Ratings68
Average rating3.8
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"--
Featured Series
2 primary booksSeasonal is a 2-book series with 2 released primary works first released in 1988 with contributions by Ali Smith.
Reviews with the most likes.
Third catch I've managed to grip on the series.
Candidly speaking, I do not feel as strong as with Summer and Spring on how the themes are correlated, and especially the way they are projected throughout the storyline. Again, typically Smith, we can see Brexit, misogyny and more current issues being scribbled and scattered from one paragraph to another paragraph in the book. Yet, as with the other books in the series, arts, the perfect means of escapism, the perfect means of dealing with life, the perfect means of emotional attachment to get through all the troubles you have. This is, again, in my perspective, very truthful and guarantee as the best means to cope with life, to seek for the ideals while the reality is never so.
Autumn, though it is the title, it was not as declining as this season ought to be as shown in the book. Perhaps for Daniel Gluck it is, that with more a century of a lifetime, his vitals are not as great as before. But this transitional period, similar to spring but in an opposite direction, from bloom to regression, from climax to falling action, from prime to decrepitude. Seemingly bleak, but is it really so?
Autumn, the season before winter, the last golden period before the arrival of darkness, when there are still more leaves to fall.
4.5
i enjoyed this one quite a bit. was a very clever book coupled with interestingly woven relationships and witty dialogue. the characters really hold everything together. once or twice the book is a little confusing (like the first few pages) but if you allow yourself to stop trying to “solve” it and sit through the discomfort, the puzzle starts to come together on its own. will have to revisit this one.
there are so many ways to take this book apart but i think this quote does it best:
“What I do when it distresses me that there's something I can't remember, is...I imagine that whatever it is I've forgotten is folded close to me, like a sleeping bird.What kind of bird? Elisabeth said.A wild bird, Daniel said. Any kind. You'll know what kind when it happens. Then, what I do is, I just hold it there, without holding it too tight, and I let it sleep. And that's that.”
:)
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