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Artful
The incomparable Ali Smith melds the tale and the essay into a magical hybrid form, a song of praise to the power of stories in our lives
In February 2012, the novelist Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Her lectures took the shape of this set of discursive stories. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted—literally—by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature.
A hypnotic dialogue unfolds, a duet between and a meditation on art and storytelling, a book about love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith’s heady powers as a fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as a reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that life and art are never separate.
Artful is a book about the things art can do, the things art is full of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness. It glances off artists and writers from Michelangelo through Dickens, then all the way past postmodernity, exploring every form, from ancient cave painting to 1960s cinema musicals. This kaleidoscope opens up new, inventive, elastic insights—on the relation of aesthetic form to the human mind, the ways we build our minds from stories, the bridges art builds between us. Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world and a meaningful contribution to that worth in itself. There has never been a book quite like it.
In February 2012, the novelist Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Her lectures took the shape of this set of discursive stories. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted—literally—by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature.
A hypnotic dialogue unfolds, a duet between and a meditation on art and storytelling, a book about love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith’s heady powers as a fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as a reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that life and art are never separate.
Artful is a book about the things art can do, the things art is full of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness. It glances off artists and writers from Michelangelo through Dickens, then all the way past postmodernity, exploring every form, from ancient cave painting to 1960s cinema musicals. This kaleidoscope opens up new, inventive, elastic insights—on the relation of aesthetic form to the human mind, the ways we build our minds from stories, the bridges art builds between us. Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world and a meaningful contribution to that worth in itself. There has never been a book quite like it.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2012
About the author
Ali Smith
147 books4,646 followersAli Smith is a writer, born in Inverness, Scotland, to working-class parents. She was raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge, for a Ph.D. that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia, she talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year and how it forced her to give up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde to focus on what she really wanted to do: writing. She has been with her partner Sarah Wood for 17 years and dedicates all her books to her.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 465 reviews
June 1, 2015
"All of it? I say.
Lucky for you the ands are ampersands, you say.
You are calling my bluff, of course. I call yours back. I take the book to the tattoo parlour down Mill Road and come home, after several sessions, with exactly this tattoo. I choose to have it done in deep blue, the colour of your eyes. It costs me a fortune. It hurts like irony.
I see you again only when it's finished and my skin settled down.
You're unreal, you say when you see it.
You're the real unreal thing all right.
Less than a month after this we move in together and mix our books up."
I love this book.
Artful is the product of four lectures Smith gave and combines a background story of coming to terms with death with a literary exploration of themes that deal with elements of grieving, time, fragmentation, etc.
Of course, Smith delivers all of this in a discourse that is both full of wit and tenderness.
I'm not sure whether I love this book because of the way that Smith delivers the lectures or the selections of poetry and books she includes. In any case, this is one of the books that I will read again and again.
Lucky for you the ands are ampersands, you say.
You are calling my bluff, of course. I call yours back. I take the book to the tattoo parlour down Mill Road and come home, after several sessions, with exactly this tattoo. I choose to have it done in deep blue, the colour of your eyes. It costs me a fortune. It hurts like irony.
I see you again only when it's finished and my skin settled down.
You're unreal, you say when you see it.
You're the real unreal thing all right.
Less than a month after this we move in together and mix our books up."
I love this book.
Artful is the product of four lectures Smith gave and combines a background story of coming to terms with death with a literary exploration of themes that deal with elements of grieving, time, fragmentation, etc.
Of course, Smith delivers all of this in a discourse that is both full of wit and tenderness.
I'm not sure whether I love this book because of the way that Smith delivers the lectures or the selections of poetry and books she includes. In any case, this is one of the books that I will read again and again.
March 17, 2022
In all likelihood the form of her seasonal novels germinated from this challenge of making a novel from a series of lectures she gave. It begins with a genderless individual reading Oliver Twist and mourning her/his recently dead genderless partner. The lectures themselves are fictionalised as being the work the dead partner was composing before death arrived. They are largely made up of daisy chains of quotes. The surprising thing is Ali Smith doesn't have much of interest to say about writing herself. She lets other authors speak for her. Katherine Mansfield soon gets quoted and I love Ali Smith for always heaping love on her. But after a promising start I soon found my engagement waning.
June 3, 2016
There are books which through the softness of their sound, their words dipping into portals unseen that quiver upon memory and a haze of further meanings, set me into a mode of creative inquiry. A different state of being finding anything else an intrusion while seeking seclusion. The book has become a place I seek; wordless and serene. The early morning flower cupping the first rays of sun.
A sensitive mind filled with graceful thought faces the devastation of loss through her readings of literature, its forms and issues of messages. Grief melts the mind, melts the actions, only to be dipped into the odes of words and their patience.
Saying the book is divided into four sections technically is correct, she who works a job imparting her knowledge of trees comes upon her late husbands speech he was working on to give at the University. It’s been a year and a day since his death. Yes, the book is about division, the untwining of souls, the threads barely brushing by in a quiet nearing silence. There is much in small saying goodbyes. On this day after a year the book opens where she is moving the reading chair from the spot he insisted it to be to where she wanted it to stand. Heavy, she pushed it unworried about the scratching of the floorboard planks. A move deserving of its own commemoration, anniversary.
A stillness pervades yet there is movement. The stillness has its own movement. A choir of whispers. Its breath heeding a dissembling and a reassembling. Forms, reflections, edges moving through time. The coming apart and creating new structures, a varied self.
Much of this is lifted, risen from his speech, the piles of paper bringing up memories from their life in books. Not just a copious reader she is a sensitive reader with a wealth of works accessible in the brilliance of her mind. Splendid works threading her moving tale together.
Closing the covers five o’clock this morning I felt honored to witness this novel stranded together with filaments of fiction, essays, nocturnal memoirs dreaming. Many edges respected while finding ways of fitting together. Strands beginning to weave around each other into a completed whole. Breathless, I recommend this experience to slow purveyors of written thought and abiding wisdom.
A sensitive mind filled with graceful thought faces the devastation of loss through her readings of literature, its forms and issues of messages. Grief melts the mind, melts the actions, only to be dipped into the odes of words and their patience.
Saying the book is divided into four sections technically is correct, she who works a job imparting her knowledge of trees comes upon her late husbands speech he was working on to give at the University. It’s been a year and a day since his death. Yes, the book is about division, the untwining of souls, the threads barely brushing by in a quiet nearing silence. There is much in small saying goodbyes. On this day after a year the book opens where she is moving the reading chair from the spot he insisted it to be to where she wanted it to stand. Heavy, she pushed it unworried about the scratching of the floorboard planks. A move deserving of its own commemoration, anniversary.
A stillness pervades yet there is movement. The stillness has its own movement. A choir of whispers. Its breath heeding a dissembling and a reassembling. Forms, reflections, edges moving through time. The coming apart and creating new structures, a varied self.
Much of this is lifted, risen from his speech, the piles of paper bringing up memories from their life in books. Not just a copious reader she is a sensitive reader with a wealth of works accessible in the brilliance of her mind. Splendid works threading her moving tale together.
Closing the covers five o’clock this morning I felt honored to witness this novel stranded together with filaments of fiction, essays, nocturnal memoirs dreaming. Many edges respected while finding ways of fitting together. Strands beginning to weave around each other into a completed whole. Breathless, I recommend this experience to slow purveyors of written thought and abiding wisdom.
