5/22/2023 0 Comments Autumn by ali smith reviews![]() Mostly, though, we encounter her in the company of Daniel Gluck, her 101-year-old former neighbour, who is sleeping out the last of his days at The Maltings Care Providers Plc. We are dropped down into brief vignettes of her early life with a hard, hedonistic mother we see her good-humouredly battling bureaucracy trying to get a passport in the Post Office we enter her visionary, art-filled dreams. She’s a typical Smith heroine - questioning, fragile, still bearing traces of the precocious child she was. It’s a brilliant and unsettling conceit, leaving you marvelling that writing this good could have come so fast.Įlisabeth Demand is a 32-year-old “no-fixed-hours casual contract lecturer at a university in London”. ![]() ![]() I looked up at one point when I was reading, and realised that the time of the novel had just overtaken real-world time. The first of a quartet of season-themed novels, it begins with the Brexit vote and spools forwards in time (and backwards, and sideways, as is Smith’s wont) towards November 2016. ![]() ![]() Here’s an old story so new that it’s still in the middle of happening, writing itself right now with no knowledge of where or how it’ll end.” This sentence, two-thirds of the way through Autumn, Ali Smith’s eighth novel, goes some way to explaining the organising logic of this impressionistic and intricate book. ![]()
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