I have never read an Ali Smith novel before so was really excited to pick Autumn up after hearing so much praise being levelled at her Season quartet (as well as the many accolades she's been awarded). Unfortunately, the stream of consciousness narrative didn't work entirely for me; while I admired the writing throughout and appreciated the subversive nature of the narrative, tackling amongst other things, Brexit, post-truth politics and the underappreciation of female artists, I found the end result a bit, well, pretentious and too experimental for my tastes.

With that being said, I do want to mention how surprisingly funny this novel was - the post office scene had me laughing out loud. While, regrettably, Autumn was not for me, I would still be interested in trying some of her other works (so not all bad!).

The first installment of Ali Smiths seasonal quartet Autumn kicks off this series with a bang, as with all my reviews about Ali Smith I encourage everyone to read something by her to discover the magic of her writing, descriptive, beautiful and profound.

I am almost ashamed to say this one eluded me. After having so many people tell me how wonderful Ali Smith is, I really, really wanted to love it. But, while admiring the level of the sentence, I am afraid I just could not get into this. Perhaps if I'd tried it in a different mindset? Or in a less isolate time?

With many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for allowing me to see this title.

There is something about Ali Smith's writing that draws you in and pulls you along. This is the 3rd Ali Smith book I've read. I have been reading her seasons series, but out of order, as I wasn't aware that the same characters would re-appear. So I've read Spring, Summer, and now back to Autumn, which I will follow shortly with Winter.

What can I say? I find her writing sublime yet abstract, enticing and thought-provoking.

I enjoy the fact that the background subject matter is current, then on top narratives from the past and the present intertwine.

A fabulous read.

I am afraid much of this abstract work went way over my head. The subversive criticism of post-truth politics in a new era of mass media, the half-comic, half-indignant sketches of our senseless bureaucratic system, the sadly recurrent reality of female artists neglected again and again in a world ruled by men.
Smith’s creates a collage with such weighty subjects and uses it to paint the backdrop of Elisabeth and David’s story while traveling back and forth in time.

The perception of time is precisely what will stay with me of this story, maybe in a similar way than Woolf’s “To the lighthouse” did. Inexorably, like a punch in the stomach, with a kind of poetic melancholy that soothes and bruises all at once. Seasons pass, leaves fall, autumn sets in, the sunset of a life allows the sunrise of another.

I will also remember the finely painted portrait of Elisabeth and David’s platonic love.
Elisabeth is about 70 years younger than David, but they stubbornly stick to each other, influencing their lives in ways that defy the standard views. David finds eternity, Elisabeth meaning and purpose, and both walk in parallel paths where physical distance means nothing, speaking to each other through years, relationships and illnesses, mere white noise in comparison to the inner voice that bounds them together.

Smith’s prose moves in rhythmic waves of concentric intensity. All her conjectural digressions converge into David and Elisabeth’s relationship, which becomes the core that sustains what otherwise would be a structureless castle of blank proclamations.
Love is what remains in the end after everything else vanishes, as it will inevitably happen to all of us, abruptly, with no warning; so let’s love generously to defy the vertigo of an empty page at the end of our journey, let’s love and let’s share and let’s read out loud to defeat silence and darkness. Like Elisabeth does, as I’d like to do when the time comes.

I thought this book was stunning. Beautiful, searing prose that fills the senses. I can't wait to read the others in the series.

In Autumn, Elisabeth is reading to her once-neighbor Mr. Gluck, who is a hundred years old and in a coma, and so unwillingly getting closer to her mother. This was a book with some of the most interesting, vivid dream imagery I've read - it mixes present-day story with Elisabeth's witty narration, Mr. Gluck's past and dream sequences. This is a very timely book, as Elisabeth is dealing with the immediate reactions to the Brexit results. This did not entirely work for me, it was a bit too experimental and I detest dream sequences, but when it did it was brilliant. This is not as much a story as it's a feeling - this entire book book is a concoction of imagery, feelings, impressions. It's a lovely book, but that did not entirely work for me.

Ive never read any books by this author before so had no idea what to expect but I knew this series of books have been highly thought of.
It was beautifully written and very thoughtful, it is very different to anything I usually read but can understand why it has been up for so many awards.

Elizabeth Demand formed a relationship with an elderly neighbor when she was a child. The narrative jumps between the time she spent with him and the conversations they had when she was young and her visits with him now as he sleeps in a care home, nearing the ending of his life.

