Mention Books Supposing How to Be Both
| Original Title: | How to Be Both ASIN B00IPXLLO8 |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | Booker Prize Nominee (2014), Costa Book Award for Novel (2014), Women's Prize for Fiction (2015), Specsavers National Book Award Nominee for UK Author of the Year (2014), Goldsmiths Prize (2014) Saltire Society Literary Award for Literary Book (2014), Rathbones Folio Prize Nominee (2015) |
Ali Smith
Kindle Edition | Pages: 376 pages Rating: 3.65 | 17409 Users | 2259 Reviews
Particularize Containing Books How to Be Both
| Title | : | How to Be Both |
| Author | : | Ali Smith |
| Book Format | : | Kindle Edition |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 376 pages |
| Published | : | September 4th 2014 by Penguin (first published August 28th 2014) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. Contemporary. Art. Literary Fiction |
Commentary Toward Books How to Be Both
Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else. A true original, she is a one-of-a-kind literary sensation. Her novels consistently attract serious acclaim and discussion—and have won her a dedicated readership who are drawn again and again to the warmth, humanity and humor of her voice.How to be both is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real—and all life’s givens get given a second chance.
A NOTE TO THE READER:
Who says stories reach everybody in the same order?
This novel can be read in two ways and this book provides you with both.
In half of all printed editions of the novel the narrative EYES comes before CAMERA.
In the other half of printed editions the narrative CAMERA precedes EYES.
The narratives are exactly the same in both versions, just in a different order.
The books are intentionally printed in two different ways, so that readers can randomly have different experiences reading the same text. So, depending on which edition you happen to receive, the book will be: EYES, CAMERA, or CAMERA, EYES. Enjoy the adventure.
Rating Containing Books How to Be Both
Ratings: 3.65 From 17409 Users | 2259 ReviewsAppraise Containing Books How to Be Both
I was inexorably drawn to reading this novel on account of its subject-matter, even though I have never got on that well with Ali Smith in the past. I love the Ferrarese schoolin some ways, its almost my favorite 15thC school of paintingand novels on Francesco del Cossa arent likely to come along any too often. In the event, I liked this more than others of Smiths novel that I have read or attempted (Hotel World, The Accidental), though there was quite a bit in it that annoyed me as well. II tussled for two weeks with this challenging and disappointing novel from the Best and Most Innovative Scottish Novelist Alive. Split into two separate narratives connected via the novels bipolar concept, the first section is quintessential Smith with its precocious teenage protagonist and her tireless obsession with words (these recurring characters are sentimental love-affairs with ones formative time discovering language and its possibilities), while the second part is one of her riskiest
The Hand that Draws the HandAli Smith has produced the literary equivalent of that Escher print of a hand drawing the hand that is drawing it. In art terms, her novel would be a diptych: two panels of equal size, with different subjects, but intended to be seen side by side. In her case, two stories from different centuries that comment on each other, reflect each other, and (in that Escher twist) at times even write each other. The first half in my edition* is in the voice of a 15th-century
Ali Smiths playfully brilliant new novel makes me both excited and wary of recommending it. This gender-blending, genre-blurring story, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, bounces across centuries, tossing off profound reflections on art and grief, without getting tangled in its own postmodern wires. Its the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that dont seem entirely possible How did she get here from there? but youve got to be willing to hang on.The games start even before
And which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. What we see or how we see? (p.150)How to be both to be made & unmade both, exist in the past and the present, perceive more, create more, love more, live more be more.Ali Smith's latest book explores these questions through the transformative agencies of Art and Friendship.Two mourning children, existing in different time frames, learn to cope with their loss & find meaning & purpose in their lives what connects them is Art,
This is exactly what I like best in experimental writing. Playful vistas with depth, lives with layers and connections that bubble up delightfully into your awareness, the fruits of discovery there for taking and in enough plenty there is no want or penalty of missing some. We have one-half of the book devoted to the life of a female painter in Renaissance Italy posing as a man, Francesco, and a second half about a teenaged girl in contemporary England, Georgie, who is engaging with her dead
HOW TO READ BOTH This clever, very clever, novel is made out of the stuff of life. Here we have the usual suspects: time, language, love and art. Four of them. And as it is about life, it is also about death.Time in which the past and future intertwine in the fleeting present. Love fledging its most admirable redeeming abilities. Language as the malleable communicator that sometimes fails. Art in its ability to fascinate and enchant. With death always lurking.Its structure is paramount. It has
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