January 19, 2013
An extended Smith short story, wrapped like bacon around the sausage of her illuminating Oxford lectures, makes up this debut non-fiction collection from the Best Living Scottish Novelist (caps mean cred). Her trope of using the second person to address an absent presence (in this case, Smith is the one being addressed, by her partner) returns, fortunately intermittent between the otherwise un-tampered-with content of her brief lectures. Not unlike Adam Thirlwell’s grandiose Miss Herbert in its weaving of narrative, opinion, fact and quotation, Smith’s book is in a minor, but no less resonant, key, and gambols with the usual passion for language present in her novels—her lectures, unsurprisingly, are riddled with quotations, as she barely suppresses her eagerness to share the marvels she has unearthed in her current literary explorations (in this case Oliver Twist, James’s The Golden Bowl and Katherine Mansfield). Missing from this is her stirring keynote speech at the Edinburgh Book Festival: an absence as heavy as the invisible You that haunts the first half of the story. Cover image of Aliki Vougiouklaki, apparently a Greek Monroe, in looks only.
March 11, 2017
1.5/5 stars.
While I liked the concept of this book - which is that it is based on 4 different university lectures given my Ali Smith - and while some passages were thought-provoking and interesting, this just wasn't a book for me. I have to say that I actually found it a bit pretentious. It's a long piece of work on thoughts and digressions on, amongst other things, time and form, and these thoughts connect with a lot of literature (too much of it!) to be consistent and make sense, in my eyes.
You would have to be really interested in the literary world as well as philosophy in order to appreciate this book, and while those two subjects do interest me, the overall messages of this book were hard for me to find, and I found myself skimming the last pages because I wasn't interested anymore.
I do love Ali Smith's fiction, though; so in the future I'll probably just stick to that.
While I liked the concept of this book - which is that it is based on 4 different university lectures given my Ali Smith - and while some passages were thought-provoking and interesting, this just wasn't a book for me. I have to say that I actually found it a bit pretentious. It's a long piece of work on thoughts and digressions on, amongst other things, time and form, and these thoughts connect with a lot of literature (too much of it!) to be consistent and make sense, in my eyes.
You would have to be really interested in the literary world as well as philosophy in order to appreciate this book, and while those two subjects do interest me, the overall messages of this book were hard for me to find, and I found myself skimming the last pages because I wasn't interested anymore.
I do love Ali Smith's fiction, though; so in the future I'll probably just stick to that.
July 24, 2016
My review will be just two quotes lifted out of this amazing book.
"All the time I read this book I felt it was feeding me".
And
"We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once."
Enough said. 5 stars. Straight to the top of my "To Be Reread" list.
"All the time I read this book I felt it was feeding me".
And
"We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once."
Enough said. 5 stars. Straight to the top of my "To Be Reread" list.
June 22, 2018
Reading this book of lectures made me want to reread Oliver Twist and since I'm not likely to do that anytime soon, I looked in my copy to see if Mudfog is mentioned or not mentioned in the very first paragraph and wondered if at the time I read it, I noticed that the Artful Dodger has dodged the summation of the last chapter.
Ali Smith is a genius, but not one of those geniuses who makes things hard to understand (dare I mention The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction); instead she makes things easy -- with humor, generosity and a loving spirit. Her wordplay evokes a smile and sometimes even a chuckle of revelation.
Her interests and literary references are all over the map (literally); and, to top it off, her narrator's job (much of this is a fictional short story) is trees (Ali Smith loves trees.), so we get some tree-knowledge here as well. For example, I learned the leaves of a tree develop a sheen of protection and when it rains, the pollution rolls right off them -- a lovely image.
Though reminding myself that these are talks, at first I did experience a little bit of frustration with the lack of attribution to some of her excerpts when I couldn't find them in the "text permissions." (Plus there's one unattributed picture of what looks like a paper plate from Pompeii that I didn't remember -- and then couldn't find -- referenced in the text at all.) But after reading the wonderful last page, I came upon "Some sources used in the writing of these talks." and not only was my curiosity satisfied (except about that one image) but I got some great additional information as well. As the ghost of the narrator's lover/spouse said: Epomony (υπομονή).
Ali Smith is a genius, but not one of those geniuses who makes things hard to understand (dare I mention The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction); instead she makes things easy -- with humor, generosity and a loving spirit. Her wordplay evokes a smile and sometimes even a chuckle of revelation.
Her interests and literary references are all over the map (literally); and, to top it off, her narrator's job (much of this is a fictional short story) is trees (Ali Smith loves trees.), so we get some tree-knowledge here as well. For example, I learned the leaves of a tree develop a sheen of protection and when it rains, the pollution rolls right off them -- a lovely image.
Though reminding myself that these are talks, at first I did experience a little bit of frustration with the lack of attribution to some of her excerpts when I couldn't find them in the "text permissions." (Plus there's one unattributed picture of what looks like a paper plate from Pompeii that I didn't remember -- and then couldn't find -- referenced in the text at all.) But after reading the wonderful last page, I came upon "Some sources used in the writing of these talks." and not only was my curiosity satisfied (except about that one image) but I got some great additional information as well. As the ghost of the narrator's lover/spouse said: Epomony (υπομονή).
December 20, 2015
Jan/Feb 2015. [4.5]
(Truly Madly Deeply x The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) + fragments of essays on literature = Artful
Just lovely! I got it because it was my favouritest book cover I’d seen in ages (as said elsewhere, I don’t like many recent covers). The content wasn’t what I expected, but was, if anything, even nicer.
I daresay some friends have also had the experience that if something external makes you miserable whilst you’re reading a particular book, it often isn’t the right book any more. But this was.
Not least because I find lost love, particularly if it occurred without any hurtful remarks, to be a displacement or refuge from harsher, less picturesque concerns; it contains the sense of having been cared about and a continuing gratefulness that someone inadvertently provided this comfort, whilst not requiring a 180 emotional turn.
Artful's narrator is the widowed partner of an author much like Ali Smith, who died a year earlier in the middle of writing a series of talks (which in reality were completed and delivered; parts of them are interpolated in the text). Related to the thought of the extreme procrastinator: ‘If I died now, I wouldn’t have to finish this’? It isn’t quite Gertrude writing in the person of Alice, for the narrator’s work sounds like monitoring trees for a local council, whilst Smith’s real-life partner is a filmmaker.
[Thank you to MJN’s review for pointing out in the first few lines that the narrator is the partner. The exuberance and deceptively simple language of Ali Smith’s writing makes me speed over pages fast as if I was reading trash, prone to missing things more than usual in something of this complexity. A few months ago in How to Be Both, I nearly didn’t realise that . I re-read the fiction sections of part 1 of Artful, ‘On time’ after I’d finished the rest, to see how they sounded with this knowledge. I don’t re-read much, but the first, reflexive, speed-reading of these two Ali Smith books seems to demand it.]
When I started writing this post, I hadn’t set out to ape the talk/essay sections of the original with their headings, but finding I wanted to say ‘look! look!’ at dozens of quotes, I had to organise them…
Mostly I want to say how wonderfully Artful expresses things.
Loss & Grief
I hadn’t read anything, I hadn’t been able to, for well over a twelvemonth and a day.
how unfair that a chair we saw online and bought on a credit card and had delivered in a van would, could, did, last longer than us).
