Genre Fiction
![Ali Smith - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B000APHM8I.jpg)
How to be both: A novel
SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
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
Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. A true original, she is a one-of-a-kind literary sensation. Her novels consistently attract serious acclaim and discussion-and have won her a dedicated readership who are drawn again and again to the warmth, humanity and humor of her voice.
How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real-and all life's givens get given a second chance.
A NOTE TO THE READER:
Who says stories reach everybody in the same order?
This novel can be read in two ways and this book provides you with both.
In half of all printed editions of the novel the narrative EYES comes before CAMERA.
In the other half of printed editions the narrative CAMERA precedes EYES.
The narratives are exactly the same in both versions, just in a different order.
The books are intentionally printed in two different ways, so that readers can randomly have different experiences reading the same text. So, depending on which edition you happen to receive, the book will be: EYES, CAMERA, or CAMERA, EYES. Enjoy the adventure.
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
Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. A true original, she is a one-of-a-kind literary sensation. Her novels consistently attract serious acclaim and discussion-and have won her a dedicated readership who are drawn again and again to the warmth, humanity and humor of her voice.
How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real-and all life's givens get given a second chance.
A NOTE TO THE READER:
Who says stories reach everybody in the same order?
This novel can be read in two ways and this book provides you with both.
In half of all printed editions of the novel the narrative EYES comes before CAMERA.
In the other half of printed editions the narrative CAMERA precedes EYES.
The narratives are exactly the same in both versions, just in a different order.
The books are intentionally printed in two different ways, so that readers can randomly have different experiences reading the same text. So, depending on which edition you happen to receive, the book will be: EYES, CAMERA, or CAMERA, EYES. Enjoy the adventure.
Editorial Reviews
"Playfully brilliant. . . . Fantastically complex and incredibly touching. . . . This gender-blending, genre-blurring story, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, bounces across centuries, tossing off profound reflections on art and grief, without getting tangled in its own postmodern wires. It's the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possible. . . . [A] swirling, panoramic vision of two women's lives, separated by more than 500 years, impossibly connected by their fascination with the mystery of existence."
-Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"Brilliant. . . . [How to be both] will one day join Virginia Woolf's Orlando as a key text in understanding the fluidity of human life. Its power emerges from a dazzlingly twinned structure. . . . The desire to capture the past, Smith beautifully shows, is one of our essential ways of recognizing that it lives like the ghost of a painter or the memories of a dead mother. Art, whether it is a debased film or a hung fresco, or this magnificent book, reminds us of this lesson, so we can go back into the world to live."
-John Freeman, The Boston Globe
"[A] sly and shimmering double helix of a novel. . . . The two parts of ‘How to be both' have overlapping themes: the subversive power of art; what Martineau refers to as ‘sexual and gender ambiguities'; the hold of the dead on the living; and, of course, the figure of Francescho him/herself."
-Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review
"Dazzling. . . . A cutting-edge, even radical rumination on time, language, art, love. . . . Ali Smith is one of our most delightfully experimental writers, in the vein of Jeanette Winterson and even Virginia Woolf. By breaking the constraints of a traditional novel, she reinvents it as an exultant testament to creativity."
-Michele Filgate, O, The Oprah Magazine
"Can a book be both linguistically playful and dead serious? Structurally innovative and reader-friendly? Mournful and joyful? Brainy and moving? Ali Smith's How to be both, which recently won the prestigious, all-Brit two-year-old Goldsmiths prize for being a truly novel novel, is all of the above-and then some. . . . Smith, whose books include The Accidental, There But For The, and the essay collection Artful, has outdone herself with How to be both. . . . To say that there's more than meets the eye in this terrific book is a gross understatement; it encompasses wonderful mothers, unconventional love and friendship, time, mortality, gender, the consolations of art and so much else. . . . Once again, Smith's affinity for beguiling oddballs and the pertly precocious rivals J.D Salinger's. . . . [A] gloriously inventive novel. . . . Ingeniously concei...
-Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"Brilliant. . . . [How to be both] will one day join Virginia Woolf's Orlando as a key text in understanding the fluidity of human life. Its power emerges from a dazzlingly twinned structure. . . . The desire to capture the past, Smith beautifully shows, is one of our essential ways of recognizing that it lives like the ghost of a painter or the memories of a dead mother. Art, whether it is a debased film or a hung fresco, or this magnificent book, reminds us of this lesson, so we can go back into the world to live."
-John Freeman, The Boston Globe
"[A] sly and shimmering double helix of a novel. . . . The two parts of ‘How to be both' have overlapping themes: the subversive power of art; what Martineau refers to as ‘sexual and gender ambiguities'; the hold of the dead on the living; and, of course, the figure of Francescho him/herself."
-Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review
"Dazzling. . . . A cutting-edge, even radical rumination on time, language, art, love. . . . Ali Smith is one of our most delightfully experimental writers, in the vein of Jeanette Winterson and even Virginia Woolf. By breaking the constraints of a traditional novel, she reinvents it as an exultant testament to creativity."
-Michele Filgate, O, The Oprah Magazine
"Can a book be both linguistically playful and dead serious? Structurally innovative and reader-friendly? Mournful and joyful? Brainy and moving? Ali Smith's How to be both, which recently won the prestigious, all-Brit two-year-old Goldsmiths prize for being a truly novel novel, is all of the above-and then some. . . . Smith, whose books include The Accidental, There But For The, and the essay collection Artful, has outdone herself with How to be both. . . . To say that there's more than meets the eye in this terrific book is a gross understatement; it encompasses wonderful mothers, unconventional love and friendship, time, mortality, gender, the consolations of art and so much else. . . . Once again, Smith's affinity for beguiling oddballs and the pertly precocious rivals J.D Salinger's. . . . [A] gloriously inventive novel. . . . Ingeniously concei...
Readers Top Reviews
WendyJT
A really interesting written book which sparked lots of discussion at Book Group. It divided opinion because one or two sections were very difficult to read due to non existent punctuation and no indication of who was speaking. I enjoyed it but some in the group failed to finish. If you like your novels easy-reading then avoid this. If you are willing to accept a bit of a challenge then go for it, but don't give up at the beginning of the 16th century portion - keep going. It really does start to make sense!
ES
I don't often review books or other products on Amazon unless there is something wrong with them I think people should know about. However I felt compelled to share my feelings about this great book as I feel the overall review should give it more stars. I can understand the confusion or irritation of some of the reviews below and would love to know which way round their versions were printed as I think if I had read these stories in the opposite order I would have been confused and missed half of the references in the painters story. I however began in the present day with George's story, which after getting used to the lack of speech marks and the stream of consciousness style of writing I thoroughly enjoyed. I then understood straight away where the painter's story was coming from. I very much enjoyed looking up all the art referenced in both stories, which I think definitely helps the enjoyment of the book and although I might not be heading off to Italy straight away I'll definitely be visiting the National Gallery to see one for myself.
