Review by New York Times Review
"CLEVER" and "inventive." Are these the two readiest adjectives that spring to mind when describing the fiction of Ali Smith? Certainly they are common responses to her work. But as understandable as this may be, I hope to convince you that neither word is quite right. One damns her with faint praise, while the other misapprehends what she actually does. Smith is a trickster, an etymologist, a fantasist, a pun-freak, an ontologist, a transgenrenatrix, an ypomonist - O.K., now I'm just making up words. Smith might approve. A wordsmith to the very smithy of her soul, she is at once deeply playful and deeply serious. And her new book, in which she tugs at God's sleeve, ruminates on clowns, shoplifts used books, dabbles in Greek and palavers with the dead, is a stunner. "Artful" consists of four talks Smith delivered last winter at Oxford University, the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature. But don't slink off to the next review just yet; these are like no lectures you've ever encountered. Part ghost story, part love story, part mystery, part ode, they weave a narrative that feels more urgent, more naked than academia commonly allows. This is good. Good because exciting; it hooks us. And good because in taking this approach, Smith goes a long way toward restoring the arid subject of comp lit to its more rightful state, something vital and raw. Fittingly, the book starts not with critical distance but within a story. On its opening pages a bereaved narrator addresses her dead lover while dragging an armchair across the room. She's moving the chair because she wants better light to read by. Take note: we begin not with reading, but with disturbing the furniture. No small task, it leaves the narrator out of breath, the floorboards gouged and the rugs "all skewy." Once settled into her new position, she declares, "Yes, the light was much better here." This is the gist, the pith of Ali Smith. She does not invent the new so much as rearrange the known. Often this entails flouting the rules: of grammar and spelling, of propriety and convention. And flout them she does, without apology and with a blessed disregard for neatness. On the face of it, "Artful" is organized in suitably Oxfordian fashion. Its four sections are called "On Time," "On Form," "On Edge" and "On Offer and on Reflection," titles you can intone with due solemnity while stroking an imaginary beard. But their contents are hardly what you would expect First there's that barmy narrator, yammering away to her dead lover as if she doesn't even realize she's supposed to be delivering a lecture. Then the dead lover herself emerges, her eyes black and empty like "cut coals," and she's weirdly disruptive: emptying a mug of tea on the floor, stealing things (the television remote, a pair of pliers, a little onyx owl) and - odder still - visibly crumbling, trailing rubble and grit in her wake and giving off such a smell that the neighbors complain. What on earth has this to do with comp lit? Brutally, beautifully, Smith never explains. Instead, she forces us to experience. All literature should be taught this way. Reading "Artful," we feel grief, bafflement, irritation, pleasure, amusement, helplessness and the joy of intermittent revelation. We feel what literature - or "Litter-ature!" as Smith at one point gleefully riffs - having drawn from life, delivers to our lives. The dead lover, who seems to have forgotten a great many words and whose own speech is speckled with gibberish, turns out to have been a scholar. Indeed, the very scholar whose uncompleted notes constitute the bulk of the book's literary references, which are so copious and catholic it seems ridiculous to try to provide even a suggestion of their scope. Suffice it to say that they range from Ovid and Dickens to Saramago and Szymborska, all the way up to Beyoncé. We learn the narrator's own stock-intrade is not books but trees (whose pulp is the literal stuff, the pith, of books), and trees appear thickly in this volume, whether the narrator is telling us how a broken apple tree may "right itself and have its fruit again" or recalling a story her lover told, about Cézanne throwing a painting of apples out the window, where it lodged "in the branches of a fruit tree." Smith establishes these doubled pairs of the dead and the living (the lover and the narrator; paintings and trees) in order to explore the tension between them. "There'll always be a dialogue, an argument," she writes, between form and content, art and life. Then she questions whether such a dialogue is truly possible. "Maybe the languages of underworld and overworld can't really meet." Later still, she suggests that the desire to meet is the seed of all artfulness, and some kind of meeting its inevitable fruit. "Even things which seem separate and finished are infinitely connected and will infinitely connect," she remarks of a William Carlos Williams poem. "This connection happens as soon as you let it, as soon as you engage - as soon as you even attempt to engage." In other words, though the languages of disparate worlds prove imperfectly compatible, our impulse to express, receive, share may itself construct the bridge we seek. "Art is always an exchange, like love," she writes, and the exchange we desire isn't limited to other mortals. In a wonderful passage on a Tove Jansson story, Smith says that "maybe all offering (and by extension the profanation we call art) is about the gulf between human and divine, and about getting some kind of attention from God, at least getting some kind of dialogue going." That last bit, complete with the slightly petulant "at least," is quintessential Smith: salty, not overly optimistic, appealingly stubborn about going for what she wants. And what she wants, I think, is not to be hailed or derided as "clever" (is she intimating as much when her narrator at one point disparages the cleverness of "know it all" trees?). Nor does she aim to please. "Artful" is a difficult, demanding book, contrarian in nature, a meditation on time that sidesteps the linear, a disquisition on form that refuses to conform. Portions left me bewildered - although in books, as