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Ali Smith
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How to be Both Kindle Edition

by Ali Smith (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.6 out of 5 stars 1,347
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WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015
WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2014
WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD

'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard

How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s.

Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.

*****

'Brims with palpable joy' Daily Telegraph

'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton

'A delight. A masterpiece. Magical' Sunday Times

WINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2014
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014

Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available to pre-order now.

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  1. Print length
    373 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Penguin
  5. Publication date
    28 August 2014
  6. File size
    1680 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  10. See all details
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Review

WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION - WINNER OF THE 2014 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE - WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD - WINNER OF THE SALTIRE LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD

A Best Book of the Year: NPR, Financial Times

"Playfully brilliant. . . . Delightful. . . . Incredibly touching." --The Washington Post

"Magnificent. . . . Brilliant and cheeky." --The Boston Globe

"[A] sly and shimmering double helix of a novel." --The New York Times Book Review

"Joyful. . . . Moving. . . . Encompasses wonderful mothers, unconventional love and friendship, time, mortality, gender, the consolations of art and so much else." --NPR

"A mystery to be marveled at. . . . Smith is endlessly artful, creating a work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time." --The Atlantic

"Ali Smith is a genius. . . . [How to be both] cements Smith's reputation as one of the finest and most innovative of our contemporary writers. By some divine alchemy, she is both funny and moving; she combines intellectual rigor with whimsy." --The Los Angeles Review of Books

"Captivating. . . . How to be both indeed works both ways, demonstrating not only the power of art itself but also the mastery of Smith's prose." --San Francisco Chronicle

"A synthesis of questions long contemplated by an extraordinarily thoughtful author, who succeeds quite well in implanting those questions into well-drawn, memorable people." --The New York Times

"Innovative. . . . The book's high-concept design is offset by the beauty, prowess, and range of Smith's playfully confident, proudly unconventional prose." --Elle

"Deft and mischievous, a novel of ideas that folds back on itself like the most playful sort of arabesque." --Los Angeles Times

"Ali Smith's signature themes--of the fluidity of identity and gender, appearance and perception--are here in profusion, as is her joyful command of language, from lofty rhetoric to earthy pun." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Ali Smith is a master storyteller, and How to be both is a charming and erudite novel that can quite literally make us rethink the way we read." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"An entirely delightful and moving story. . . . When you reach the end of this playful and wise novel, you want to turn to the beginning and read it again to piece together its mysteries and keep both halves simultaneously in mind." --The Dallas Morning News

"A wonderfully slippery, postmodern examination of the perception, gender, loss and the lasting power of art. . . . The sort of book you could happily read a second time and uncover overlooked truths. In art as finely crafted as this, there's always more to see, if you look." --The Miami Herald

"Boundless. . . . Exhilarating. . . . Smith's concerns--in subject matter and form--are profound and encompassing, and it is beautiful to watch her books defy pinning down." --Portland Oregonian

"An inventive and intriguing look into the world of art, love, choices, and the duality of the human existence. . . . Even though Smith is writing two very different stories from two different eras, she does a masterful job of weaving connecting threads between the two." --Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Wildly inventive. . . . The narrative voice makes the double-take cohesive, as both are lyrical and fresh. . . . I absolutely adored this book." --Laura Creste, Bustle

"Smith's talent shines brightest in her tender depiction of the emotions that, like the underpaintings in a fresco, remain hidden but have a powerful impact." --BookPage

About the Author

ALI SMITH is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, Summer, Spring, Winter, Autumn, Public Library and Other Stories, and How to Be Both, which won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Novel of the Year Award. Her work has been shortlisted four times for the Booker Prize. Most recently, she won the George Orwell Prize for Fiction for Summer. Born in Inverness, Scotland, she lives in Cambridge, England.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00IPXLLO8
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin; 1st edition (28 August 2014)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1680 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 373 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0375424105
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.6 out of 5 stars 1,347

About the author

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Ali Smith

Ali Smith

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Ali Smith CBE FRSL (born August 1962 in Inverness) is a Scottish writer.

She was born to working-class parents, raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD that she never finished. She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with CFS/ME. Following this she became a full-time writer and now writes for The Guardian, The Scotsman, and the Times Literary Supplement. Openly gay, she lives in Cambridge with her partner filmmaker Sarah Wood.

In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

In 2009, she donated the short story Last (previously published in the Manchester Review Online) to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the 'Fire' collection.

