The first of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet, which dig into migration and xenophobia in post-Brexit Britain through the story of centenarian Daniel and the people around him.

I love Ali Smith's writing. This work of fiction centers on topics of art, found family, Brexit. I can't wait to read the rest in the series. I will for sure put more books by Smith on my tbr.

Beautifully written and clearly well thought out . This is a reminder that literary fiction can be accessible and enjoyable. An excellent read.

Elisabeth grows up a lonely child. Raised by a distracted and at times neglectful single mother and having little in common with most children, Elisabeth spends most of her time alone. That is, until she meets her neighbor, an older gentleman named Daniel Gluck. Daniel is literate and witty and knows things about the world that her mother would never think of wanting to know. Her mother isn't sure about him but comes to depend on him as single mothers do with those near to them that are willing to help.

Despite an age gap of seven decades, Elisabeth soon finds Daniel to be one of the central figures of her life, giving her things to consider and think about she had never imagined and opening her life. Daniel loves art and literature and music and he exposes Elisabeth to all of that. In particular, he loves the work of a sixties female artist named Pauline Boty and that is the subject that Elisabeth eventually chooses as her doctorate dissertation.

The novel picks up again when Elisabeth is 32 and Daniel is 101 and living in a care facility. Elisabeth goes to see him regularly although he is in a type of coma and only sleeps while she is there. She still goes regularly, reading aloud to him and reminiscing about their time together. She is now a part-time art lecturer and is trying to form a closer relationship with her mother. She uses her time sitting with Daniel to think about her life and put it into a form she can understand.

This is the first of an anticipated four book sequence. The form is loose, like the ramblings of a mind left to ponder things in unguarded moments. Along the way, Smith talks about how she finds the world or at least her corner of it, after Brexit, with a government who doesn't seem to care about its people, about how art can speak to us when we are straining for connection. It was nominated for Best Book Of The Year by such publications as The New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, The Guardian, NPR, and The Washington Post. This book is recommended for readers willing to think about what their lives mean and readers of literary fiction.

Exceptional. There’s no one like Smith. Witty, punny, warm, imaginative, playful. The book is a delight.

I found the story difficult to become acclimated to and very slow moving. It really did not catch my attention at all and I had to move on to something else.

This was my very first experience with an Ali Smith book. I will be honest, she is an imposing author. One that requires something of you as you open the pages of her books. Knowing this going in, I was happily surprised at the wit and humor found in everyday situations like being in line at the Post Office for a passport picture submission. Because of that entry point, I felt more at ease and less girded for a master class in high English Literature. But as I read, I realized that I see why she is considered a master of the form. I reveled in how she was able to say so much about the current state of UK affairs (immediately post_Brexit) through the lens of a woman, her mother, and their dying neighbor for whom she has had a very unique and special relationship. There are layers here, but they are nuanced in most cases. Like the leaves on a tree that fall little by little in Autumn until the tree is eventually bare, this book lets impressions and ideas float to the ground as you read it. It's a wonderful piece of literature- simultaneously high minded and accessible for someone willing to pick it up.

Three hours on a Saturday afternoon is all I had with this lovely book. For some reason I had been avoiding it -- it doesn't make any sense now that I've flown through, but I didn't care for one of Ms. Smith's earlier novels, and that's the best excuse I can come up with... Anyway, don't judge a book by its predecessor is the lesson I learned. I adored Daniel Gluck and curious, caring Elisabeth. There is a fair amount of cheeky humor, most having to do with a passport photo, and some searing passages commenting on society. It's a brilliant book and I'm anxiously waiting for Winter from the library. I won't make the mistake of waiting twice.

Ali Smith has gotten a lot of hype for this book and it lives up to it. It is beautiful and each word is in the right place. I can't wait to read more from her.

More abstract than I tend to read, the story is both engaging and bittersweet.

“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.”

Ali Smith’s Autumn, a state-of -the-nation novel, looks at Britain after the EU referendum. This is a turbulent, ugly world of bitterly divided opinions, library closures, cuts in university spending, and overwhelming student debt. The novel goes back and forth between the past and the present, and all this is seen through the eyes of Elisabeth and her relationship with the elderly Daniel Gluck.

autumn

The novel opens with Daniel Gluck, now 101 years old, sleeping and dreaming in a care home. In his dream, Daniel, washes up on a sandy shore, and once again has a young body that cooperates, runs, and gives joy in its pure ability. At the same time, even in this dream state, Daniel is conscious that his body is aged and rotting.

The novel’s next sequence takes us to Elisabeth who is reading, appropriately, Huxley’s Brave New World as she waits in line at the Post Office to apply for a new passport. There’s the sense that time grinds down to this slow, tap-dripping pace as Elisabeth pulls a distressingly high number from the ticket machine, waits and waits…. shifting uneasily on a seat on which one movement makes another customer sitting next to her “jerk[ed] into the air.”

Elisabeth Demand-thirty two years old, no-fixed-hours casual contract junior lecturer at a university in London, living the dream, her mother says, and she is, if the dream means having no job security and almost everything being too expensive to do and that you’re still in the same rented flat you had when you were a student over a decade ago.