Set in Autumn of 2016 as Britain revels from the results of the Brexit referendum.

Autumn in a nice book, short, an easy read, beautiful language and imagery, but I think ultimately, it will be forgettable.(Although I don't think I will ever forget the exchange between Elizabeth and the Post Office employee. My favorite part!) I still plan on picking up Winter in a couple of months and continuing with the quartet as I am very intrigued by Summer.

Thank you to #NetGalley and Penguin for an advanced copy.

This book reads like a stream of thoughts and focuses on a female character at different points in her life and the neighbour she befriended, an older man. There are Brexit themes and parallels in the story and other events that build the story. I found it difficult to keep up and didn’t understand all of the side stories.

Absolutely adored this book, initial worry about it being pure stream of consciousness quickly put to rest. I really loved following Elisabeth Demand on her journey through a post referendum vote Britain. There is so much beautiful writing about art and the human condition and politics. A wonderful book

PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTION:

“Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017.

Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819.

How about Autumn 2016?

Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.

Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.

Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. This first in a seasonal quartet casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history-making.

Here's where we're living. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic.

From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.

Here comes Autumn”

NO SPOILERS

Seeing promotions for Summer, the final book in Ali Smith’s quartet, reminded me that I had always meant to read Autumn because I had heard so much about it. I was not disappointed and understand why it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016 (Paul Beatty’s The Sellout was the winner.)

Smith’s prose is easy, flowing and unpretentious. It is written in the third person yet is still very intimate and this, I think is down to the dialogue…I especially love the dialogue. It is snappy, witty and unbelievably natural, even though most of us do not talk this way. (Although I do, in my head, afterwards, when “I wish I’d said that!”).

The book is beautifully observed and I felt I was there, in the Post Office, at the bedside, on the riverside bench, watching the development of Elisabeth and Daniel’s relationship. He seems a wonderful, compassionate man, full of wisdom and humour. She is a curious, intelligent young girl. Their friendship is full of love and respect. I feel rather honoured to have been allowed to stand and stare.

There are many mirrored themes in the book. Truth and lies. Seen and not seen. Spoken and unspoken. What Smith leaves unsaid is as compelling as what is written. I suppose the subject matter could be thought dull or mundane but is so well woven together that I was enthralled. It may help that I agree with all the sentiments but I hope that it would go a long way to changing the views of those who do not.


Autumn is an easy, intelligent, perfectly crafted novel andI am going to put the kettle on and begin Winter.


Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin UK for the complimentary copy of the book, which I have voluntarily reviewed.

Ali Smith... You have done it yet again. This is only my second read - I think - by Smith, but she is slowly becoming one of my favourite authors of all time. You know the type: the kind of author you discover in college when everything is still brand new and exciting and scary and terrifying at the same time, and you are glad to be away from your hometown but you also miss your room and sometimes your mama too, so you end up reaching for books that kind of feel like home, books that can capture that sense of nostalgia and terror and freedom all at once. Yeah, that one.

In Autumn, Ali Smith wonderfully intertwines the past with the present, memory with current events. Not everything takes place in the real world - she explores imaginary scenarios, stories, and the human unconscious quite a bit - but don't all of them shape our perception of "reality" anyway? I think this dichotomy of past vs present and reality vs fiction was not meant to be perceived as a dichotomy per se, but rather, as two sides of the same coin, two inescapable aspects of the same thing. Autumn really takes its time to develop the two main characters and their relationship, showing us the various ways their lives meet and affect each other, in a wonderful mix of beauty, love, tenderness, a sense of perhaps resolution and closure, perhaps even demise. It is clearly a book that allows for a variety of interpretations, as it can be as optimistic or as nihilistic as the reader holding it.

** A copy was provided via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. **

'It is like democracy is a bottle someone can threaten to smash and do a bit of damage with. It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming a dialogue.
It is the end of dialogue.''

This first volume of the Seasonal Quartet is a brilliant opening. Ali Smith's sociopolitical commentary through fiction is impressive in its depth and acuteness. Her witty dark humour had me laugh out loud at times, while I found other moments profoundly moving. Her main protagonist, Elizabeth, is perfectly strange, and therefore perfectly relatable. The Scottish political novel clearly has a bright future ahead.