Smith was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literature.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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Top reviews from Australia

Ruth Stewart
5.0 out of 5 stars A gorgeously rich and complex novel written from the perspective of eye and cameras
Reviewed in Australia on 2 August 2016
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Wonderful summoning of the explosively creative world of a renaissance painter contrasting and intersecting with the world of a grieving teenager in a Cambridge where images and word are captured and transmitted on smart phones
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miss s m rushworth
3.0 out of 5 stars like me, you are snatching a few minutes reading ...
Reviewed in Australia on 19 April 2017
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I think there are five star elements to this book but the gimmick of randomly choosing ( or rather having chosen for you) which order to read the two (intertwined) stories isn't among them. Having started to read the Kindle version for my book club but unable to sustain the momentum I was flummoxed to listen to my friend who had read the physical version apparently discussing a completely different book!
A third member of the club had attempted the Kindle version but given up, defeated by the prose style and layout. Both our Kindle editions started with Eyes (15th century), whereas our friend's paper copy started with Camera (21st century). All the of us agreed that Camera was much more accessible. I've read reviews on this page from people who read the same sequence as I did and preferred that way. All I can say is that (re)starting with Camera, there is now a reasonable chance I might actually finish the book versus virtually no chance starting the other way round.
If you have time on your hands and can take the book in large chunks at a time, then you might want to challenge yourself by staying with Eyes, but if, like me, you are snatching a few minutes reading at a time, I strongly recommend starting with Camera.
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Kim David Roberts
1.0 out of 5 stars Why Bother
Reviewed in Australia on 4 May 2015
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What an endurance. Why would you bother to write a book like this. A great disappointment.
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MisterHobgoblin
3.0 out of 5 stars One of its legs is both the same
Reviewed in Australia on 18 October 2015
I had expected to be writing a gushing review exhorting people to read a great novel from one of Scotland’s liveliest writers. I have loved almost everything Ali Smith has written.

Alas, How To Be Both has not hit the mark. Basically, it is two novellas, stitched together. In one of them, we find a 15th century Italian girl, dressed as a boy in order to pass herself off as a painter, working on frescoes for the local Duke. This girl, who adopts the name of Francescho, spends time exploring her sexuality in brothels, consorting with a pickpocket, and demanding more money. Oh, and she is dead. Possibly. From time to time, we are reminded that Francescho is in purgatorio, but mostly we find ourselves reading a straight autobiographical narrative, chopped up into little pieces and scattered into a random order. The narrative is written in a preudo-mediaeval voice interspersed with modern colloquialisms such as “Just saying”. Sentences themselves are fragmented and drift off into the ether. It is very confusing.

Then, abruptly, the story finishes and we find modern teenager, George (really Georgia), remembering a holiday to Italy with her mother shortly before the mother died. They saw the frescos that Francescho had painted and wondered about the life of this painter. Cutting between present day grief, greatly exacerbated by the heavy handed school counsellor, and happier past memories, it feels choppy. There is a story of growth and loss; there is a sexual ambiguity; an awakening of an adult from the chrysalis of childhood.

The gimmick is that you can read either story first. The Kindle edition prints the entire text twice – first 15th Century-Current, then Current-15th Century. You can read whichever version you wish. Not that I imagine it would be a very different experience since the stories seem only very loosely connected. Perhaps we are supposed to wonder whether the 15th Century narrative was just made up by George. Certainly it never felt quite authentic as a mediaeval narrative. And although the George narrative felt more real, it didn’t seem to go anywhere.

Normally Ali Smith’s writing is clear and unambiguous, drawing beauty from human life rather than from arty language. However, this seems to have been abandoned for How To Be Both where much is opaque. It is especially difficult to tell what is happening at any given point in the Francescho narrative as it seems to be so half formed and to wriggle about so much.

I’m not quite sure what Ali Smith was trying to do here. Her short fiction is excellent and her novels are playful and innovative. Perhaps this is trying to be both but it isn’t succeeding.
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Jinny
3.0 out of 5 stars Two halves don’t make a right
Reviewed in Australia on 21 February 2018
Hard to rate this book. One half is brilliant, the other virtually unreadable...
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Top reviews from other countries