R. A. WalkerSusan As
This book was suggested to me by a relative, who recommended Ali Smith as an author and said that if I was going to buy just one book by her, then make it How to be both. Before buying it, I noticed that the reviews on Amazon averaged 3.2 stars, with 33% of people giving it five stars and 25% one star. I am firmly in the latter category, and like many other people I cannot conceive how it was the winner of the 2014 Costa Novel of the Year Award and won or was shortlisted for other prizes in 2014 and 2015. Either there were few candidates in those years, which is unlikely, or the judges and reviewers had collective bouts of insanity, possibly, or they were perhaps afraid that any criticisms would elicit disapproval from their peers, probably! reviewers called rich strong and moving : daring inventive down to earth funny profound and deeply moving sagacious playful compelling : but arranging text in patterns across the page is merely annoying and the whole book is poorly written The book contains two separate, but supposedly related, stories, each of which tries and fails to be intelligent and clever. In the edition I read, the first is set in 2014 and concerns a pedantic 16 year old teenager called George (Georgia), who is grieving the recent death of her mother, a prominent economist and journalist; while the second is allegedly set in the 1460s and describes the life of a young female Italian renaissance artist who had painted a fresco that George and her mother had seen on a visit to Italy. [I say “allegedly” because although the blurb on the back of the book says this, there are no dates in the text and few clues to confirm the period.] I understand that Ali Smith asked her publishers to print two versions of the book, one with the modern text first and one with it second. If my edition had been printed with the renaissance part first then I would have stopped reading after the first four pages of gibberish, thus saving me many wasted hours, but as I am a completer/finisher I persevered until the end, hoping against hope that I would find something to justify my time. I did find a flash of insightful writing after 300 pages or so, long past the point of no return, but by then I was irritated and frustrated by the author’s stream of consciousness writing, unpunctuated sentences, unnecessary artificial effects (see above), unbelievable characters and the absence of a plot or plot development (in both parts!). It should not be necessary to have to re-read and reconstruct sentences - adding my own punctuation, structure, and deliberately missing words - in an attempt to understand them. Moreover, I had no empathy with, and neither did I care about, any of the characters. I read and enjoy novels by many modern authors, including those translated from foreign languages, but I thought th...
Roger Brunyate
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...
Short Excerpt Teaser
Consider this moral conundrum for a moment, George's mother says to George who's sitting in the front passenger seat.
Not says. Said.
George's mother is dead.
What moral conundrum? George says.
The passenger seat in the hire car is strange, being on the side the driver's seat is on at home. This must be a bit like driving is, except without the actual, you know, driving.
Okay. You're an artist, her mother says.
Am I? George says. Since when? And is that a moral conundrum?
Ha ha, her mother says. Humour me. Imagine it. You're an artist.
This conversation is happening last May, when George's mother is still alive, obviously. She's been dead since September. Now it's January, to be more precise it's just past midnight on New Year's Eve, which means it has just become the year after the year in which George's mother died.
George's father is out. It is better than him being at home, standing maudlin in the kitchen or going round the house switching things off and on. Henry is asleep. She just went in and checked on him; he was dead to the world, though not as dead as the word dead literally means when it means, you know, dead.
This will be the first year her mother hasn't been alive since the year her mother was born. That is so obvious that it is stupid even to think it and yet so terrible that you can't not think it. Both at once.
Anyway George is spending the first minutes of the new year looking up the lyrics of an old song. Let's Twist Again. Lyrics by Kal Mann. The words are pretty bad. Let's twist again like we did last summer. Let's twist again like we did last year. Then there's a really bad rhyme, a rhyme that isn't, properly speaking, even a rhyme.
Do you remember when
Things were really hummin'.
Hummin' doesn't rhyme with summer, the line doesn't end in a question mark, and is it meant to mean, literally, do you remember that time when things smelt really bad?
Then Let's twist again, twisting time is here. Or, as all the sites say, twistin' time.
At least they've used an apostrophe, the George from before her mother died says.
I do not give a fuck about whether some site on the internet attends to grammatical correctness, the George from after says.
That before and after thing is about mourning, is what people keep saying. They keep talking about how grief has stages. There's some dispute about how many stages of grief there are. There are three, or five, or some people say seven.
It's quite like the songwriter actually couldn't be bothered to think of words. Maybe he was in one of the three, five or seven stages of mourning too. Stage nine (or twenty three or a hundred and twenty three or ad infinitum, because nothing will ever not be like this again): in this stage you will no longer be bothered with whether songwords mean anything. In fact you will hate almost all songs.
But George has to find a song to which you can do this specific dance.
It being so apparently contradictory and meaningless is no doubt a bonus. It will be precisely why the song sold so many copies and was such a big deal at the time. People like things not to be too meaningful.
Okay, I'm imagining, George in the passenger seat last May in Italy says at exactly the same time as George at home in England the following January stares at the meaninglessness of the words of an old song. Outside the car window Italy unfurls round and over them so hot and yellow it looks like it's been sandblasted. In the back Henry snuffles lightly, his eyes closed, his mouth open. The band of the seatbelt is over his forehead because he is so small.
