de Ali Smith
Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Two old friends—Daniel, a centenarian, and Elisabeth, born in 1984—look to both the future and the past as the United Kingdom stands divided by a historic, once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand-in-hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.
A luminous meditation on the meaning of richness and harvest and worth, Autumn is the first installment of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, and it casts an eye over our own time: Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearean jeu d’esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s pop art. Autumn is wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories.
Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Two old friends—Daniel, a centenarian, and Elisabeth, born in 1984—look to both the future and the past as the United Kingdom stands divided by a historic, once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand-in-hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.
A luminous meditation on the meaning of richness and harvest and worth, Autumn is the first installment of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, and it casts an eye over our own time: Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearean jeu d’esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s pop art. Autumn is wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories.
Critiques-
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Starred review from March 6, 2017
This splendid free-form novelâthe first in a seasonally themed tetralogyâchronicles the last days of a lifelong friendship between Elisabeth, a British university lecturer in London, and her former neighbor, a centenarian named Daniel. Opening with an oblique, dreamy prologue about mortality, the novel proper sets itself against this past summer's historic Brexit vote, intermittently flashing back to the early years of Elisabeth and Daniel's relationship. Though there are a few relevant subplots, including Elisabeth's nightmarish attempt to procure a new passport, as well as her fascination with the painter Pauline Boty, the general plot is appropriately shapeless, reflecting the character's discombobulated psyche. Smith (How to Be Both) deftly juxtaposes her protagonists' physical and emotional states in the past and present, tracking Elisabeth's path from precocity to disillusionment. Eschewing traditional structure and punctuation, the novel charts a wild course through uncertain terrain, an approach that excites and surprises in equal turn. Seen through Elisabeth's eyes, Daniel's deterioration is particularly affecting. Smith, always one to take risks, sees all of them pay off yet again. -
Starred review from November 15, 2016
A girl's friendship with an older neighbor stands at the center of this multifaceted meditation on aging, art, love, and affection.Smith (Public Library and Other Stories, 2016, etc.) opens this volume, the first of a planned quartet featuring each season, with a man washed ashore naked. He wonders if he is dead. He sees a girl nearby and sews himself some clothing from leaves after a needle and a bobbin of gold thread appear in his hand. From dream or fantasy, the narrative shifts to hard reality: the man, Daniel, next appears asleep in a hospital bed in the present time, age 101. His visitor is Elisabeth, age 32, a university lecturer in art history who has just endured the painful comedy of bureaucracy while trying to renew her passport at the post office. She met Daniel when she was 8 and needed to interview him for a school project. The book will jump around in time as Daniel introduces Elisabeth to puns, storytelling, and art, especially that of a woman he loved named Pauline Boty. She was an actual U.K. artist of the pop era who made a brief appearance in the movie Alfie. Her work included a portrait of Christine Keeler during the Profumo Affair, and Smith has fun with Keeler's court appearances. History is also current, as Smith touches on the friction caused by Brexit nationwide (with a pointed opening allusion to Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities) and in one town where some undefined menace arises with the installation of large electrified fences. Smith has a gift for drawing a reader into whatever world she creates, even when she bends the rules of fiction, as she did also in her previous novel, How to Be Both (2014). Smith's book is a kaleidoscope whose suggestive fragments and insights don't easily render a pleasing pattern, yet it's compelling in its emotional and historical freight, its humor, and keen sense of creativity and loss.COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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September 15, 2016
First in a quartet of interconnected but stand-alone novels collectively called "Seasonal," this work explores the nature of time, how the past influences the present, and how the concept of harvest is deeply embedded in our consciousness. What, you expected something conventional from the Man Booker-short-listed and Baileys Prize-winning author?
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from December 1, 2016
On the eve of the polarizing Brexit vote, a young woman reads aloud at the bedside of a semicomatose elderly man whom she visits weekly in his nursing home. When they met years earlier, Elisabeth was a neglected young girl whose single mother frequently left her at home alone, and Daniel was the much older, sophisticated European who had recently moved in next door. Elisabeth may have reminded Daniel of his beloved younger sister, who was left behind when Daniel escaped from World War II Germany. Over long walks and talks, Daniel patiently introduced Elisabeth to fine literature and to the avant-garde art of the Sixties. Many years later, Elisabeth, now an art historian, rediscovers Daniel close to death in a nursing home. As a wave of xenophobia sweeps across Europe and over to Britain, the parallels to the racism and violence in Daniel's past are striking. VERDICT At the heart of Man Booker Prize nominee Smith's (How To Be Both) new novel is the charming friendship between a lonely girl and a kind older man who offers her a world of culture. This novel of big ideas and small pleasures is enthusiastically recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 8/15/16.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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December 1, 2016
On the eve of the polarizing Brexit vote, a young woman reads aloud at the bedside of a semicomatose elderly man whom she visits weekly in his nursing home. When they met years earlier, Elisabeth was a neglected young girl whose single mother frequently left her at home alone, and Daniel was the much older, sophisticated European who had recently moved in next door. Elisabeth may have reminded Daniel of his beloved younger sister, who was left behind when Daniel escaped from World War II Germany. Over long walks and talks, Daniel patiently introduced Elisabeth to fine literature and to the avant-garde art of the Sixties. Many years later, Elisabeth, now an art historian, rediscovers Daniel close to death in a nursing home. As a wave of xenophobia sweeps across Europe and over to Britain, the parallels to the racism and violence in Daniel's past are striking. VERDICT At the heart of Man Booker Prize nominee Smith's (How To Be Both) new novel is the charming friendship between a lonely girl and a kind older man who offers her a world of culture. This novel of big ideas and small pleasures is enthusiastically recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 8/15/16.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Dwight Garner, The New York Times
***Long-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize***
"Autumn is about a long platonic friendship between an elderly man and a much younger woman. His name is Daniel. He's 101. . . . Her name is Elisabeth. She's a 32-year-old fitfully employed art lecturer at an unnamed university in London. She comes to read to, and be with, him. . . . There's a bit of a Harold and Maude thing going on here. . . . As Elisabeth and Daniel talk, and as Elisabeth processes the events of her life, a world opens. Autumn begins to be about 100 things in addition to friendship. It's about poverty and bureaucracy and sex and morality and music. It includes a long and potent detour into the tragic life and powerful painting of the British Pop artist Pauline Boty (1938-66), whose work, Smith makes plain, should be better known. . . . This is the place to come out and say it: Ali Smith has a beautiful mind. I found this book to be unbearably moving in its playful, strange, soulful... - Sarah Lyall, The New York Times Book Review "[Elisabeth and Daniel] are each other's favorite people in the world, even though their paths cross only intermittently and he is 69 years old than she is. . . . Their extraordinary friendship forms the moral center of this beautiful, subtle work, the seventh novel by Smith, who consistently produces some of Britain's most exciting, ambitious and moving writing. . . . Smith teases out big ideas so slyly and lightly that you can miss how artfully she goes about it. . . . Smith's writing is fearless and nonlinear, exploring the connectivity of things: between the living and the dead, the past and the present, art and life. She conveys time almost as it if is happening all at once, like Picasso trying to record an image from every angle simultaneously. . . . Smith's writing is light and playful, deceptively simple, skipping along like a stone on the surface of a lake, brimming with humanity and bending, despite everything, toward hope. . . . 'Whoever makes up the story makes up the...