The post office episode has to be the best portrayal of the mind-numbing, surreal experience of dealing with government bureaucracy.

I just have to make it clear to you first up before we check anything, he says, that if I go ahead now and check your Check and Send form today it’ll cost you £9.75. I mean £9.75 today. And if by chance something isn’t correct in it today, it’ll still cost you £9.75 today, and you’ll need to pay me that money anyway even if we can’t send it off because of whatever incorrect thing.

Right, Elisabeth says.

But. Having said that, the man says. If something’s not correct and you pay £9.75 today, which you have to do, and you correct the thing that’s not correct and bring it back here within one month, provided you can show your receipt, then you won’t be charged another £9.75. However. If you bring it back after one month, or without a receipt, you’ll be charged another £9.75 for another Check and Send service.

Got it, Elisabeth says.

Are you sure you still want to go ahead with today’s Check and Send? the man says.

Uh huh, Elisabeth says.

Could you say the word yes, rather than just make that vaguely affirmative sound you’re making, please, the man says.

Of course, Elisabeth’s passport application is rejected, as we knew it would be. A tape measurement concludes that her face is the ‘wrong size.’ In spite of the negative experience at the post office, author Ali Smith does not dehumanise the post office worker, for Elisabeth sees “despair” in his eyes. This flesh and blood man has been turned into someone who spends his days spewing out regulations he can recite by heart.

This wonderful novel goes back and forth in time to specific moments in Elisabeth’s life–moments she shared with Daniel. They met in 1993 when Elisabeth was 8 and Daniel was already elderly. Elisabeth’s mother, a nice woman, who’s obsessed with an antiques television programme, at one point bars the child Elisabeth from spending time with Daniel, but Elisabeth disobeys her mother, and over time, Daniel introduces Elisabeth to the world of Art. This formative, important relationship between Elisabeth and Daniel leads Elisabeth to a discovery of the artist, Pauline Boty. This also leads to threads concerning Christine Keeler and the scandal that rocked the nation. Now many decades on, the episode seems like an aside for the history books.

Time is under examination here, as well as the fleeting nature of life. We are all subject to the time in which we live: war, revolutions, and Brexit votes. Our lives are shaped by the times in which we live, and some things are beyond our control. Autumn argues that time never stands still, everything erodes and fades. We should value what we have while we can. In Elisabeth’s case, she has clung to art.

We have to hope, Daniel was saying, that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end not much else matters.

Author Ali Smith’s Autumn, which is partly experimental, is one of a planned quartet of novels, and I’ll be reading the others.

Review copy

First published in Great Britain in 2016; published by Penguin Random House/Anchor on October 17, 2017

Autumn is set in England, where “Thatcher taught us to be selfish and not just to think but to believe that there’s no such thing as society.” Issues like immigration and Brexit divide people, and it “has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually becoming dialog.” Anger is worn like a shield and race hatred is prevalent. The news “makes things spectacular that aren’t, and deals so simplistically with what’s truly appalling.”

Against that backdrop, Daniel Gluck, having reached the age of 101, lies in a hospital bed, sometimes believing he’s on a beach littered with corpses, sometimes believing he’s inside the trunk of a Scotch Pine. Daniel once wrote songs that are no longer remembered. He seems unaware that Elisabeth Demand visits him daily, reading to him during the “increased sleep periods” that his nurses consider a prelude to death.

Elisabeth’s friendship with Daniel began when she was his 8-year-old neighbor. In flashbacks, we see Daniel as an aging man with an obvious interest in linguistics and art who imparts bits of wisdom dressed up in the kind of silliness that might appeal to a young girl whose mother is less than an ideal parent. Daniel taught Elisabeth how to make up stories that would help her understand the ways in which life can be shaped and the world can be changed. That makes him a pretty wonderful character, the opposite of selfish people who do not believe in society and prefer to shout their own opinions instead of listening to the opinions of others.

Daniel represents an earlier time, while Elisabeth, now a lecturer in art history, is just coming to comprehend the role that time plays in life. Daniel’s descriptions of paintings when Elisabeth was a child eventually lead Elisabeth to understand Daniel’s great secret, which helps her understand something about life. Through Daniel, Elisabeth becomes interested in the pop art of Pauline Boty, which leads her to contemplate Christine Keeler, who was central to the Profumo Affair. The sexual liberation that began in the 1960s came to be manifested in many ways, one of which is expressed by this thought: “A great many men don’t understand a woman full of joy, even more don’t understand paintings full of joy by a woman.”

Both Daniel and Elisabeth are perfectly drawn characters. Daniel is one of those gentle souls from a kinder era who dispense wise words in unexpected moments, drawing on their vast life experiences to apply the lessons they’ve learned to a new generation’s circumstances. Those characters exist in literature more than reality, but they are always a joy to encounter, in person or in the pages of a well-written story. We never learn much of Daniel’s life, but we learn enough to know his essence.