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Valk
3.0 out of 5 stars algumas partes boas mas outras maçantes
Reviewed in Brazil on 2 July 2018
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O livro tem partes boas mostrando o mundo de uma adolescente lidando com o luto mas se perde ao tentar trazer uma figura do passado se tornando muitas confuso e desinteressante, perdendo o fluxo da narrativa.
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Client d'Amazon
4.0 out of 5 stars very happy!
Reviewed in Canada on 12 April 2018
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Arrived a week early, very happy!
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Cliente Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Do not miss this masterpiece!
Reviewed in Italy on 14 October 2016
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An amazing book!!!!!!!!!
It will carry you away. It is fresh, innovative, intriguing, moving, ironic, smart,
in other words an absolute must-read!
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Roger Brunyate
5.0 out of 5 stars The Hand That Draws the Hand
Reviewed in the United States on 13 December 2015
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Ali Smith has produced the literary equivalent of that Escher print of a hand drawing the hand that is drawing it. In art terms, her novel would be a diptych: two panels of equal size, with different subjects, but intended to be seen side by side. In her case, two stories from different centuries that comment on each other, reflect each other, and (in that Escher twist) at times even write each other. The first half is in the voice of a 15th-century Italian painter returned to earth watching a teenager looking at one of the artist's works in a gallery. The artist follows the youth through the city, and observes what seem like the symptoms of obsession. In between, we hear snatches of the painter's own story, growing up as the child of a stonemason, training as an artist, and achieving artistic but ill-paid success painting frescoes for a palace in Ferrara.

The second half is told in the third person, and is the modern story of the teenager in the gallery, whom we learn is called George. George's mother has recently died. But a month or two before she did, she took George to Ferrara to see the artist's painting. It transpires that little is known about the painter, other than approximations of birth and death, and one of the things that George's mother and George do is to make up a life to go with the name, a fiction that resonates with the autobiographical information we have learned in the first half, but does not entirely match it. The novel ends just as George begins the behavior the artist observed at the start of the novel. A hand drawing a hand….

No description of the novel can do as well as the short paragraph on the back cover, a reticent gem that nonetheless says almost everything that is important. Write at greater length and you come up against the fact that Smith keeps her ideas so close to her chest that it is almost impossible to describe the book without spoilers. For instance, I was able to identify the painter before the end of the first half (it helps to have once taught art history) -- but Smith holds back the name until the last few pages of the entire book, so I shall also. Looking back with my present knowledge, though, I see how skillful the author was in incorporating the known facts, together with a lot that might reasonably be surmised; she clearly knows her history. But a lot must be invented, and one of her inventions is a doozy that turns out to be the thematic pivot of the entire novel.

Oh dear, I realize that I must have made this sound like some dry intellectual puzzle, but not so. For Smith has given her painter an exuberant individual voice, with its own fractured syntax, idiosyncratic punctuation, and even typography (the whole book is printed with ragged right margins). It begins and ends in a poem about a snail, spiraling its way across the page, and the 150 pages in between are a poem in prose. Here is a complete paragraph as an example:

"It is a feeling thing, to be a painter of things : cause every thing, even an imagined or gone thing or creature or person has essence : paint a rose or a coin or a duck or a brick and you'll feel it as sure as if a coin had a mouth and told you what it was like to be a coin, as if a rose told you first-hand what petals are, their softness and wetness held in a pellicle of colour thinner and more feeling than an eyelid, as if a duck told you about the combined wet and underdry of its feathers, a brick about the rough kiss of its skin."

I did not need to get far before I was convinced I was reading a six-or-seven-star masterpiece. Unfortunately, the second half did not consistently sustain it. Perhaps it was the lack of the first-person perspective. Perhaps Smith left herself with so many themes to pull together that she could not quite find her focus. Perhaps it is that we are seeing George at a particularly awkward stage, lost, grieving, and not a little bratty. Even verging on autistic. But that feeling does pass, and there are some marvelous passages in this half too. Let me offer one more paragraph, about those Ferrara frescoes which contain, among many other details, a picture of a man wringing the neck of a duck. The voice here, repetitious but truly thinking, is that of the sixteen-year-old:

"It is like everything is in layers. Things happen right at the front of the pictures and at the same time they continue happening, both separately and connectedly, behind, and behind that, and again behind that, like you can see, in perspective, for miles. Then there are the separate details, like that man with the duck. The picture makes you look at both -- the close-up happenings and the bigger picture. Looking at the man with the duck is like seeing how everyday and how almost comic cruelty is. The cruelty happens in among everything else happening. It is an amazing way to show how ordinary cruelty really is."

Not accidentally, this passage contains the word "both," one of many "boths" that recur throughout the book, most of which I cannot comment on without spoilers. But this "both," the coexistence of happiness and cruelty, and of the details within the bigger picture, certainly hits some of the themes that make this ambitious but deceptively casual novel a near-masterpiece.
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Alfaz del Pi
5.0 out of 5 stars 2 tales in one book
Reviewed in Spain on 21 April 2016
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This a most enjoyable read, not always easy, but cleverly written making it a page turner. You want to know how the author will bring it together at the end.
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