You're an artist, her mother says, and you're working on a project with a lot of other artists. And everybody on the project is getting the same amount, salary-wise. But you believe that what you're doing is worth more than everyone on the project, including you, is getting paid. So you write a letter to the man who's commissioned the work and you ask him to give you more money than everyone else is getting.
Am I worth more? George says. Am I better than the other artists?
Does that matter? her mother says. Is that what matters?
Is it me or is it the work that's worth more? George says.
Good. Keep going, her mother says.
Is this real? George says. Is it hypothetical?
Does that matter? her mother says.
Not says. Said.
George's mother is dead.
What moral conundrum? George says.
The passenger seat in the hire car is strange, being on the side the driver's seat is on at home. This must be a bit like driving is, except without the actual, you know, driving.
Okay. You're an artist, her mother says.
Am I? George says. Since when? And is that a moral conundrum?
Ha ha, her mother says. Humour me. Imagine it. You're an artist.
This conversation is happening last May, when George's mother is still alive, obviously. She's been dead since September. Now it's January, to be more precise it's just past midnight on New Year's Eve, which means it has just become the year after the year in which George's mother died.
George's father is out. It is better than him being at home, standing maudlin in the kitchen or going round the house switching things off and on. Henry is asleep. She just went in and checked on him; he was dead to the world, though not as dead as the word dead literally means when it means, you know, dead.
This will be the first year her mother hasn't been alive since the year her mother was born. That is so obvious that it is stupid even to think it and yet so terrible that you can't not think it. Both at once.
Anyway George is spending the first minutes of the new year looking up the lyrics of an old song. Let's Twist Again. Lyrics by Kal Mann. The words are pretty bad. Let's twist again like we did last summer. Let's twist again like we did last year. Then there's a really bad rhyme, a rhyme that isn't, properly speaking, even a rhyme.
Do you remember when
Things were really hummin'.
Hummin' doesn't rhyme with summer, the line doesn't end in a question mark, and is it meant to mean, literally, do you remember that time when things smelt really bad?
Then Let's twist again, twisting time is here. Or, as all the sites say, twistin' time.
At least they've used an apostrophe, the George from before her mother died says.
I do not give a fuck about whether some site on the internet attends to grammatical correctness, the George from after says.
That before and after thing is about mourning, is what people keep saying. They keep talking about how grief has stages. There's some dispute about how many stages of grief there are. There are three, or five, or some people say seven.
It's quite like the songwriter actually couldn't be bothered to think of words. Maybe he was in one of the three, five or seven stages of mourning too. Stage nine (or twenty three or a hundred and twenty three or ad infinitum, because nothing will ever not be like this again): in this stage you will no longer be bothered with whether songwords mean anything. In fact you will hate almost all songs.
But George has to find a song to which you can do this specific dance.
It being so apparently contradictory and meaningless is no doubt a bonus. It will be precisely why the song sold so many copies and was such a big deal at the time. People like things not to be too meaningful.
Okay, I'm imagining, George in the passenger seat last May in Italy says at exactly the same time as George at home in England the following January stares at the meaninglessness of the words of an old song. Outside the car window Italy unfurls round and over them so hot and yellow it looks like it's been sandblasted. In the back Henry snuffles lightly, his eyes closed, his mouth open. The band of the seatbelt is over his forehead because he is so small.
You're an artist, her mother says, and you're working on a project with a lot of other artists. And everybody on the project is getting the same amount, salary-wise. But you believe that what you're doing is worth more than everyone on the project, including you, is getting paid. So you write a letter to the man who's commissioned the work and you ask him to give you more money than everyone else is getting.
Am I worth more? George says. Am I better than the other artists?
Does that matter? her mother says. Is that what matters?
Is it me or is it the work that's worth more? George says.
Good. Keep going, her mother says.
Is this real? George says. Is it hypothetical?
Does that matter? her mother says.