I’m okay. I’ve moved a really heavy chair. I’ve changed things. And I’ve read sixteen lines in a novel and I’ve thought several things about them and none of this with you, or to do with you; I even read the phrase ‘item of mortality’ and thought of something other than you. Time heals all wounds. Or, as you used to say, time achilles-heels all wounds.
That’s as far as you got. That was it over. I’d read all of you, now.
Voice
As in Alice B. Toklas, the voice is still noticeably the author-partner’s. But here it’s so lovely, primarily expressive rather than egotistical, that there isn’t the same questioning of the psychological dynamics of the project. (Also Smith must be riffing on Stein, which gives the story further ironic distance - and its tone is very endearing.)
The rugs, all skewy now, looked like creatures, a mess of dogs asleep in random places on the floor. I quite liked that. I liked the thought that the room was full of new and unexpected sleeping dogs.
The top piece of paper on the abandoned writings is suncurled. It's as if there's always been a gap in the language waiting for that word.
Relationship
The exuberance of Smith’s writing is there in the IRL version of this writer. How often is ‘literary fiction’ this likeable?
you rushing out of the garden and into the kitchen a couple of summers ago with the book open going, look! look at this! it’s probably a hundred years old, a hundred-year-old greenfly, it could literally be a hundred years since anyone’s opened this, look at its wings! you can actually see the veins, you can actually still see the green of it, think, a hundred years ago this greenfly could’ve been visiting hundred-year-ago roses
It’s kind of a novelty to hear about secure couples in literature, especially when they aren’t (in this context they can’t be) cloying.
Like the nodding De Chirico heads in Sylvia Plath’s The Disquieting Muses, you said from your seat at the desk. If you say so, I said, whatever they are when they’re at home.
Not that I can imagine living with someone who didn't get most of my – and I their - references, as more than a temporary flatmate. But many people do.
It was me who liked cinema, not you. We’d had a lot of arguments about it. And the thing about the Powell Pressburger target was something I’d actually once said to you. In fact, I’d said a lot of those things to you, about Chaplin and Hitchcock, and it was me who’d made you sit down with me and watch them both. I couldn’t believe that what I’d said had got into your writing. It was thrilling.
Because when I think about what it was like to live with you, it was like all these things. It was like living in a poem or a picture, a story, a piece of music, when I think of it now. It was wonderful.
There's just so much love, not aggrandisement, in the way such things are said, all this feels as if it's probably rooted in the way she feels about her partner, not so much in the puffed-up ego of imagining people saying nice things about her in her absence.
From one of the talks:
Offering and sacrifice are at one level a direct request for dialogue, and at another ask the existential question – not so much do You exist, as do I?
Trees and nature
Even after the worst storm damage, a tree, so long as there’s some green in the break, can be healed and mended and carry on growing. Unless, that is, the heart was like one of the literally thousands of kinds of apple tree that have disappeared from the British Isles in reasonably recent history because of the way the supermarkets only really like to sell about five kinds of apple.
That would be something: to have a heart whose tree produced a fruit that had otherwise died out.
one day [Cezanne] threw something he was working on, a study of apples, out of the window of the top floor of his house and it landed in the branches of a fruit tree below, and he left it for weeks, till the day he looked up, saw it again and called to his son to go and get the ladder because it had ripened enough for him to work on it a bit more.
And much talk of evenings getting lighter... this is a spring book.
Quoting / about other people in the talks
Kusama: ‘By continuously reproducing the forms of things that terrify me, I am able to suppress the fear.’
Edwin Morgan – Orpheus - this sounds just lovely. Would like to read the whole thing.
e e cummings. As a kid I'd found him not as exciting and funny as the childish lowercase promised. Recently I've seen several of his poems or bits of and they're lovely. Should perhaps look again.
EM Forster, though, saw it a little more even-handedly: ‘when human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other.’
Here’s to the ‘wreathed trellis of a working brain’: that’s what Keats called it in Ode to Psyche. George Mackay Brown said about how he spent his days: ‘I assure you, there are few jobs in life like the leafing and blossoming of the imagination.’
how Ovid, metamorphosing into Ted Hughes - I love this way of putting it.
Josephine Baker and her use of comic mask - again, want to know more, but so many things!
Horrible things probably worth knowing more about:
His French swimming instructor befriends him. The friendship is as illegal as inviting an illegal immigrant into your home is, in Calais, in the year 2009. We are living in times where, very close to home, hospitality is punishable by law.
The nature of the ghost
You were wearing that black waistcoat with the white stitching that went out of fashion in 1995, the one we gave to Oxfam. Ha. I'd almost forgotten about early 90s waistcoats! They were everywhere. Mostly unnecessary and in the way, but I had one long fitted denim one which both suited me and was surprisingly warm.
If only I’d reimagined you without your snoring. But then it wouldn’t have been true, would it? It wouldn’t have been you.
Not that I wasn’t glad you were back, coming and going like you did over the weeks, the same you only slightly more ragged-looking every time, and every time coming in like I wasn’t even there and going straight over and sitting at the study desk, pulling your hair out over those talks you had been going to give about books and art.
When I got back I found you’d clearly been right behind me and had lifted a couple of books from the charity bookshop whose stock I’d had a passing look at. I began to worry. You were a figment of my imagination. That meant I must have taken those things.
The mixture of magic realism and realism-in-self-awareness in these sections is great.
(I don't understand why the narrator makes herself sound so much worse than she is when talking to the doctor though. And all this results in is getting sent to a bland and generic counsellor who doesn't connect with her, whom there's no opportunity to choose based on whether they suit one another. Though she does provide information that strings the book together.)
Aliki Vougiouklaki (her on the cover)
who played ALL FOUR in her time, Antigone, Evita, that mad pure Julie Andrews nun with the guitar, and the gorgeous debauched Sally Bowles – as well as Shirley Valentine and Shaw’s Pygmalion and Aristophanes’s Lysistrata and the leads in My Fair Lady and in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, and dressed up as a boy in a Greek film musical version of Romeo and Juliet, and more.
The film scenes described (still not using YouTube so have not seen) sound wonderful and exuberant. I love 60s cinema but have never seen any from Greece.
Aliki by the way is Greek for Alice I love that she cares about this and knows this and thinks we would care too; I'm not sure how she manages to make little things like this never sound patronising – which is very easy: assuming your audience knows and/or can look things up is usually the best way not to – but she has a knack.
(Truly Madly Deeply x The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) + fragments of essays on literature = Artful
Just lovely! I got it because it was my favouritest book cover I’d seen in ages (as said elsewhere, I don’t like many recent covers). The content wasn’t what I expected, but was, if anything, even nicer.
I daresay some friends have also had the experience that if something external makes you miserable whilst you’re reading a particular book, it often isn’t the right book any more. But this was.
Not least because I find lost love, particularly if it occurred without any hurtful remarks, to be a displacement or refuge from harsher, less picturesque concerns; it contains the sense of having been cared about and a continuing gratefulness that someone inadvertently provided this comfort, whilst not requiring a 180 emotional turn.
Artful's narrator is the widowed partner of an author much like Ali Smith, who died a year earlier in the middle of writing a series of talks (which in reality were completed and delivered; parts of them are interpolated in the text). Related to the thought of the extreme procrastinator: ‘If I died now, I wouldn’t have to finish this’? It isn’t quite Gertrude writing in the person of Alice, for the narrator’s work sounds like monitoring trees for a local council, whilst Smith’s real-life partner is a filmmaker.
