All across the country, the countries cut adrift. This first book in Smith’s quartet is about the time-traversing friendship between the young Elisabeth and the old Daniel -“lifelong friends, …We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.” Even as their conversations dance through art and literature and history, the country is breaking apart (again) over the Brexit vote, and xenophobia is in the air and populates the new detention centres for illegal immigrants that are springing up in the countryside.Īll across the country, what had happened whipped about itself as if a live electric wire had snapped off a pylon in a storm and was whipping about in the air about the trees, the roofs, the traffic.Īll across the country, the country split in pieces. And now Elisabeth is watching Daniel in his hospital bed, waiting for him to wake and ask the question he always asks: What you reading? Even as we wonder who he is, and how he finds himself thus, he vanishes, leaving us to encounter Elisabeth Demand, in the midst of dealing with the intractable bureaucracy of the British Postal Services. That’s one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once, says Art in Ali Smith’s Winter.Īutumn opens with old Daniel Gluck, not quite dead, washed up on a beach on the edge of a forest, now clothed only in leaves, and now “respectable”. Four luminous volumes that pack story and riddle, art and nature (Art in Nature, as we shall see), past and present, crises personal and political, all wrapped in what has now become signature Ali Smith wordplay. In the course of five months I consumed the entire Seasonal Quartet, too impatient in the midst of our pademicked lockdown to wait for book stores to open or Amazon to deliver, like a greedy child, I had to have them right now-on my Kindle. The second time led to a more sustained involvement my interest was sparked by an interview of the author by writer Linn Ullman on the podcast How to Proceed. I raced through it, transfixed, by the ingenuity of form and stop-in-your-tracks prose, the effortlessness with which she shifts perspective and forces you to see first through one pair of eyes and then another, and before you know it, you have been both. My first encounter with Ali Smith was a hardcover library book with an intriguing title: How to be Both.
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