I’ve never read any Ali Smith before so wasn’t sure what to expect.
Although this is the first book in the Seasonal Quartet, I actually read Spring first. I thought it was because I wasn’t reading the books in order that I didn’t ‘get’ them, but now, I’m not sure if I would ever ‘get’ them even reading them in the correct order.
I loved the relationship between Elisabeth and Daniel with their 70 year age gap. I felt stirred by the Brexit parts and I laughed at the post office encounters.
But there were several parts where I could just not engage at all.
All in all, I think it was a case of “it’s not you, it’s me”.

Thank you to Penguin and Netgalley for an ARC in return for an honest review.

This is the first in the quartet of the seasonal series, with the last, Summer, arriving in August this year (2020). I had seen the hype and it came well recommended, but I didn’t know anything about Autumn before I read it.

For instance, I didn’t realise until I googled this that the artist for the cover is David Hockney, his ‘Early November Tunnel’. This for me, is an indication that Ali Smith is a layered, nuanced and joyful writer – there are numerous references in the novel to Pop Art, the movement Hockney’s work belongs to, and so this cover brings the outside and the inside worlds in a bit closer together. It adds a delightful little detail to be uncovered, like pass the parcel or layers from an onion.

I’m appreciating more in my advancing years that I am drawn towards non-linear stories, self-referential and illusory tales passed from person to person, regardless of constraints of time or space. It’s probably why I like Terrence Malick films so much, three hours of ponderous meandering where not much happens but boy, does it look pretty. Something in them is soothing, and in the same way, Autumn was a balm. I don’t mean it was light hearted – the themes of death, of loss and of how you cope with never having had the person/item you love most of all, are not light. But in some ways they are human and universal, and I appreciated this connection.

Elisabeth is in her mid to late 30s, and we start the story with her in an Orwellian/Burgess Post Office queue which never seems to go anywhere but the numbers on the tickets keep increasing.  When she finally gets there, a farcical conversation about her passport renewal commences, which I’m sure we can all relate to.

The other half of this story is Daniel, a centenarian in a care home at the end of his life, he’s Elisabeth’s best friend. Their relationship and interactions are brilliant, and as something of a precocious and slightly irritating little girl, I can relate to her relentless questions and probing investigation of the world around her. He treats her with respect and broadens her horizons in a way we don’t see from her family and the rest of the people around her.

His chapters are mostly dream state, connecting her memories of him with his thoughts and processing for what’s happening to him as he sleeps more and more in the care home. His life, reduced to a room in a building.

Wrapped around and through all of this is the recent vote to leave the EU, in summer 2016. Something about the nearness to our everyday life, coupled with the drudgery and anger of the last four years, puts a lump in your chest. Ali Smith, through her characters, talks of the violence uptick after the vote, and the bewilderment on how this was actually going to be achieved. We are, of course, gifted with experience and can now say that the government still doesn’t know, lots of people who voted to leave are now dead and others would like a chance to change their minds.  With six months left to organise an exit plan, it’s not looking optimistic.

It’s definitely the kind of book you can read over and over as I’m now spotting connections that I hadn’t immediately made when I read it. I’m hoping the connections continue with the next one, Winter, but I also don’t want to spoilt it by reading too much about them ahead of time. This is a short book that doesn’t take long to read, but it stays with you afterwards.  

Thanks as always to Netgalley and publisher Hamish Hamilton for the digital ARC.

Beautiful, startling, funny, serious, charming, unnerving.

I adore Ali Smith's writing although her postmodern style is not for everyone.

Autumn is a brilliant blur of friendship and Britain and Brexit. I loved it.

Unfortunately this book just wasn't for me as much as I love Ali Smith. I have therefore decided not to finish it.

I read a lot about this book. I heard a lot about. There was a lot of publicity, promotion, recognition, rewards, awards and accolades. I thought myself lucky being granted to review this book.
However, I have to admit defeat. I failed miserably. I failed to see the point of this book. I missed why this book is so 'wow'.
I understand that literary fiction is the evasive, multi layered and complex beast. It is not for everyone. Obviously, this type of fiction is not for me. I consider myself a strong reader having survived all the Russian and European classics back in school. However, Autumn went beyond me.
I got it that it is 'shape-shifting', but where is the plot? I guess I stay in my crime-fiction universe and let my brain rest.

