Autumn
Ratings73
Average rating3.8
‘'It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again. That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature.''
‘'How many words can you hold in a hand.In a handful of sand.''
Two old souls. Elizabeth, 34 years old. Optimistic, bookish, pragmatic, direct. Daniel, 101 years old. Dreamer, artistic, hopeful, stubborn. They come together once again in a time when autumn has fallen over the fate of a land that has seemed to lost its direction. Brexit is a reality, a bleak and terrifying reality for the entire continent. Daniel is about to depart, Elizabeth is at a crossroads. The United Kingdom is in limbo. And we now know that it isn't going to get any better...
Ali Smith creates a monument. A literary testimony of the time when Europe lost a part of its heart. Without doctrines and preaching megaphones, without empty words, Autumn becomes a symbol for the void. Is it a new beginning or a death?
‘'A minute ago it was June. Now the weather is September.The nights are sooner, chiller, the light a little less each time. Dark at half past seven. Dark at quarter past seven. Dark at seven.The greens of the trees have been duller since August, since July really. But the flowers are still coming. The hedgerows are still humming. The shed is already full of apples and the tree's still covered in them.The birds are on the powerlines.The swifts left long ago. They're hundreds of miles from here by now, somewhere over the ocean.''
Ali Smith writes about the duality of autumn. Its beautiful, haunting, sad nature. About Life and Death mirrored in the changes around us, and the way Art is able to immortalize seemingly detrimental details. We find ourselves walking with two brilliant characters in a country in disarray and doubt. The chill, the perfume of the chestnuts, the focus on the colours of Cezanne. Echoing Thomas Hardy's masterpieces and the haunting part of Miranda in Shakespeare's The Tempest, with references to Huxley's Brave New World and Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (with its unmistakable comparisons, though we could change Paris with Berlin to be more acute and accurate...), the central theme is all about one thing our times are severely lacking: Dialogue!
The end of dialogue is the end of peace. When we don't ‘'talk'', discord and isolation follow. When countries don't ‘'talk'', there is tangible danger. BUT! Can ONE talk with someone who refuses to LISTEN, parroting lies, constructed threats or parading their own frightening ignorance? Dialogue requires bilateral participation. It is easy to lecture on its values, but it needs TWO to succeed. By God, we hardly see this anymore. And thus, wounds fester and madmen thrive in their lies. Well, too bad for those who believe them. They're always the first to regret it.
I was moved by Smith's writing. There is a beautiful, sensual chapter in which trees become a metaphor for womanhood and birth. She creates a parody of the ordeal of the ‘'perfect'' passport photo in a telling example of every absurd regulation that not only makes travelling difficult but also discourages the citizens from trusting their countries' own laws. As if ages-old prejudices weren't enough...I mean, come on! We're all for safety - OBVIOUSLY! - but the Sabbath for man not man for the Sabbath!
Allow me to leave you with two extracts that deserve 10+ stars. This is how the melancholic tranquillity, the serenity and quiet sadness of autumn can be contained in two short chapters.
‘'They walked past the shops, then over to the fields where the inter-school summer sports were held, where the fair wnt and the circus. Elizabeth had last come to the field just after the circus had left, especially to look at the flat dry place where the circus had had its tent. She liked doing melancholy things like that. But now you couldn't tell that any of these summer things had ever happened. There was just empty field. The sports tracks had faded and gone. The flattened grass, the places that had turned to mud where the crowds had wandered round between the rides and the open-sided trailers full of the driving and shooting games, the ghost circus ring: nothing but grass. Somehow this wasn't the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren't relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief. Past the field there was another field. Then there was the river.''
‘'October's a blink of the eye. The apples weighing down the tree a minute ago are gone and the tree's leaves are yellow and thinning. A frost has snapped millions of trees all across the country into brightness. The ones that aren't evergreen are a combination of beautiful and tawdry, red orange gold the leaves, then brown, and down. The days are unexpectedly mild. It doesn't feel that far from summer, not really, if it weren't for the underbite of the day, the lacy creep of the dark and the damp at its edges, the plants calm in the folding themselves away, the beads of the condensation on the webstrings hung between things. On the warm days it feels wrong, so many leaves falling. But the nights are cool to cold.''
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Misschien beter als boek in een leesclub?
Tijdens het lezen net iets te vaak het gevoel dat ik iets mis in betekenis en achtergrond, al zijn de post-Brexit stukken erg mooi.
Maar mijn kennis van vrouwelijke pop-art kunstenaars schiet mogelijk wat te kort, en de droom-scenes lijken me heel geschikt om eens met iemand over te praten :-)
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.”
