Ali Smith: Autumn (2016)
A girl's friendship with an older neighbor stands at the center of this multifaceted meditation on aging, art, love, and affection.
"From the Man Booker-shortlisted and Baileys Prize-winning author of How to be both: a breathtakingly inventive new novel--about aging, time, love, and stories themselves--that launches an extraordinary quartet of books called Seasonal... The first installment in a quartet, Seasonal, comprised of four stand-alone books, separate yet interconnected and cyclical (as are the seasons), explores what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes …
A girl's friendship with an older neighbor stands at the center of this multifaceted meditation on aging, art, love, and affection.
"From the Man Booker-shortlisted and Baileys Prize-winning author of How to be both: a breathtakingly inventive new novel--about aging, time, love, and stories themselves--that launches an extraordinary quartet of books called Seasonal... The first installment in a quartet, Seasonal, comprised of four stand-alone books, separate yet interconnected and cyclical (as are the seasons), explores what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take and in our ways with narrative. Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy, and the color hit of Pop Art, Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means"--
264 pages
English language
Published April 4, 2016
This novel takes what could be rightly described as a stream-of-consciousness narrative and gives it substance, even something close to order. Concerned very much with the perception and passage of time, 'Autumn' may be mistakenly described as a novel without much of a plot, but I firmly believe that is exactly what Smith intended with it.
