THIS BOOK. This. Book. After a few false starts with Ali Smith, I’ve finally found a favorite from her oeuvre. I couldn’t get enough. It was pure joy to read this book slowly and carefully, doting on each word. My edition began with the Renaissance painter, which I think made the connection a bit harder. I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at in the painter’s purgatorial state. The description on the back was lackluster. But after a few pages, falling into the rhythm was just magical. I loved it.
From the publisher:
A novel all about art’s versatility, borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take.
“Cements Smith’s reputation as one of the finest and most innovative of our contemporary writers. By some divine alchemy, she is both funny and moving; she combines intellectual rigor with whimsy” —The Los Angeles Review of Books
How to be both is 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. Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else.
Booklots! 