[Thank you to MJN’s review for pointing out in the first few lines that the narrator is the partner. The exuberance and deceptively simple language of Ali Smith’s writing makes me speed over pages fast as if I was reading trash, prone to missing things more than usual in something of this complexity. A few months ago in How to Be Both, I nearly didn’t realise that . I re-read the fiction sections of part 1 of Artful, ‘On time’ after I’d finished the rest, to see how they sounded with this knowledge. I don’t re-read much, but the first, reflexive, speed-reading of these two Ali Smith books seems to demand it.]
When I started writing this post, I hadn’t set out to ape the talk/essay sections of the original with their headings, but finding I wanted to say ‘look! look!’ at dozens of quotes, I had to organise them…
Mostly I want to say how wonderfully Artful expresses things.
Loss & Grief
I hadn’t read anything, I hadn’t been able to, for well over a twelvemonth and a day.
how unfair that a chair we saw online and bought on a credit card and had delivered in a van would, could, did, last longer than us).
I’m okay. I’ve moved a really heavy chair. I’ve changed things. And I’ve read sixteen lines in a novel and I’ve thought several things about them and none of this with you, or to do with you; I even read the phrase ‘item of mortality’ and thought of something other than you. Time heals all wounds. Or, as you used to say, time achilles-heels all wounds.
That’s as far as you got. That was it over. I’d read all of you, now.
Voice
As in Alice B. Toklas, the voice is still noticeably the author-partner’s. But here it’s so lovely, primarily expressive rather than egotistical, that there isn’t the same questioning of the psychological dynamics of the project. (Also Smith must be riffing on Stein, which gives the story further ironic distance - and its tone is very endearing.)
The rugs, all skewy now, looked like creatures, a mess of dogs asleep in random places on the floor. I quite liked that. I liked the thought that the room was full of new and unexpected sleeping dogs.
The top piece of paper on the abandoned writings is suncurled. It's as if there's always been a gap in the language waiting for that word.
Relationship
The exuberance of Smith’s writing is there in the IRL version of this writer. How often is ‘literary fiction’ this likeable?
you rushing out of the garden and into the kitchen a couple of summers ago with the book open going, look! look at this! it’s probably a hundred years old, a hundred-year-old greenfly, it could literally be a hundred years since anyone’s opened this, look at its wings! you can actually see the veins, you can actually still see the green of it, think, a hundred years ago this greenfly could’ve been visiting hundred-year-ago roses
It’s kind of a novelty to hear about secure couples in literature, especially when they aren’t (in this context they can’t be) cloying.
Like the nodding De Chirico heads in Sylvia Plath’s The Disquieting Muses, you said from your seat at the desk. If you say so, I said, whatever they are when they’re at home.
Not that I can imagine living with someone who didn't get most of my – and I their - references, as more than a temporary flatmate. But many people do.
It was me who liked cinema, not you. We’d had a lot of arguments about it. And the thing about the Powell Pressburger target was something I’d actually once said to you. In fact, I’d said a lot of those things to you, about Chaplin and Hitchcock, and it was me who’d made you sit down with me and watch them both. I couldn’t believe that what I’d said had got into your writing. It was thrilling.
Because when I think about what it was like to live with you, it was like all these things. It was like living in a poem or a picture, a story, a piece of music, when I think of it now. It was wonderful.
There's just so much love, not aggrandisement, in the way such things are said, all this feels as if it's probably rooted in the way she feels about her partner, not so much in the puffed-up ego of imagining people saying nice things about her in her absence.
From one of the talks:
Offering and sacrifice are at one level a direct request for dialogue, and at another ask the existential question – not so much do You exist, as do I?
Trees and nature
Even after the worst storm damage, a tree, so long as there’s some green in the break, can be healed and mended and carry on growing. Unless, that is, the heart was like one of the literally thousands of kinds of apple tree that have disappeared from the British Isles in reasonably recent history because of the way the supermarkets only really like to sell about five kinds of apple.
That would be something: to have a heart whose tree produced a fruit that had otherwise died out.
one day [Cezanne] threw something he was working on, a study of apples, out of the window of the top floor of his house and it landed in the branches of a fruit tree below, and he left it for weeks, till the day he looked up, saw it again and called to his son to go and get the ladder because it had ripened enough for him to work on it a bit more.
And much talk of evenings getting lighter... this is a spring book.
Quoting / about other people in the talks
Kusama: ‘By continuously reproducing the forms of things that terrify me, I am able to suppress the fear.’
Edwin Morgan – Orpheus - this sounds just lovely. Would like to read the whole thing.
e e cummings. As a kid I'd found him not as exciting and funny as the childish lowercase promised. Recently I've seen several of his poems or bits of and they're lovely. Should perhaps look again.
EM Forster, though, saw it a little more even-handedly: ‘when human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other.’
Here’s to the ‘wreathed trellis of a working brain’: that’s what Keats called it in Ode to Psyche. George Mackay Brown said about how he spent his days: ‘I assure you, there are few jobs in life like the leafing and blossoming of the imagination.’
how Ovid, metamorphosing into Ted Hughes - I love this way of putting it.
Josephine Baker and her use of comic mask - again, want to know more, but so many things!
Horrible things probably worth knowing more about:
His French swimming instructor befriends him. The friendship is as illegal as inviting an illegal immigrant into your home is, in Calais, in the year 2009. We are living in times where, very close to home, hospitality is punishable by law.
The nature of the ghost
You were wearing that black waistcoat with the white stitching that went out of fashion in 1995, the one we gave to Oxfam. Ha. I'd almost forgotten about early 90s waistcoats! They were everywhere. Mostly unnecessary and in the way, but I had one long fitted denim one which both suited me and was surprisingly warm.
If only I’d reimagined you without your snoring. But then it wouldn’t have been true, would it? It wouldn’t have been you.
Not that I wasn’t glad you were back, coming and going like you did over the weeks, the same you only slightly more ragged-looking every time, and every time coming in like I wasn’t even there and going straight over and sitting at the study desk, pulling your hair out over those talks you had been going to give about books and art.
When I got back I found you’d clearly been right behind me and had lifted a couple of books from the charity bookshop whose stock I’d had a passing look at. I began to worry. You were a figment of my imagination. That meant I must have taken those things.
The mixture of magic realism and realism-in-self-awareness in these sections is great.
(I don't understand why the narrator makes herself sound so much worse than she is when talking to the doctor though. And all this results in is getting sent to a bland and generic counsellor who doesn't connect with her, whom there's no opportunity to choose based on whether they suit one another. Though she does provide information that strings the book together.)
Aliki Vougiouklaki (her on the cover)
who played ALL FOUR in her time, Antigone, Evita, that mad pure Julie Andrews nun with the guitar, and the gorgeous debauched Sally Bowles – as well as Shirley Valentine and Shaw’s Pygmalion and Aristophanes’s Lysistrata and the leads in My Fair Lady and in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, and dressed up as a boy in a Greek film musical version of Romeo and Juliet, and more.
The film scenes described (still not using YouTube so have not seen) sound wonderful and exuberant. I love 60s cinema but have never seen any from Greece.
Aliki by the way is Greek for Alice I love that she cares about this and knows this and thinks we would care too; I'm not sure how she manages to make little things like this never sound patronising – which is very easy: assuming your audience knows and/or can look things up is usually the best way not to – but she has a knack.