in friendship, that isn't necessarily bad. A degree of incomprehension can be stimulating, challenging, an incentive to return. As Smith says, "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." I suspect what the great rogue Smith actually wants is contained within a line she quotes from a sonnet by Michelangelo. "The greatest artist does not have any concept which a single piece of marble does not itself contain within its excess, though only a hand that obeys the intellect can discover it." To be, of all things, obedient - not to convention or expectation but to the workings of the mind and the burning need to discover, to meet. Here, as in all her work, Smith gives the impression not of inventing but of rising up to meet something that's already there. Smith's lectures on European comparative literature are like no lectures you've ever encountered. Leah Hager Cohen teaches writing at Lesley University and the College of the Holy Cross.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 3, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
As author of the 2012 Weidenfeld Lectures on Comparative Literature, Smith finds inspiration in Milosz's conviction that The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person. Indeed, Smith daringly splits herself into two captivating voices: that of a Dickens-loving bibliophile and that of her former lover's ghost. Because that ghost shares the bibliophile's passion for literature, the dialogue evolves into a wide-ranging reflection on how novelists invent reality, how poets cross-fertilize the literary flowers of their predecessors, how filmmakers transform the screen into a dream that absorbs their audience. As unpredictable as an undead vagrant, this scintillating conversation showcases Smith's own gifts as a creative writer. But it also reminds readers of how great literature of Shakespeare, Lawrence, Hopkins, Ovid, Plath, Rilke, and Flaubert requires them to reorient their line of vision. Nothing Smith shows her reader forces such reorientation more than violating conventional boundaries, often in dangerous ways. These most unlecture-like of lectures deliver the thrill of perilous border crossings.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Ali Smith delivered a collection of lectures in 2012 on European literature at St. Anne's College, Oxford, that are presented here through the first-person voice of a fictional woman confronted by the physical presence of her husband, despite his death. The lectures weave together different times, movements, and elements of the arts to consider not only what art is, but also the purposes it serves and the ways it moves people. With a Scottish accent that simultaneously reveals pain for the passing husband and celebrates life and art, Smith adds complexity and meaning to the book through her narration. Her shifts from soulful to smiling can occur over the course of just a few words, and she uses her tone and timing to the fullest effect in these moments. Her soft but inviting voice seduces listeners and keeps their attention throughout. A Penguin Press hardcover. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Toward the beginning of the first of the four lectures that make up Smith's new book, she quotes Matthew Reynolds on Sappho, saying, "The longing in the fragments was doubled by a longing felt by readers for the fragments themselves to be made whole," adding, "It is the act of making it up, from the combination of what we've got and what we haven't, that makes the human, makes the art...." Fitting then, that Smith's book is made up of four unfinished literary lectures. Everyone from Michelangelo to Beyonce is referenced, as our narrator wanders through days and thoughts in a dense collage of words, haunted by the lover who is gone. There is grief here but also a joyful spirit at work in the form of wordplay and appreciation for the transformative power of art. Smith reads the audio version, and while American readers may at first be challenged by her quick speech and Scottish accent, there is a moving intimacy to her narration. Verdict Readers of serious literature and poetry will find this a rich, worthy listen.-Heather Malcolm, Bow, WA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Acclaimed Scottish novelist Smith (There but for the, 2011, etc.) considers the places where art and life intersect, sometimes collide and meld. The guide on this extraordinary journey is a woman who, after "twelvemonth and a day" of mourning, sees her dead lover before her. She offers the apparition tea and begins to ask questions, but the responses are garbled and confused. Smith's storytelling facility and critical eye are evident in the fact that this ongoing conversation--adapted from a series of lectures at St. Anne's College, Oxford--about time, memory, loss, longing, love, art and nature stirs the mind and heart all the more because it takes place between the imagination and reality. In the essay "On time," Smith reminds us of Shakespeare's "Devouring Time, Time's pencil, Time's fell and injurious hand, Time's scythe, Time's fickle glass." Even books, she writes, are "tangible pieces of time in our handsthey travel with us, they accompany us from our pasts into our futures." In each of the essays, the woman continues her struggle with grief and letting go. Her lost lover returns again and again in an alarming state of increasing decay, and she regrets the failings of her imagination to call up an odorless, less-ragged form. Smith seamlessly connects the narrator's smart, funny, regret-infused observations to an expansive discussion of aesthetics, metaphor, the tension between form and fluidity, what it means to be on the edge in life and art, the power of Oliver Twist (in all its forms) and Alfred Hitchcock movies, and the acts of giving and taking. On this quest, the author goes into the "margins that burn with the energy of edit" to shed light on the human spirit through art. But does the grieving woman ever let go of her lover's spirit and move on? It's all beautifully revealed. A soulful intellectual inquiry and reflection on life and art, artfully done.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
