How to be both

Title:

How to be both

Author:

Smith, Ali, 1962-

ISBN:

9780375424106

Personal Author:

Smith, Ali, 1962-

Edition:

First United States edition.

Publication Information:

New York : Pantheon Books, [2014]

Physical Description:

371 pages ; 22 cm

Abstract:

"The brilliant Booker-nominated novel from one of our finest authors: How to Be Both is a daring, inventive tale that intertwines the stories of a defiant Renaissance painter and a modern teenage girl. How can one be both--near and far, past and present, male and female? In Ali Smith's new novel, two extraordinary characters inhabit the spaces between categories. In one half of the book, we follow the story of Francescho del Cossa, a Renaissance painter in fifteenth-century Italy who assumes a duel identity, living as both a man and a woman. In the novel's other half, George, a contemporary English teenage girl, is in mourning after the death of her brilliant, rebellious mother. As she struggles to fill the void in her life, George finds her thoughts circling again and again around a whimsical trip she and her mother once made to Italy, to see a certain Renaissance fresco... These two stories call out to each other in surprising and deeply resonant ways to form a veritable literary double-take, bending the conventions of genre, storytelling, and our own preconceptions"-- Provided by publisher.

Subject Term:

Artists -- Italy -- History -- 15th century -- Fiction.

Art, Italian -- 15th century -- Fiction.

Gender identity -- Fiction.

Teenage girls -- Fiction.

Genre:

Historical fiction.

Document ID:

SD_ILS:2185804

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Library	Collection	Collection	Call Number	Status
Searching... Beale Memorial Library (Kern Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction	FIC SMITH ALI	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Fig Garden Branch (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	SMITH AL How	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Hanford Branch Library (Kings Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	FIC SMITH	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Lemoore Branch Library (Kings Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	FIC SMITH	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Reedley Branch Library (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	SMITH AL How	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Ridgecrest Branch Library (Kern Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction	FIC SMITH ALI	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Visalia Library (Tulare Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Fiction Area	FIC SMITH ALI	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

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.

Author Notes

Ali Smith was born in 1962 in Inverness. She is a Scottish writer. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD. She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Following this she became a full-time writer[4] and now writes for The Guardian, The Scotsman, and the Times Literary Supplement.

In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Smith was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literature. Her short story colection includes: Free Love and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, and The First Person and Other Stories. Her novels include: Like, Hotel World, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy, There But For The, and How to Be Both. She was short listed for the Folio Prize 2015. She won the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction for her novel How to be Both.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (6)

Publisher's Weekly Review

British author Smith (There but for The), a playful, highly imaginative literary iconoclast, surpasses her previous efforts in this inventive double novel that deals with gender issues, moral questions, the mystery of death, the value of art, the mutability of time, and several other important topics. Two books coexist under the same title, each presenting largely the same material arranged differently and with different emphases; which narrative one reads first depends on chance, as different copies of the book have been printed with different opening chapters. In one version, the androgynous adolescent character George (for Georgia) is mourning the sudden death of her mother following a family trip to Italy, where they viewed a painting by the obscure Renaissance artist Francesco del Cossa. The alternate volume begins with Francesco, recounting stories of the painter's youth and the ongoing creation of a fresco in a palazzo in Ferrara, a process described in vibrant detail. Francesco's secret is disclosed in both sections-teasingly in one, overtly in the other. The narratives are captivating, challenging, and often puzzling, as the prose varies among contemporary vernacular English, archaic 15th-century rhetoric interposed with fragments of poetry, and unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness narration. Clever puns and word games abound. George's mother accurately identifies the subtext when she says, "Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen." Smith's two-in-one novel is a provocative reevaluation of the form. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In this era of extolling genre fiction and the joys of story, Smith's latest novel makes a case for experimental, literary fiction. One half of this daring novel is the mostly conventional tale of a precocious teen struggling with the death of her arty, brilliant mother. George, née Georgia, is still living in a kind of stunned stupor. She sees a school counselor but is mostly helped by her first crush, the alluring H, who starts to pull her out of her shell. The other half of the novel is narrated by the disembodied voice of a fifteenth-century painter caught in the wave-laden air of twentieth-century Britain. As the spirit observes the contemporary world, with its votive tablets (iPhones), she casts back to her own life disguised as a boy in order to practice her art. Along the way, we learn of a teenager's bratty ways with her smart but sometimes overbearing parents, the power politics of Renaissance Italy, the best places to procure blue pigment, and how everyone, everywhere, must come to terms with the passage of time and the grief of loss. And we learn how to be both: male and female, artist and businessperson, rememberer and forgiver, reader of tales and literary adventurer. Lucky us.--Weber, Lynn Copyright 2014 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