January 24, 2013
I saw you last night, though you are now far away. I saw you and you saw what I was reading. You said you'd seen these lectures delivered. You looked appalled when I said that I really wasn’t enjoying them, and you chided me for my ignorance before asking why. As I rifled through the pages of the book looking for examples, another old friend came in and said what a great book it was. My frustration grew as I found it impossible to focus on the words, impossible to find anything at all in this, much less anything I objected to.
True story. A dream, but no less true for that. I had the dream after having read the first two sections of this book, and my inability to cite any particulars was, of course, easy enough to understand once I had woken. I have now returned it to the library, so this will no doubt be much the same, though without the facade or frustration.
1. Putting the Pathetic in Parenthetically
When told about his enthusiastic advocacy in my dream, the friend, referred to above as ‘you’ in an empty attempt to emulate the work currently under discussion, said “Fuck off. This is why I’m wary when you say that things remind you of me.” (Pathetic. The only thing I recently said reminded me of him was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ih7Kz... , and there’s nothing wrong with that.) Later he added, “I think my mum got something by her for Christmas.”
2. Putting the Art in Cart and then Putting the Cart, Chronologically, Before the Horse
Is this fiction or non? Is it important? No, to all of it. The apparent structural ingenuity is not, however, enough to provide sustenance. The story tells of someone bereaved (it has been a year), having lost their partner. Then the deceased comes through the door - looking bedraggled, with reduced affect and speaking what appears to be nonsense. The dead person has left behind some unfinished essays and it is with our protagonist that we read these. There is more of the story, but it never really grabbed me, and even when I reached out to it we were unable to establish any meaningful contact. The essays themselves are quite lacklustre, despite being sprinkled with choice quotes from many wonderful writers (Jose Saramago, Clarice Lispector, Henry James, Leonora Carrington, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray etc.). Smith doesn’t seem to have much to add though, or much to say using these quotes to illustrate; instead she seems to think that puns and other frivolous wordplay is the best way to meaning (this tendency can be seen in the section titles to a small extent – On Time, On Edge, On Your Honour and On Tenterhooks (these last 2 are fabricated as I’ve forgotten the actual ones)). I don’t have any objections to any form of word game but, indulged in to this extent, though they may be fun to play they are certainly not a spectator sport. I can’t help being slightly sympathetic to anyone with decent taste in books, and one of the stars is probably for the quotes. Good taste is not, however, a good reason to start making tongues. Some of the things quoted don’t live up to this standard at all, the only example I can remember being Jackie Kay’s truly awful poem ‘http://www.google.com'- we later learn this was written specially for this collection (why? Why?).
3. Putting the Sock in – Putting a Sock in It
I picked this book up after having seen much fulsome praise for Ms Ali on this here site. I was not much impressed. Perhaps it is a bad place to start, but I would have a hard time working up the enthusiasm for more. This is not a parody review: it is not meant to ape her writing style, but I hope the inclusion of ‘putting the ____ in _____’ headings as well as several largely meaningless phrases, along with the general lack of anything to say, communicates what I felt to be the flaws of this book. I will now include a small quote from The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago (several times quoted in Artful) to demonstrate how easy it is to have that man speak for us:
“…some of our thoughts are like this, they serve only to occupy, out of anticipation, the place of others that would give us more food for thought.”
True story. A dream, but no less true for that. I had the dream after having read the first two sections of this book, and my inability to cite any particulars was, of course, easy enough to understand once I had woken. I have now returned it to the library, so this will no doubt be much the same, though without the facade or frustration.
1. Putting the Pathetic in Parenthetically
When told about his enthusiastic advocacy in my dream, the friend, referred to above as ‘you’ in an empty attempt to emulate the work currently under discussion, said “Fuck off. This is why I’m wary when you say that things remind you of me.” (Pathetic. The only thing I recently said reminded me of him was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ih7Kz... , and there’s nothing wrong with that.) Later he added, “I think my mum got something by her for Christmas.”
2. Putting the Art in Cart and then Putting the Cart, Chronologically, Before the Horse
Is this fiction or non? Is it important? No, to all of it. The apparent structural ingenuity is not, however, enough to provide sustenance. The story tells of someone bereaved (it has been a year), having lost their partner. Then the deceased comes through the door - looking bedraggled, with reduced affect and speaking what appears to be nonsense. The dead person has left behind some unfinished essays and it is with our protagonist that we read these. There is more of the story, but it never really grabbed me, and even when I reached out to it we were unable to establish any meaningful contact. The essays themselves are quite lacklustre, despite being sprinkled with choice quotes from many wonderful writers (Jose Saramago, Clarice Lispector, Henry James, Leonora Carrington, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray etc.). Smith doesn’t seem to have much to add though, or much to say using these quotes to illustrate; instead she seems to think that puns and other frivolous wordplay is the best way to meaning (this tendency can be seen in the section titles to a small extent – On Time, On Edge, On Your Honour and On Tenterhooks (these last 2 are fabricated as I’ve forgotten the actual ones)). I don’t have any objections to any form of word game but, indulged in to this extent, though they may be fun to play they are certainly not a spectator sport. I can’t help being slightly sympathetic to anyone with decent taste in books, and one of the stars is probably for the quotes. Good taste is not, however, a good reason to start making tongues. Some of the things quoted don’t live up to this standard at all, the only example I can remember being Jackie Kay’s truly awful poem ‘http://www.google.com'- we later learn this was written specially for this collection (why? Why?).
3. Putting the Sock in – Putting a Sock in It
I picked this book up after having seen much fulsome praise for Ms Ali on this here site. I was not much impressed. Perhaps it is a bad place to start, but I would have a hard time working up the enthusiasm for more. This is not a parody review: it is not meant to ape her writing style, but I hope the inclusion of ‘putting the ____ in _____’ headings as well as several largely meaningless phrases, along with the general lack of anything to say, communicates what I felt to be the flaws of this book. I will now include a small quote from The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago (several times quoted in Artful) to demonstrate how easy it is to have that man speak for us:
“…some of our thoughts are like this, they serve only to occupy, out of anticipation, the place of others that would give us more food for thought.”
December 26, 2017
A rather odd book, fusing notes from a series of lectures on the arts that the author gave at Oxford with a meditation on grieving for a lost partner.
I wondered why the author chose to render this book as a work of fiction. Why not present the lectures in their final form for us to digest? As they are, the individual subjects hit chords that resonate but are not presented as a cohesive whole. The dead arts professor (a proxy for Smith, I take it) is memorialized by the narrator-lover who is a botanist by trade and an amateur literateur who can only manage to read Oliver Twist throughout the course of this novel. A sort of an ego-boost for Smith, by Smith, I think. At points, the narrative gets a bit corny when the narrator starts to see the dead lover in ghostly form, smell and all (and the smell intensifies as time passes). What finally turned me off the fictional element was when the narrator (or the ghost) starts stealing things from other people. The narrator subsequently seeks help for her kleptomaniacal activity, which is likened to a form of grieving by her shrink.
The content of the lectures themselves are interesting: time, form, edges, offer and reflection are dissected into their various dimensions and meanings with elegant word-play. Some points stuck with me:
• Form is clear rules and unspoken understandings.
• The mirror is a reflection between our world and another.
• The multiple dimensions of time and the multiple meanings of the word “form.”
• “On edge” and “being on edge” - the best way to illustrate each other. Edges are extremes and borders.
• Love is an exchange of altruism vs. selfishness.
