language, love and art. Four of them. And as it is about life, it is also about death.Time in which the past and future intertwine in the fleeting present. Love fledging its most admirable redeeming abilities. Language as the malleable communicator that sometimes fails. Art in its ability to fascinate and enchant. With death always lurking.Its structure is paramount. It ha

This experimental novel is challenging, but if you can give it your attention, it is wondrous.The novel has two parts: One part tells the story of George (full name Georgia), a teenage girl who is trying to cope with the sudden death of her mother. The other part tells the story of Francesco del Cossa, who was a real-life Italian artist during the Renaissance. The two narratives are linked because George and her mother had gone to Italy to see a fresco painted by del Cossa, and it turned out to

Well, I tried. It won the Booker Prize and had loads of rave reviews, so it must be good, right? Well I read the first half (about George) and it was okay maybe, with reservations because of the odd & difficult-to-understand word usage/style. Then I started the second section and decided that life is just too short and I have way too many books on my "To Read" list anyway. Perhaps Ali Smith is an amazing writer who's invented a totally new way to write a novel, but it sure didn't touch me.

Yes, yes. Well done, Ali Smith. You're very smart.If there is one thing Ali Smith's Bailey's Prize victory with her novel How To Be Bothhas proven to me, it is that even literary prizes can fall prey to the bells, whistles, and buzz words of a good media campaign.How To Be Bothwas marketed as a genre-defining, genre-bending, and genre-creating novel of utmost importance in the literary world. It apparently hailed the rebirth of true stylistic originality, and Ali Smith has been described by one

Ali Smith’s playfully brilliant new novel makes me both excited and wary of recommending it. This gender-blending, genre-blurring story, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, bounces across centuries, tossing off profound reflections on art and grief, without getting tangled in its own postmodern wires. It’s the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don’t seem entirely possible — How did she get here from there? — but you’ve got to be willing to hang on.The games start even be...

I tussled for two weeks with this challenging and disappointing novel from the Best and Most Innovative Scottish Novelist Alive. Split into two separate narratives connected via the novel’s bipolar concept, the first section is quintessential Smith with its precocious teenage protagonist and her tireless obsession with words (these recurring characters are sentimental love-affairs with one’s formative time discovering language and its possibilities), while the second part is one of her riskiest

Playful and unique in structure - this novel is comprised of two stories which, depending on the copy of the book you are reading, could start with the story of George, a precocious teenager who has recently and suddenly lost her mother, OR the narrative of relatively unknown Italian renaissance painter, Francesco del Cossa. What is kind of brilliant about this little trick, is that each person's understanding of the stories will be slightly different, depending on which story they read first. I...

...beauty in its most completeness is never found in a single body but is something shared instead between more than one body Ali Smith upends the standard binary worldview in this gorgeous, complex, postmodern creation. It's a rare book that leaves me weeping at the end, but this is a rare read, indeed. At once playful and melancholic, absurd and achingly real, How To Be Both transcends boundaries of past and present, life and death, perception and reality—not to mention plot and character—t

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....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 th

It is an infinite loop. A book of mirrors. There are many kinds of both, inside the stories, outside the stories but in the book, over and over, back and forth. Like looking in a mirror of a mirror, to see endless reflection. The words line up one after the other, but they also reach out, silently, to pair up and mirror and reflect upon themselves across time, thereby bridging it. Time merges. The book somehow begins to escape time, to transcend it, to weave a fabric.”Past or present? George sa...

This is exactly what I like best in “experimental” writing. Playful vistas with depth, lives with layers and connections that bubble up delightfully into your awareness, the fruits of discovery there for taking and in enough plenty there is no want or penalty of missing some. We have one-half of the book devoted to the life of a female painter in Renaissance Italy posing as a man, Francesco, and a second half about a teenaged girl in contemporary England, Georgie, who is engaging with her dead m...

This book won the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize, the Novel Award in the 2014 Costa Book Awards and the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. This, very much lauded in literary circles book, is a clever tale somehow connecting a story of dealing with loss in the 21st century to the story of a struggling female artist forced to dress and live as a man in 15th century Italy! Maybe a bit too clever, so not as accessible as it could have been? A great piece of work, smart and genre busting. 8 out of 12

This is one of the best books I’ve read in awhile. “It is a feeling thing, to be a painter of things: cause every thing, even an imagined or gone thing or creature or person has essence: paint a rose or a coin or a duck or a brick and you’ll feel it as sure as if a coin had a mouth and told you what it was like to be a coin, as if a rose told you first-hand what petals are, their softness and wetness held in a pellicle of colour thinner and more feeling than an eyelid, as if a duck told you abou...

This book was so interesting that while reading it, I decided to order 5 other of Ali Smith's novels just because I knew I had to get to know her better. This book contains two fates and two stories which are told seperately. The writing style is unique and somewhat messy, but the tone of voice is clear and the two characters have very different personalities. Meanwhile, the lines between their fates shine through and that's one of the beauties of this novel. I was impressed by how they are both...

3.5 out of 5 stars