By CHRISTOPHER BENFEY SOME BOOKS ARE easier to read than to describe. Ali Smith's sly and shimmering double helix of a novel, "How to Be Both," a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, opens with a flourish, as a ribbon of words unfurls down the page: "Ho this is a mighty twisting thing fast as a fish being pulled by its mouth on a hook if a fish could be fished through a 6-foot wall made of bricks." Momentarily disoriented (who is speaking so breathlessly, and about what exactly?), the reader is about to be pulled through two quite different stories - although they're presented in succession, both are numbered "one" and prefaced by enigmatic images - and invited to fit them together, by hook or by crook. The first section, introduced by a pair of eyes blooming from a flower stem, time-travels back to 15th-century Ferrara, in northern Italy. The narrator is revealed to be a garrulous ghost named Francescho, trapped in some sort of purgatory. Kindred revenants have haunted Smith's highly regarded novel "Hotel World" and her exhilarating hybrid of Gothic fiction and aesthetic theory, "Artful." An ambitious painter, Francescho was hired, centuries ago, to decorate a palace designed, like Kublai Khan's pleasure dome, to banish boredom. Francescho's picaresque adventures - romances with sympathetic prostitutes; a one-night stand with a wandering "infidel"; skirmishes with a tightfisted patron over payment - are incorporated within the dazzling frescos for the palace. Prostitutes become the three Graces; the Moor morphs into a guardian for Aries the ram. Smith has given a piquant twist to these rambunctious proceedings: The audacious (and presumably fictitious) painter turns out to be a woman disguised as a man, her chest tightly bound with linen, and trained by her bricklayer father to succeed in a man's world. If this first section of "How to Be Both" has some of the cavalier brio of Virginia Woolf's gender-bending "Orlando," the second section, prefaced by a schematic image of a security camera, is more like a crime novella unfolding in our modern world of shifting digital identities and N.SA. surveillance. The setting is present-day Cambridge, England - where, we are reminded, in another allusion to the novel's two narrative strands, "DNA history had been made." A precocious teenage girl called George (for "Georgie Girl," though also suggesting those glass-ceiling-shattering Georges, Eliot and Sand) is trying to cope in the aftermath of her mother's senseless death, at 50, from an allergic reaction to a common antibiotic. George's mother, Carol Martineau (the name recalls the 19th-century women's rights activist Harriet Martineau), is an influential economist of pronounced leftist views. With complementary degrees in art history and women's studies, she is also an "Internet guerrilla," designing "subverts" (as opposed to adverts, or advertisements) that pop up on web pages to protest, say, the low number of women enrolled at the Slade School of Art. One of her "most retweeted Subverts" updates Auden: "Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen." Outed from anonymity three years before her death by persons unknown, Martineau suspects that the British intelligence services have been monitoring her - or, as one of George's friends jokes, "minotauring" her - for her subversive activities. A mysterious woman who calls herself Lisa Goliard, and introduces herself as a fellow artist, seems to be tailing her. Martineau, meanwhile, is pursuing her own interests in politically motivated art. She is so fiercely drawn to a reproduction of a fresco painting in an art magazine, depicting a gorgeous dark-skinned man in rags, that she yanks George and her younger brother, Henry, from school and takes them straight to Ferrara. There they spend a lot of time in the Palazzo Schifanoia (a name Martineau translates as "the palace of escaping from boredom"), where the painting is on display. It is at this point that the some -assembly-required aspects of "How to Be Both" come to the fore, as it dawns on the reader (at least on this reader) that the artist who made the picture of the disheveled hunk in rags is the same artist whose ghostly voice was heard in the opening section of the novel. After her mother's death, George takes up the quest as a sort of memorial tribute, aided by her classmate Helena Fisker, a half-Pakistani girl she is falling in love with. They discover that little is known about the artist, now revealed to be the (actual) early Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa. 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. The first section of the book, narrated in the artist's voice, may even be a fantasy worked up by George and Helena, since it's suspiciously packed with the argot of today: "cause" for "because" and the schoolgirl aside "Just saying." "Wouldn't it be better if we just imagine him talking like we do?" George asks Helena, as they assemble a class presentation on Cossa. If readers don't already feel a bit lost in narrative complexity, like so many minotaurs wandering in their own maze, there's yet another twist. Pantheon has issued two different versions of "How to Be Both," so some readers will begin the book with George's story and others will begin with Francescho's. My own advice, if your mystery threshold is low, is to start with George. That way, you'll learn a great deal about Francesco del Cossa before you're flung into his/her sometimes confusing memories. Readers might also keep an iPad open to photographs of Cossa's frescoes, and to his astonishing paintings of St. Vincent Ferrer in the National Gallery in London and St. Lucy in the National Gallery in Washington. Poor Lucy, martyred by having her eyes gouged out, is the source of those strange eye-flowers that open the Ferrara section. Smith has delved deeply into Cossa's shadowy life and enigmatic work. But she's less interested in astrological arcana, which scholars like Aby Warburg have identified as keys to the meaning of the fresco cycle in Ferrara, than in the wondrous immediacy of Cossa's human figures (think of a French book of hours twinned with Botticelli). She is particularly interested in the letter, much discussed by art historians, that Cossa wrote to the Duke of Ferrara complaining that he was being paid unfairly, by the square yard rather than for his skill. It has been suggested that Cossa painted part of his own face - his alert eyes and wavy hair - into a picture of the duke dispensing justice, as though to cast doubt, subversively, on whether justice had indeed been done in his case. If this is Cossa's face, it certainly does look androgynous. "Male or female? It can't be both," George tells her mother, who replies: "Who says? Why must it?" 'Art makes nothing happen,' one character writes, 'in a way that makes something happen.' CHRISTOPHER BENFEY teaches English at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author, among other books, of "Degas in New Orleans" and "A Summer of Hummingbirds."