In the course of the lectures, we get either passing references or detailed analyses of the literary greats and their works: Dickens, Proust, Saramago, Kafka, Borges, Woolf, Ondaatje, Calvino, Atwood, (Angela) Carter and (Katherine) Mansfield to name a few. Painters like Cezanne and Dali, and movie makers like Hitchcock, with his recipe for suspense, are also on offer. Writers like Woolf, who struggled at a time when cinema was coming of age and threatening to topple books from their perch, had much to say about the new medium and its divergence from the written word— “We can see life on the screen to a deeper level when we have no part in it.” —part observation, part condemnation. Anecdotes are plentiful: e.g. Dali was trapped in a diving suit, nearly dying of suffocation, when he dressed in one to illustrate how he was going to be diving into the depths of human subconscious. And the poetry selected and explained is comprised of very powerful pieces. And like the narrator who is hooked on Dickens, the dead lover was also hooked on a now-dead Brazilian Marilyn Monroe look-alike actress, Aliki Vougiouklaki, who played every juicy female lead part in the movies in her country. Aliki gets to adorn the cover of this book.
There is lot to keep the art enthusiast engaged. But I wondered why this form was chosen to present the work. Was there a need for experimentation, was there a need for validation, was there a need to extend the material in the lectures to a wider audience beyond Oxford? Perhaps all three are in play here.
I wondered why the author chose to render this book as a work of fiction. Why not present the lectures in their final form for us to digest? As they are, the individual subjects hit chords that resonate but are not presented as a cohesive whole. The dead arts professor (a proxy for Smith, I take it) is memorialized by the narrator-lover who is a botanist by trade and an amateur literateur who can only manage to read Oliver Twist throughout the course of this novel. A sort of an ego-boost for Smith, by Smith, I think. At points, the narrative gets a bit corny when the narrator starts to see the dead lover in ghostly form, smell and all (and the smell intensifies as time passes). What finally turned me off the fictional element was when the narrator (or the ghost) starts stealing things from other people. The narrator subsequently seeks help for her kleptomaniacal activity, which is likened to a form of grieving by her shrink.
The content of the lectures themselves are interesting: time, form, edges, offer and reflection are dissected into their various dimensions and meanings with elegant word-play. Some points stuck with me:
• Form is clear rules and unspoken understandings.
• The mirror is a reflection between our world and another.
• The multiple dimensions of time and the multiple meanings of the word “form.”
• “On edge” and “being on edge” - the best way to illustrate each other. Edges are extremes and borders.
• Love is an exchange of altruism vs. selfishness.
In the course of the lectures, we get either passing references or detailed analyses of the literary greats and their works: Dickens, Proust, Saramago, Kafka, Borges, Woolf, Ondaatje, Calvino, Atwood, (Angela) Carter and (Katherine) Mansfield to name a few. Painters like Cezanne and Dali, and movie makers like Hitchcock, with his recipe for suspense, are also on offer. Writers like Woolf, who struggled at a time when cinema was coming of age and threatening to topple books from their perch, had much to say about the new medium and its divergence from the written word— “We can see life on the screen to a deeper level when we have no part in it.” —part observation, part condemnation. Anecdotes are plentiful: e.g. Dali was trapped in a diving suit, nearly dying of suffocation, when he dressed in one to illustrate how he was going to be diving into the depths of human subconscious. And the poetry selected and explained is comprised of very powerful pieces. And like the narrator who is hooked on Dickens, the dead lover was also hooked on a now-dead Brazilian Marilyn Monroe look-alike actress, Aliki Vougiouklaki, who played every juicy female lead part in the movies in her country. Aliki gets to adorn the cover of this book.
There is lot to keep the art enthusiast engaged. But I wondered why this form was chosen to present the work. Was there a need for experimentation, was there a need for validation, was there a need to extend the material in the lectures to a wider audience beyond Oxford? Perhaps all three are in play here.
September 12, 2019
Me before starting Artful: hmm I’m not really sure how much I’ll enjoy a book that’s a fusion of essay, literature lecture and fiction...
Ali Smith: Hold my beer.
.
Truly, I didn’t think I’d enjoy this one, and while there were some parts that went over my head (classic Ali Smith tbf) for the most part I was reading in sheer awe. This is Smith’s love letter to literature. She explores the myriad of ways literature can impact us, change our view of the world, the ways it can be read and reread and different meanings extracted from it.
.
A quote from a critic on the back likens it to being at a dinner party with some of literature’s greats and I concur - imagine them all holding forth over some glasses of wine, yeah you might not catch all of it but dammit you’re happy to be there and happy to glean what you can from their brilliance. That’s what this book was like for me.
.
It made me want to read more widely, read better, read MORE, and I will definitely, 100 percent be reading this book again in the future, many times, myself a different person each time I pick it up and new meanings revealed to the new me.
Ali Smith: Hold my beer.
.
Truly, I didn’t think I’d enjoy this one, and while there were some parts that went over my head (classic Ali Smith tbf) for the most part I was reading in sheer awe. This is Smith’s love letter to literature. She explores the myriad of ways literature can impact us, change our view of the world, the ways it can be read and reread and different meanings extracted from it.
.
A quote from a critic on the back likens it to being at a dinner party with some of literature’s greats and I concur - imagine them all holding forth over some glasses of wine, yeah you might not catch all of it but dammit you’re happy to be there and happy to glean what you can from their brilliance. That’s what this book was like for me.
.
It made me want to read more widely, read better, read MORE, and I will definitely, 100 percent be reading this book again in the future, many times, myself a different person each time I pick it up and new meanings revealed to the new me.
July 5, 2022
Ali Smith gave the lectures that comprise Artful in 2012 at St. Anne's of Oxford University. Ten years later in 2022, I am reading this while studying abroad at this very college. This dedication to literature and writing feels as if it were written for this exact moment in my life.
October 1, 2019
"We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once."
-Ali Smith, Artful.
~
How do I begin? Ali Smith enchanted me once more while reading Artful. I adored this book. Too much. Maybe I've fallen in love with the book way too much.
There was to much wit and tenderness in the book. This book is a product of four lectures, On time, On form, On edge and On offer and On reflection, given in Oxford University.
I've always wanted to explore Smith's writing before reading the rest of her seasonal quartet and I am glad I read this.
~
Every booklover and lovers of literature should read this book. This is Smith's love letter to books and literature. I've highlighted so many quotes from the book. Artful is wonderful, it's wholesome, enriching and splendid. I envy the students who attended these lectures. It was a perfect book to end my September reading with.
~
Reading this book made me want to revisit Oliver Twist yet again, there were so many references to it in the lectures. Ali Smith loves trees, so there was some tree knowledge thrown in too. I am convinced after reading this that reading will never go out of fashion. Artful is profoundly beautiful and haunting. A journey through the beautiful world of literature.
This book made me want to widen my reading horizons, made me ponder a lot over literature and certainly this is one of the books which I would love to reread again and again.
5⭐
-Ali Smith, Artful.
~
How do I begin? Ali Smith enchanted me once more while reading Artful. I adored this book. Too much. Maybe I've fallen in love with the book way too much.
There was to much wit and tenderness in the book. This book is a product of four lectures, On time, On form, On edge and On offer and On reflection, given in Oxford University.
I've always wanted to explore Smith's writing before reading the rest of her seasonal quartet and I am glad I read this.
