How to Be Both (Smith)

How to Be Both 
Ali Smith, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375424106


Summary
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. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Inverness, Scotland, UK
• Education—University of Abderdeen; Cambridge University
• Awards—Whitbread Award  
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, England


Ali Smith is a Scottish writer who won the Whitbread Award in 2005 for her novel, The Accidental. To date, she has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times and the Orange Prize twice.

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 Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She then became a full-time writer and now writes for The Guardian, Scotsman, and Times Literary Supplement. She lives in Cambridge, England, with her partner filmmaker Sarah Wood.

Works
Smith is the author of several works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World (2001), which was short-listed for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize in 2001. She won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002. ♦  The Accidental (2007) won the Whitbread Award and was also short-listed for both the Man Booker and Orange Prize.  ♦  Her 2011 novel, There But For The, was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize and named as a Best Book of the Year by both the Washington Post and Boston Globe.  ♦  How to Be Both (2014) was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Her story collections include Free Love, which won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award, and The Whole Story and Other Stories.

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. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/20/2014.)

Book Reviews
Extraordinary.... Warm, funny, subtle, layered, intelligent.... Brilliant.
Spectator (UK)
 

Exuberant, rhapsodic.... Dizzyingly good and so clever that it makes you want to dance.
New Statesman (UK)
 

Dazzling indeed.... Smith has written a radical novel, one that becomes two novels, with discrete meanings . . . Those writers making doomy predictions about the death of the novel should read Smith’s re-imagined novel/s, and take note of the life it contains.
Independent (UK)
 

[A] rich, strong and moving novel.... Ingenious.... A triumph.
Financial Times (UK)
 

Immensely enjoyable.... Inventive and playful, compassionate and sagacious.... Explores the injustices of life but also its delights, including the pleasures of art and the redemptive power of love.
Express (UK)
 

An heir to Virginia Woolf, Ali Smith subtly but surely reinvents the novel.... How to Be Both brims with palpable joy, not only at language, literature and art’s transformative power but at the messy business of being human, of wanting to be more than one kind of person at once.
Telegraph (UK)


(Starred review.) British author Smith...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.... Two books coexist under the same title, each presenting largely the same material arranged differently...a provocative reevaluation of the form.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) This adventurous, entertaining writer offers two distinctive takes on youth, art and death—and even two different editions of the book.... 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 builds a thoughtful fun house with her many dualities.
Kirkus Reviews

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