Ratings37
Average rating4.1
Waar Autumn toch niet helemaal mijn ding bleek te zijn, was Winter met zijn zeer vervreemdende [] begin over een zwevend hoofd (of is het toch wat anders?), fijne steken naar de Brexit, Boris Johnson en Trump een aangenaam tijdsverdrijf. Veel minder het gevoel dat ik voor dit boek te dom/weinig onderlegd was, met slechts zijdelinge referenties naar kunst...Na het lezen van een recensie (na afloop) ergens op een Engelse website wel het gevoel dat ik toch nog een en ander aan woordspelingen gemist heb - slecht een paar denk ik herkend te hebben, maar er zitten er nog veel meer in (maar ik ben dan ook niet Kroatisch-via-Canadees)...[] Ja, Autumn was ook best vreemd maar dit vond ik betere vreemd :-)
Last run on the series.
I regard Winter as a bit different from the others. It is still politically centred on about protests that happened in the past and now, referring to other current topics like pollution, littering, etc. What is shared in common between the four parts is that I can always find characters who dedicate themselves to work and act to change the shady bits of the world.
Yet, Winter, happens to be not so cold from what I perceive in the novel. The frozen bonds unraveled and manage to melt, being another festive season of the catch up of family members, being one of the centripetal forces that unite people, being one of the warm bonfire to light up the darkness and defense against the cold. From Art, his mother, his aunt and Lux's way of getting along, which I do have to give a round of applause to Lux, who, being a total stranger, is so willing to help build what was lost of the family and being the sheer force in solidarity when she literally could have refused from such an awkward and annoying case.
Speaking of art, Art and art, art in nature, considered by me as a nice shuffle of words. While Art himself might be in some sort of an existential crisis, or an identity crisis, in the sense which the blogs he had written, might not be real but would be the content reader wish to see and are able to relate. In the light of this, there is also shoutouts to Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Charles Chaplin, etc. Again, it makes winter less unapproachable and rather, with a pair of welcoming arms in the air silently shouting a “you're always welcome here” with warmth while the outside is suffused in dormancy.
I do like the blithe atmosphere during the conversations in the Cornwall cottage. Yes, it might be annoying to have your seniors debating against each other just for the sake of being antagonistic while you are trying to think some things through, or finding the household with immense dread in itself simply because you find that irreparable generational gap slowly becoming an abyss that you cannot find any way to get across, ending up with a rendition of the circumstance that it is simply the lack of common interests which induce that abyss.
Winter, cold, fearful, dark, prolonged night, lessened day, petrified by winter tales, terrified by horror and the never ending darkness, depression, melancholy, isolation, loneliness... As with every review I have done about the quartet, ending it with the final season of the year is considering a bliss to myself. Again, a few more words, a few more sentences, a few more questions.
Take yourself out for a walk in winter and despite that clarity of bleakness, of everything covered in white, too sharpening to have your eyes on them for long, try to infiltrate yourself with some warmth-not from the nature perhaps, but with our species who do share the same amount of heat as we all do.
Winter, the end, the symbolic farewell to a year. “That's what winter is: an exercise remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you.” To die, so we can be more alive, so we do know what means life.
‘'God was dead: to begin with.And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead.Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead.''
Winter. I concluded my first reading experience in Ali Smith's universe on a day when the centre of Athens was covered in snow. Sun and snow in the heart of the capital, the first in almost 20 years. During a break in my teaching sessions - because Zoom is still going strong, damn it!- I looked outside my window as the snow was falling. Silence and children's laughter. And I thought, why does winter fascinate us so much? What is it that makes it so special? Does it bring us together or drive us apart? In Ali Smith's moving masterpiece, both happen. As in life itself.
‘'It can do this because it's midwinter, which is a time of year when children and gods are meant to meet, when a child can speak to gods and gods are meant to listen, a time that's about children and gods being related.''
Sophie, Iris, Art, Lux. Four people trying to spend Christmas Day as peacefully as they can, trying to remain unscathed by their reluctant interaction. Small chance, really. Two sisters, as different as day and night, and two strangers that decided to follow one another, each one obeying a special motive. Memories come and go, past anger and regrets come to the surface. Who are they? What are they looking for? Where will this search end? Why don't we listen but remain too much in love with our own voice? Moving back and forth to an eventful past and a frighteningly uncertain present, Ali Smith's characters share their thoughts on age and obligations, dreams and reality, ghosts and the people that pass by in a flash, freedom and revolution and propriety. Love and anger.
In a world where money is all there is because we chose to make it so, in a country where Brexit is a reality, in a time when a madman enters the White House, one may feel like a piece of stone, heavy and still. Do we let others create a sculpture of us, projecting their image on ourselves? Or do we CHOOSE to grab the tools and break the mold? After the Capitol Attack by a bunch of uneducated bigots/racists/all-around barbarians obeying a monster, the final pages in Smith's masterpiece became all the more poignant.
‘'It's winter, still. There's no snow. There's been almost none all winter. It'll be one of the warmest winters on record, again. Still, it's colder in some places than others.This morning there was frost on the ridges of the turned earth across the fields, frost the sun had melted on one side only.Art in nature.''
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Enjoyed the reading experience, and it was an experience. I did find myself lost a couple of times to what was going on, however I loved her writing style and the tone of the book. It was a perfect read for Christmas.
Refreshing to read a novel that feels so energetically modern. The timeless problems of family, relationship, and loneliness, are woven poetically and inseparably into the fabric of modernity and of the lives we find ourselves living now, in the age of Google and Trump.