~
Every booklover and lovers of literature should read this book. This is Smith's love letter to books and literature. I've highlighted so many quotes from the book. Artful is wonderful, it's wholesome, enriching and splendid. I envy the students who attended these lectures. It was a perfect book to end my September reading with.
~
Reading this book made me want to revisit Oliver Twist yet again, there were so many references to it in the lectures. Ali Smith loves trees, so there was some tree knowledge thrown in too. I am convinced after reading this that reading will never go out of fashion. Artful is profoundly beautiful and haunting. A journey through the beautiful world of literature.
This book made me want to widen my reading horizons, made me ponder a lot over literature and certainly this is one of the books which I would love to reread again and again.
5⭐
December 1, 2013
This book is a wee bit confusing. It is based on a series of lectures the author did at St. Anne's College at Oxford, but it is also a story of loss from the perspective of the left-behind lover of the dead lecturer. Except the author herself is the lecturer. You can see how this might be confusing.
There are a lot of literary and art references, all of which are highly documented in the back (including full-color photos!). I'm not sure I got a lot out of it, not nearly as much as I would have expected. I do like Smith's novels, and will read more of those.
I liked this bit on books:
"We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once. Books and music share more in terms of resonance than just a present-tense correlation of heard note to read word. Books need time to dawn on us, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them, because books are produced by books more than by writers; they're a result of all the books that went before them. Great books are adaptable; they alter with us as we alter in life, they renew themselves as we change and re-read them at different times in our lives."
There are a lot of literary and art references, all of which are highly documented in the back (including full-color photos!). I'm not sure I got a lot out of it, not nearly as much as I would have expected. I do like Smith's novels, and will read more of those.
I liked this bit on books:
"We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once. Books and music share more in terms of resonance than just a present-tense correlation of heard note to read word. Books need time to dawn on us, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them, because books are produced by books more than by writers; they're a result of all the books that went before them. Great books are adaptable; they alter with us as we alter in life, they renew themselves as we change and re-read them at different times in our lives."
August 29, 2022
let's start this review by saying that for most than 5 or 6 years, i always thought ali smith was a man, and i would apologise for that, because after reading this collections of lectures given by ali smith that has on the same line the story of a protagonist hunted by their partner's ghost as they deal with their grief, no man can capture the descent into madness and being compelled with grief, no man can write “To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.” and make it hold all meaning of love and compassion.
this is the perfect introduction to ali smith work, mixing nonfiction with creative storytelling, literacy mentions of Shakespeare, Ovid and Dickens and discussions of words meanings.
this is the perfect introduction to ali smith work, mixing nonfiction with creative storytelling, literacy mentions of Shakespeare, Ovid and Dickens and discussions of words meanings.
May 26, 2019
Ik wil graag mijn favoriete feitje van dit boek delen:
Dalí wilde een keer een lezing in een duikpak geven en ging daarvoor naar een beroemde duikpakkenmaker die vroeg voor welke diepte hij het nodig had waarop Dalí antwoordde: “the depths of the subconscious!” Toen kwam hij in vol ornaat inclusief helm de lezing geven maar die was nog incoherenter dan normaal omdat hij bijna stikte vanwege de helm, totdat iemand die af kreeg met een biljartkeu??? wild
Dalí wilde een keer een lezing in een duikpak geven en ging daarvoor naar een beroemde duikpakkenmaker die vroeg voor welke diepte hij het nodig had waarop Dalí antwoordde: “the depths of the subconscious!” Toen kwam hij in vol ornaat inclusief helm de lezing geven maar die was nog incoherenter dan normaal omdat hij bijna stikte vanwege de helm, totdat iemand die af kreeg met een biljartkeu??? wild
Read
November 12, 2017(No rating because I feel funny rating something I didn't understand)
I found this incredibly hard to follow and would be lying if I said I got much out of it. There were sections where I found I was beginning to understand what Smith was getting at, then it would change direction entirely and I would be completely lost again.
This is probably genius but 90% of it went over my head. I may revisit it in the future, but the least accessible book I have read by Smith so far.
I found this incredibly hard to follow and would be lying if I said I got much out of it. There were sections where I found I was beginning to understand what Smith was getting at, then it would change direction entirely and I would be completely lost again.
This is probably genius but 90% of it went over my head. I may revisit it in the future, but the least accessible book I have read by Smith so far.
May 11, 2019
Ik heb deze geluisterd als luisterboek en het was het einde. Door Ali Smith zelf verteld.
Ze is zo lief en slim en menselijk en het liefst zou ik elke avond in slaap willen vallen bij haar stem die vertelt over haar oude geliefde en hun gesprekken over literatuur.
Ze is zo lief en slim en menselijk en het liefst zou ik elke avond in slaap willen vallen bij haar stem die vertelt over haar oude geliefde en hun gesprekken over literatuur.
August 14, 2023
"There was a draft by this window. There’d always been a draft by this window because one year when we painted it then left it a little open to dry we couldn’t get it to close completely again without cracking the paint, and you never wanted to crack it because you’d painted it so carefully, so we never did. I knew that if I sat there for any length of time I’d end up with a really sore neck and shoulder even though right now it was summer. Summer: a couple of times in the twelvemonth and a day I’d wondered if the seasons would ever be new again, brand-new time, rather than just seem to be following each other nose to tail like paint-peeling wooden horses on an old carousel.
I looked across the room to the other window, where I’d always thought it would be better to have that chair anyway. [...]
But it was your chair, this chair, even though we’d bought it on my credit card (and it still wasn’t paid off; how unfair that a chair we saw online and bought on a credit card and had delivered in a van would, could, did, last longer than us)."
I looked across the room to the other window, where I’d always thought it would be better to have that chair anyway. [...]
But it was your chair, this chair, even though we’d bought it on my credit card (and it still wasn’t paid off; how unfair that a chair we saw online and bought on a credit card and had delivered in a van would, could, did, last longer than us)."
April 5, 2021
Roman, Literaturvorlesung, persönliche Gedanken, Essay - mit "Wem erzähle ich das?" mischt Autorin Ali Smith die Formen und stellt ihr gesamtes Talent zur Schau. Einfühlsam, emotional und weitsichtig. Die technischen Eckpunkte der Literatur werden untersucht, mit der Menschheitsgeschichte abgeglichen und in eine wundervolle Erzählung eingebettet. Liebe und Tod, Ewigkeit und Sehnsüchte, alles vermengt.
Ich weiss nicht, wie es Ali Smith immer wieder schafft, mit ihren Büchern die Menschheit als Wunder und positive Existienz darzustellen, aber es gelingt. Man fühlt sich mit der Welt verbunden, man sieht neue Verbindungen und liebt die Kultur noch mehr. Faszinierend.
Ich weiss nicht, wie es Ali Smith immer wieder schafft, mit ihren Büchern die Menschheit als Wunder und positive Existienz darzustellen, aber es gelingt. Man fühlt sich mit der Welt verbunden, man sieht neue Verbindungen und liebt die Kultur noch mehr. Faszinierend.
October 12, 2022
feels like a love letter from humans to art and art to humans
March 24, 2024
Made me grateful to be alive lol 😝😜🤪
May 15, 2019
Second read was even more intriguing, absolutely love Smith's endless references to phenomenal art(ists) and literature and her brilliantly complex fusion of fiction and essay form.
May 30, 2022
"It was like we were reading the same book, like you were just ahead of me in the reading".
