![]() ![]() While the modern story is a fairly straightforward narrative, about a teenage girl in Cambridge who has lost her mother, the Italian section is in the voice of a recently-deceased 500-year-old cross-dressing fresco painter, and begins at a level of surreality and with a lack of context that is disorientating for a good few pages. Most readers-and many reviewers-were oblivious to the fact that were two editions. ![]() ![]() The novel comprises two discrete stories, one set in the present day and one in fifteenth-century Italy, and half of the books were printed with the modern story first, while the other half began in the Renaissance. In her award-winning 2014 novel How to Be Both, Smith managed to extend her playfulness to the production of the book itself-a process not well known for its adventurousness. ![]() Her most recent books, Autumn (2016) and Winter (2017), reflect the United Kingdom’s bleak political climate, but manage to be light-hearted and high-spirited at the same time. Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet is a lesson in how to create novels that reflect the now in all its glory and horror, writes The JRB Editor Jennifer Malec.Īli Smith is one of the most interesting, inventive and enjoyable experimental literary novelists currently writing in what might be called the mainstream. ![]()
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