:)
This book has many different types of narration in it, but only few if them were interesting to me. The rest was, for me, a bunch of fillers that didn't resonate.
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.
This is more like 3.7. This is not an easy read. Some passages are beautifully written. Other seems to make no sense. Bu it still fits the narrative. It's more about senses than anything
A lovely read. The parts about Daniel were so soft and wonderful. Some sections got a bit muddled for me, but overall a quiet, moving narrative.
I finished Autumn last night but I needed to sleep on my feelings to write an accurate review of this book. I think this book was a phenomenally crafted book. Ali smith can write dream sequences and dialogue and mundane human experience with such a sharp wit and vitality that I haven't seen in any other literature I have read. I love the character of mr Gluck and his relationship with Elisabeth. I loved the peppering of historical women within the text (Christine Keeler and Pauline Boty). I loved the description of the seasons and some of the disjointed elements of this book. I would rate this book a high 4.5 as I enjoyed all the characters I encountered in this novel. The only reason it misses out on a full 5 stars it that it took me a quite a while to connect with the book overall as I was only dipping into it here and there when I had any time so the first dream sequence took me a bit to get my head around. I loved the modern and relevant elements of the book around immigrant, asylum seekers, multiculturalism and Brexit. Those bits felt so current and important. Overall I really did enjoy the book and I am happy to continue on with Ali smiths seasonal collection and the other books of hers I haven't read!
The author of this book is likely brilliant. She's a true craftswoman. It was easy to get lost in her prose, but in the end, it still left me feeling lost.
Impressionistic, and perhaps existentialist, but while skillfully done, it wasn't something that I found I really enjoyed reading either. Some really meaningful scenes, and some very humorous ones for anyone who has ever had problems at the post office trying to get a passport, and yet I put it down thankful that it was over and I could move on to different book.
Autumn is a little crazy, but wholly beautiful. By a little crazy, I mean that to the average reader, it is a disjointed mess. By being beautiful, I mean that Smith has a way with weaving gorgeous prose. I haven't read enough Ali Smith to know if this is just her style—it is my third—but I'm beginning to think it may be. And while Autumn is definitely more humorous, poignant, and breathtaking than other works I've read from the author, it's such an incredibly broken story (structurally speaking) that I'm hesitant to heap too much praise on it.
Autumn is the story of Elisabeth and her relationship with her mother. It is the story of Daniel, a centenarian who has been mentor and friend to Elisabeth. It is a story about bureaucracy and the results of Brexit, a tale of acceptance and prejudice. It is a story as old as Keats and as ‘contemporary' as Trump. And it is the tragedy of Pauline Boty, 1960s British pop artist. It's Boty's story that really pulls the reader in. Despite the wonderfully written sentences and the joys of watching Elisabeth apply for a passport, nothing stuck with me in this story more than the tale of Boty.
I hadn't heard of Boty prior to reading this novel. I doubt many readers will have. I wondered whether she was even a real person or merely a fictional creation of the author's, so I hopped on over to my local search engine and began a research project that ended hours later.
Being a relatively little known but successful artist and actress during her brief life, it is a wonder Boty is not better known today. The fact that she's not, paired with the story of her tragic death (...and her husband's ... and their daughter's), makes her story all the more interesting. It's a family tragedy that draws comparisons to the Brontȅ's. You can feel, in this novel, that Smith was getting sucked into the story of Boty, whether that was her original intention with the novel or not. In turn, the reader, attracted by that passion, is easily pulled in too.
Elisabeth is a wonderful character. She is funny in her moments of desperation; she inspires during her more reflective moments. The whole cast is fine. The story is jumbled, but it's certainly not bad. The language is, as I mentioned, phenomenal. The scenes are drawn with skill. Autumn is a very capable novel, but what sticks with me in the end is the story of Boty. But Boty is only a fragment of what this novel is about. It's about so many things. That lack of focus kept me from loving this novel as much as I might have otherwise.
Man Booker Prize 2017:
Although I had planned on reading this novel eventually, I was spurred to read it sooner as an attempt to make it through the 2017 Man Booker longlist. I may revise my thoughts on Smith's chances of winning after I've completed more of the books on this year's list, but I think Autumn stands a fair chance to make it to the shortlist. It's intelligent, beautiful, and extremely poignant, and those are three factors that tend to play into the Man Booker Prize. Not having read enough of the other nominees at this point, I can't attest to Autumn's overall chances of taking the prize, but I think there have got to be better candidates amongst this year's nominees. I will not be shocked if Autumn makes it to the shortlist; neither will I be shocked if it is cut.