Guardian Review

Women's prize for fiction chair of judges Shami Chakrabarti says 'this is not a good book, this is a great book' Weaving together the stories of a teenage girl in modern-day Cambridge and a 15th-century Italian artist, Ali Smith's How to Be Both has won the Baileys women's prize for fiction, with chair of judges Shami Chakrabarti describing it as a work that will still be read in 100 years. Already the winner of prizes including the Costa novel award and the Goldsmiths, and shortlisted for the Man Booker, Smith's novel beat a strong shortlist to win the [pound]30,000 award on Wednesday evening. Intended to celebrate "excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from throughout the world", the Baileys prize, formerly known as the Orange, has been won in the past by Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Zadie Smith for On Beauty. "I think she is a literary genius," said Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty. "I haven't felt that way about reading since I was doing my English A-levels. It reminded me of what it felt like reading Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, all of the greats ... that this is not a good book, this is a great book, and people are going to be reading it long after I'm dead." How to Be Both is a split narrative, and half of its copies were printed with the story of the teenage girl, George, whose mother has recently died, first. The other copies begin with the story of Francesco del Cossa, an artist in 15th-century Ferrara who in Smith's story is born a girl but raised as a man. In a statement, Chakrabarti called How to Be Both a "tender, brilliant and witty novel of grief, love, sexuality and shape-shifting identity". She added: "The way she has the ancient and the modern, the high art and the references to classical art, but also the contemporary nature of the story, and the universal themes of grief, loss and gender ... it's all so effortless ... there's also really contemporary stuff like pornography, technology and surveillance." Chakrabarti said she had read How to Be Both both ways -- with George's perspective first, and then with Francesco's. "I think if I were advising somebody, and this is probably deeply controversial and Ali and her publisher will probably be very cross with me, I think the best way in is to read the modern story first. But others would disagree." This year's Baileys judging panel also included Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, the columnist Grace Dent, the novelist and winner of the inaugural Orange prize in 1996 Helen Dunmore, and Channel 4 news presenter Cathy Newman. Chakrabarti said the panel "went round the houses" to choose Smith as their eventual winner from a shortlist that also included Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests -- the bookies' favourite -- Rachel Cusk's Outline, Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, Kamila Shamsie's A God in Every Stone and Laline Paull's debut The Bees. "It wasn't easy," she said. "But in the end How To Be Both was a very popular choice." Smith, who was born in Inverness, is the author of four collections of short stories and six novels, including the Booker and Orange-shortlisted Hotel World, and the Whitbread prize-winning The Accidental. She is critically acclaimed, but Chakrabarti hoped that the Baileys win would bring her work to a wider audience. "In my heart I believe she will be read in 100 years' time, but I want her to be really broadly read now," she said. The women's prize for fiction was set up after researchers led by the novelist Kate Mosse found that by 1992, only 10% of novelists shortlisted for the Booker had been women. In 1991, not a single female author was shortlisted for the prize. The award has been described as "sexist" by the novelist AS Byatt, who said that it "assumes there is a feminine subject matter -- which I don't believe in". But Chakrabarti called new research from the novelist Nicola Griffith, which found that a novel is more likely to win a literary award if it is about a man, "vindication of the role of the prize". Looking at the subject matter of the winners of six major literary awards, including the Booker and the Pulitzer, Griffith found the majority, even if written by women, were told from the point of view of men or boys. None of the 15 Pulitzer winners was told wholly from a female perspective, she wrote, while between 2000 and 2014 the Booker has been won by nine books by men about men, three by women about men, two by women about women, and one by a woman about both. "Certainly the results argue for women's perspectives being considered uninteresting or unworthy. Women seem to have literary cooties," Griffith has written. "Women's stories and their characters are not being celebrated enough in modern publishing," agreed Chakrabarti. "Women are great readers as well as great writers and understandably they want their stories to be told." Gender injustice, she added, is still the "greatest injustice on the planet". "There's a lot of work to be done, and a lot of stories to be told, and stories are what I believe change the world more than anything," she said. How to be both by Ali Smith (Penguin, [pound]8.99). To order a copy for [pound]6.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of [pound]1.99. - Alison Flood.