Wspaniała Ali.
Wspaniała Ali.
March 11, 2020
I think it is the single greatest blessing of my life to be born a reader, or maybe bred into it .. I’m not sure which. Maybe it was my grandparents who got me into reading, maybe it was my parents’ motivation that kept me reading, maybe it was my best friend, her recommendations and our many, many discussions that decided that I’ll be a reader for life. Mostly and assuredly, though, it was the books themselves that helped me see the world as a profound place.
Artful is a book that reaffirms my love for literature as sustenance for the soul.
Artful is a homage to literature. Artful is about literature as a work of art. Artful is a book on other books. Artful is about the endless possibilities of fiction and storytelling. Artful is about the impact and influence of reading.
If not for literature, how was I to know there were things below the surface? How would I know how to scratch that surface? Or how to understand what lay there?
If not for literature, how would I understand time, and how it worked? How would I understand love, and every feeling in the world a bit more profoundly?
If not for literature, how would I know that everything had meaning? How was I to know that most things had multiple meanings? How was I to live without meaning in my life?
Literature breathes in from us, and breathes out to us. It takes from us to give unto us. I will never fully fathom its infinite capability to understand me and to make me understand. On one hand, literature is a worldly beast, informing us about its geography and history, its sociology and politics and economy. On the other hand, it pertains to each reader a bit more personally. This other literature, the one we consider the art of life, is in how we perceive it, how we understand it and how we experience it.
My reading of Ali Smith has always remained a tad and touch beyond comprehension. I call her a half and half author, half so clear, half so very convoluted. So maybe she’s addressing a reader like me when she says,"We treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once." Consider me reprimanded!
Literature, for me, is a lesson on how to live. And life, in tandem to literature, I hope remains artful. 5 stars!
Artful is a book that reaffirms my love for literature as sustenance for the soul.
Artful is a homage to literature. Artful is about literature as a work of art. Artful is a book on other books. Artful is about the endless possibilities of fiction and storytelling. Artful is about the impact and influence of reading.
If not for literature, how was I to know there were things below the surface? How would I know how to scratch that surface? Or how to understand what lay there?
If not for literature, how would I understand time, and how it worked? How would I understand love, and every feeling in the world a bit more profoundly?
If not for literature, how would I know that everything had meaning? How was I to know that most things had multiple meanings? How was I to live without meaning in my life?
Literature breathes in from us, and breathes out to us. It takes from us to give unto us. I will never fully fathom its infinite capability to understand me and to make me understand. On one hand, literature is a worldly beast, informing us about its geography and history, its sociology and politics and economy. On the other hand, it pertains to each reader a bit more personally. This other literature, the one we consider the art of life, is in how we perceive it, how we understand it and how we experience it.
My reading of Ali Smith has always remained a tad and touch beyond comprehension. I call her a half and half author, half so clear, half so very convoluted. So maybe she’s addressing a reader like me when she says,"We treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once." Consider me reprimanded!
Literature, for me, is a lesson on how to live. And life, in tandem to literature, I hope remains artful. 5 stars!
March 6, 2013
A blow-away book, this British novelist's 2012 Weidenfeld Lectures on comparative literature at Cambridge. A glancing sensibility, full of puns that lead to deeper thoughts in 4 lectures On Time, On Form, On Edge... For example, she asks us to consider in the Time section that literary time is not just sequence, but consequence; she brilliantly relates the root of "kindness" to family, old German kind, kinder, etc. Graspable literary reflections that stimulate and puzzle, contained within a frame story running throughout the lectures -- of her dead woman lover, a literary scholar who's completing a set of lectures on these subjects, but maddeningly keeps reappearing (more and more decayed in body) to talk with her, ask where the coffee mugs are, etc. I've not read any of Ali Smith's novels, but from her range of citations and illustrations she shows herself to be a cheerful polymath, ranging from rock and pop lyrics to classical literature and myth, and the doings of a popular Greek film actress of the 50s and 60s -- who illustrates the cover. Playful, challenging -- it refreshes the critical landscape.
April 22, 2021
A collection of 'talks' by Ali Smith. I fell in love with Ali Smith after reading her seasonal quartet, though I have read just two and yet to finish the series.
This is not really a novel, although there is an obscure storyline. Page by page, it takes you through loss and grief, poetry, the visual arts, on a journey that entwines life and art.
Ali starts with a ghost story, a story that constructs its way around four linked lectures. Playing with form and function here and at the beginning, switching from the narrator telling us their story and then switching to the lectures on time, on form, on edge, and offer, and on reflection.
Artful is playful and cleverly constructed, beautifully told.
Highly recommended if you are into art, philosophies, and empathy. This book is one of its kind.
Happy Reading! :)
This is not really a novel, although there is an obscure storyline. Page by page, it takes you through loss and grief, poetry, the visual arts, on a journey that entwines life and art.
Ali starts with a ghost story, a story that constructs its way around four linked lectures. Playing with form and function here and at the beginning, switching from the narrator telling us their story and then switching to the lectures on time, on form, on edge, and offer, and on reflection.
Artful is playful and cleverly constructed, beautifully told.
Highly recommended if you are into art, philosophies, and empathy. This book is one of its kind.
Happy Reading! :)
December 31, 2021
"You can't step into the same story twice--or maybe it's that stories, books, art can't step into the same person twice, maybe it's that they allow for our mutability, are ready for us at all times, and maybe it's this adaptability, regardless of time, that makes them art, because real art . . . will hold us at all our different ages like it held all the people before us and will hold all the people after us, in an elasticity and with a generosity that allow for all our comings and goings. Because come then go we will, and in that order."
A brilliant work, albeit not for all. Reminds me of every good, comforting, challenging conversation with my undergraduate literature professors after a particularly memorable seminar.
A brilliant work, albeit not for all. Reminds me of every good, comforting, challenging conversation with my undergraduate literature professors after a particularly memorable seminar.
September 13, 2017
I was a little confused by this book. I expected a novel but it is more a collection of essays and lectures interwoven with a story of loss from the perspective of a lover left behind after the death of her partner, who is haunting her. Even though I am interested in literature and philosophy, I started to find the large amount of references a little pretentious to be perfectly honest.
There were also times where I was touched by an emotional or thought-provoking passage though.
While it is interesting and I liked the concept of the book, it rambled on a little at times and couldn't quite keep my attention throughout.
There were also times where I was touched by an emotional or thought-provoking passage though.
While it is interesting and I liked the concept of the book, it rambled on a little at times and couldn't quite keep my attention throughout.
November 26, 2020
2nd read
The more I read of Ali Smith, the more I come to enjoy her. And especially her style. Brilliant !
First read
What a strange read. Not a novel, not an essay, not a series of lectures. But all of that, too. And a love letter at the same time. To a real person? To art, for sure. To words, and films, and music and books and stories. To myths and reflections. To change and transformation.
This is a book I will have to come back to. A book full of references. Some of which I knew, most of which I did not. A book on books - sometimes at least.
The more I read of Ali Smith, the more I come to enjoy her. And especially her style. Brilliant !
First read
What a strange read. Not a novel, not an essay, not a series of lectures. But all of that, too. And a love letter at the same time. To a real person? To art, for sure. To words, and films, and music and books and stories. To myths and reflections. To change and transformation.
This is a book I will have to come back to. A book full of references. Some of which I knew, most of which I did not. A book on books - sometimes at least.
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