Daniel’s life is ending and, in a sense, Elisabeth’s is still beginning. By dealing with the mundane (repeated trips to bureaucrats who reject her passport photos because they do not match their precise requirements) and thinking about Boty, she learns to question the value of rules and norms of behavior, including rules that once defined the subservience of women, that are ultimately meaningless. She discovers that the past (Daniel’s song lyrics, for example) can be relevant to the present, even as people and events fade in and out of collective memory, to be lost and rediscovered, again and again.

Time flies, Daniel says, demonstrating by throwing his watch off a bridge. The past is replaced by the present which will be replaced by the unstoppable future. The immigrants who are reviled today will become the bedrock citizens of tomorrow. When so many people see change as something to be resisted, Autumn suggests that the march of time is to embraced, that the present and future can be shaped “with people’s histories and with the artefacts of less cruel and more philanthropic times.” But whether we can shape it or not, Autumn reminds us, time remains in motion. We can join it or we can be stuck. And if we join it, we can choose to bring the best parts of the past into the present, and to create the present in a way that will build a better future. Those lessons, taught in joyful and lyrical prose, make Autumn a valuable addition to the literature of time.

RECOMMENDED

My first Ali Smith novel and my second experience reading this author. I can see myself becoming a fan. The book's dual narrators are a centenarian, bed-ridden man and the 30-something female neighbor who is visiting him. There are layers to this book as both of them reminisce about years past and talk about what Brexit means to them and what it would mean to England as a whole.

Do not dismiss this book because it delves into a complicated sociopolitical issue. Allow yourself to be swept up by the narrative and the relationship fostered by these two individuals through the decades in which they have known each other.

Link: https://thepagewalker.blogspot.ca/2017/11/book-review-autumn-by-ali-smith.html
Date: November 6, 2017

Autumn by Ali Smith

AUTUMN begins in a dream-like state. Daniel Gluck is dead. He supposed he is in heaven, because he looks young again and naked. It is as if rebirth took place by the seashore and he is the only one who survived. The truth is, time has finally caught up with Daniel. He is reliving some old memories, and escape is inevitable at this state.

Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Demand is experiencing the hard reality of the bureaucratic world. Her passport application was rejected: “Your face is the wrong size… The correct size in the photograph submitted, the man say, is between 29 millimetres and 34 millimetres. Yours falls short by 5 millimetres.” Apparently, there are correct stipulations in life, measurements that we have to abide, like sizes, dates, and time. Very unlike in death.

This is my first Ali Smith, and I find myself in a difficulty here, describing how her writing works, or how this book worked for me. To call her wonderful seems underrated. To pronounce her difficult, on the other hand, seems obtuse. And yet, I find her both wonderful and difficult.

I find her words fluid, yet I don’t know where it will lead me. They seem to make no sense, until it gets me where it needs me to be, where it is profound and unblinking. Smith can move from poetic, to conversational, and matter-of-factly funny. At one point, the book tells about the Brexit and the chaos it brought to the English nation. Still, in a succession of recollections, it tells about life in its minute form. Autumn is the paradoxical view of death and birth, of letting go and seeding. It tells us that time is not really our enemy, but not exactly our friend either.

Autumn is the first book in the Seasonal Quartet, followed by Winter.

I feel like I'm missing something. I can immediately see that the book has beautiful prose, often simplistic and breezy, but I could not fathom how all these individual stories connect. Most of the book is about Elisabeth (as both a child and, at present, an adult) and her friendship with her elderly neighbor Mr. Gluck. There's a little bit of Brexit talk. There's mentions of the only female British pop star. Something about a scandal of sorts.

I don't know. I found it all very disjointed, but I'm probably just not grasping what may be obvious to other readers. I wouldn't mind reading the second installment to this 4 book series to see if my mind changes. But for now, I'll remain puzzled.

i received an e-galley from Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

This is one of those novels that merges stream of consciousness with poetry with real life details you just can't shake. A perfect fall novel, the love and loneliness that described in its pages makes you want to get a warm, strong drink and curl up on the couch with it. It's not a book for everyone, but if you want something dreamy, honest and unnerving, with lots of poetic lines and bold strokes of life, I think you may like this one. I loved it and will be buying the published edition to add my library.

Very excited about this one since Autumn is my favorite season. Hope the rest of the seasons live up to the quality of this one. This is a lovely book about time and love and stories,

I'm not sure Ali Smith is quite right for me. I can see why people enjoy her work; it's experimental and atmospheric and there are so many moments beautiful writing and brilliant observation. But, I had to skip over all of the parts from Daniel's point of view because the stream of consciousness, weirdness was just way too much for me...I found it uncompelling, uninteresting and like the only goal was to be as out there as possible. I wish the parts from Elisabeth's POV were the way the entire book was written, as much of it was witty and funny and compelling...though overall I am still not entirely sure how I feel about the finished product.

It was.....very Euro? I don't know. Ali Smith writes beautifully but Autumn left me a little ..flat.

It's rambling, it travels through and back through time and people. There are layers and layers...but like layers of a bad onion.

Not for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Autumn is a fluidly written book with an existential bent. I will be anxious to see how the future novels connect to this one.