Kirkus Review

This adventurous, entertaining writer offers two distinctive takes on youth, art and deathand even two different editions of the book.George, short for Georgia, is 16, whip-smart and seeking ways to honor her dead mother. She vows to dance the twist every day, as her mother did, and to wear something black for a year. She also inhabits a memory, a visit to Italy they made together to view a 15th-century mural her mother admired, and studies a painting by the same artist in London's National Gallery. There, she sees a woman her mother knew and tries to study her as well. In the book's other half, the ghost of the 15th-century artist pushes up through the earth to the present and finds himself in the museum behind George as she studies his painting and just before she spots the mystery woman. The painter's own memories travel through his youth and apprenticeship in a voice utterly different from and as delightful as George's. Hethough gender is bending here tooalso loses his mother when young and learns, like George, of the pain and joy of early friendship. He provides an intimate history for the mural in Italy and offers a very foreign take on George and modern times. The book is being published simultaneously in two editionsone begins with George's half, and the other begins with the painter's, which might be slightly more challenging for its diction and historical trappings. Both are remarkable depictions of the treasures of memory and the rich perceptions and creativity of youth, of how we see what's around us and within us. Comical, insightful and clever, Smith (There But for The, 2011, etc.) builds a thoughtful fun house with her many dualities and then risks being obvious in her structural mischief, but it adds perhaps the perfect frame to this marvelous diptych. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

Smith's (Artful) new novel is made up of two parts-one section called CAMERA, from the point of view of George, a current-day teenager who has just lost her mother, and another section called EYES, from the point of view of a 15th-century artist who seems to have come back to George's time and location as a ghost. With her characteristically playful love of language, Smith has written a book that was designed to be produced in two versions, so the section that comes first depends on a listener's (or reader's) particular copy. What results is a challenging listen, as bits of each story reveal themselves from one section to the next, presuming the listener's intelligence and yielding a pleasure in the puzzle that elevates the book beyond passive entertainment. The theme of art as both charm and balm weaves through both sections and is masterfully balanced with lovingly drawn characters and dialog that rings true regardless of its setting. The choice of a male reader, John Banks, is interesting given the prevalence of female characters and works well given the themes of the book. VERDICT This work is inventive and thought provoking but best of all moving and beautiful as well. ["Smith presents two extraordinary books for the price of one": LJ 11/15/14 starred review of the Pantheon hc.]-Heather Malcolm, Bow, WA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

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. Excerpted from How to Be Both by Ali Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.