I have always felt that Ali Smith was an author that I should find out more about but until now had never done anything about it.  Autumn is Smith's seventh novel but is itself only the opening movement of a proposed quartet Seasonal, with Winter already released and a further two volumes promised.  More pertinently however, Autumn is also the first 'Brexit novel', published a mere four months after the referendum and showcasing a fascinating attempt by Smith to write a 'state of the nation' in fiction.  Yet, interviews reveal that Smith had been planning a seasonal sequence of novels for twenty years and that Brexit was more swept up by her writing rather than the other way around.  I came to the book with the feeling of being more than a little late to the party but still pleased that I had finally found my way.

Autumn is a novel preoccupied with time, less about plot and more concerned with the individual experience of existence.  It opens with with Daniel being plunged into a disorientating region outside of time, 'He must be dead, he is surely dead, because his body looks different from the last time he looked down at it, it looks better, it looks rather good as bodies go … But pure joy! He’d forgotten what it feels like, to feel.'  Daniel is a century old and as we head back to reality, we realise that he is in a care home, stuck in the 'increased sleep period' which indicates that death is not far away.  Visiting him is Elisabeth, a woman in her early thirties who has known Daniel since she was a child.  She sits by his bedside, she stays with her mother, she is a part time Art History lecturer and in flashbacks we discover how she and Daniel met.

The bond between Elisabeth and Daniel, despite the near-seventy year age gap, is the warmest part of the novel and Smith creates some magnificent dialogue between the pair.  Meeting when the eight year-old Elisabeth moves in next door with her mother, Daniel asks her, 'Your father’s not dead, though? [...] No, Elisabeth said. He’s in Leeds.'  He takes on a mentor role, asking her consistently through the years about what she is reading, telling her 'Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.'  The bond between the two of them is the moral heart of an otherwise rather bleak world.

It is a jolt to read a novel with quite so contemporary a setting.  Elisabeth tells Daniel about the murder of Jo Cox, 'Someone killed an MP,” she tells him. “A man shot her dead and came at her with a knife. Like shooting her wouldn’t be enough. But it’s old news now. Once it would have been a year’s worth of news. But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff.'  There are strong and deliberate stylistic parallels between Autumn and Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities when it comes to the description of Brexit, 'All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won'.  As Elisabeth reports on her reading choices, Smith makes other sly references to the state of play.

One of the most truly magnificent moments of the novel however came from Elisabeth's increasingly Kafka-esque attempts to renew her passport at the Post Office.  With her application rejected (HEAD INCORRECT SIZE), Elisabeth muses to the man behind the counter on the nature of narrative, 'this notion that my head’s the wrong size in a photograph would mean I’ve probably done or am going to do something really wrong and illegal', then moving on to consider other moments that would be portents of doom within a story, to which the clerk angrily replies that 'This isn't fiction. This is the Post Office', seemingly indicating himself to be beyond even Smith's control.

The question of who tells the story, who in effect controls the narrative, is a central one within Autumn.  Elisabeth rants about how the news simplifies or distorts complex situations.  The characters consistently misinterpret each other (Elisabeth's mother distrusts Daniel as she assumes he must either be gay or a pedophile, Elisabeth and her mother constantly struggle to communicate).  The Brexit referendum is misread as a solution to the refugee crisis.  Elisabeth studies the forgotten pop-artist Pauline Boty and reflects upon the constant cycle of someone being forgotten and then rediscovered.  All the while, Daniel moves in and out of consciousness, in and out of time.

Autumn is a powerful novel, fiercely intelligent but highly aware of that fact.  I was reminded of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Française and that similar sense of immediacy in writing, however like the latter, it has a slightly incomplete feel.  It is a snapshot rather than a panorama of Britain, capturing the fractured nation at a vulnerable moment in its history but able to offer few conclusions.  It sums up a mood, but then ... what?  This may be the 'first' post-Brexit novel, but I still was not sure what wisdom Smith was really trying to share on the subject, other than that it had stirred up division.  Maybe Brexit is still too raw a subject for me to be able to accept authors trying to write about it, to explain it neatly - maybe it still seems like too much of a mess.  Or perhaps picking up Smith with one of her experimental pieces did not give me the clearest picture of her style as an author - or just maybe I need to read the rest of the quartet before I make my mind up.  Autumn is a book that is well worth reading now and will probably be equally well worth returning to in a few years to see how far we have come - I am both delighted to have read it and uncertain whether I warmed to it - in short, this is an ideal pick if you happen to be in a book group!