Autumn (Smith)

Autumn  (Seasonal Quartet)
Ali Smith, 2016 (U.S., 2017)
Knopf Doubleday
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101969946


Summary
Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

Two old friends—Daniel, a centenarian, and Elisabeth, born in 1984 — look to both the future and the past as the United Kingdom stands divided by a historic, once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand-in-hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.
 
A luminous meditation on the meaning of richness and harvest and worth, Autumn is the first installment of Ali Smith’s Seasonal quartet, and it casts an eye over our own time: Who are we? What are we made of?

Shakespearean jeu d’esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s pop art. Wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories, Autumn is an unforgettable story about aging and time and love — and stories themselves. (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
Ali Smith has a beautiful mind. [Autumn is] unbearably moving in its playful, strange, soulful assessment of what it means to be alive at a somber time.
New York Times


Beautiful, subtle.… Brimming with humanity and bending, despite everything, toward hope.
New York Times Book Review


Delights in puns and lyric reveries. For a book about decline and disintegration, Autumn remains irrepressibly hopeful about life, something "you worked to catch, the intense happiness of an object slightly set apart from you."
Wall Street Journal


Shimmers with wit, melancholy, grief, joy, wisdom, small acts of love and, always, wonder at the seasons.
Boston Globe


Smith regales us with endless wordplay.… Autumn is the first installment of Smith’s ‘Seasonal’ quartet. If this brilliantly inventive and ruminative book is representative of what is to come, then we should welcome Smith’s winter chill whatever the season.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


It is undoubtedly Smith at her best.… This book sets Smith’s complex creative character in stone: puckish yet elegant, angry but comforting. Long may she remain that way.
Times (UK)


Already acknowledged as one of the most inventive novelists writing in Britain today, with her new novel, Autumn, Ali Smith also proves herself to be one of the country’s foremost chroniclers, her finger firmly on the social and political pulse.
Independent (UK)


An ambitious, multi-layered creation.… Smith is convincing as both a 12-year-old girl proud of her new rollerblades and a man living in a care home.… The story is rooted in autumn, and Smith writes lyrically about the changing seasons.… An energising and uplifting story.
Evening Standard (UK)


Proving Smith’s ambition and scope, Autumn is the first in a four-part series (the other titles will be Spring, Winter and Summer).… If the first instalment is anything to go by, the series is destined to become a canon classic.… That Smith has done so with such impressive sleight of hand, and with such expediency, is incredible.
Irish Independent


Smith writes in a liltingly singsong prose that fizzes with exuberant punning and wordplay.… Compellingly contemporary.… [An] appeal to conscience and common humanity—intergenerational, interracial, international — in these deeply worrying times.
Irish Times


Knits together an astonishing array of seemingly disparate subjects.… Free spirits and the lifeforce of art — along with kindness, hope, and a readiness "to be above and beyond the foul even when we’re up to our eyes in it" — are, when you get down to it, what Smith champions in this stirring novel.
NPR


Smith’s novel plays an intimate melody against a broader dissonance, probing the friendship between an art historian and an aging songwriter as they grapple with personal predicaments and a perilous world.
Oprah Magazine


In Britain, Smith has won the Whitbread, the Goldsmiths, and the Costa prizes, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker three times. American readers ought to be better acquainted with her genius.… This ambitious four-novel sequence will end with summer and Smith in her element. If we are all very lucky, perhaps the world will catch up with her there, too.
Slate


[A] splendid free-form novel — the first in a seasonally themed tetralogy.… Eschewing traditional structure and punctuation, the novel charts a wild course through uncertain terrain, an approach that excites and surprises in equal turn.… Smith, always one to take risks, sees all of them pay off yet again.
Publishers Weekly


At the heart of Man Booker Prize nominee Smith’s new novel is the charming friendship between a lonely girl and a kind older man who offers her a world of culture. This novel of big ideas and small pleasures is enthusiastically recommended.
Library Journal


A girl's friendship with an older neighbor stands at the center of this multifaceted meditation on aging, art, love, and affection.… Smith has a gift for drawing a reader into whatever world she creates.… [Autumn is] compelling in its emotional and historical freight, its humor, and keen sense of creativity and loss.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. How is the story rooted in autumn? Why do you think Ali Smith decided to write a quartet of books about the seasons, the changing of the seasons, and the passing of time? Why did she start with autumn?

2. How is the book obsessed with time? "Time travel is real. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute" (p. 175).

3. Ali Smith stated in an interview with her British publishers:

The way we live, in time, is made to appear linear by the chronologies that get applied to our lives by ourselves and others, starting at birth, ending at death, with a middle where we’re meant to comply with some or other of life’s usual expectations, in other words the year to year day to day minute to minute moment to moment fact of time passing. But we’re time-­containers, we hold all our diachrony, our pasts and our futures (and also the pasts and futures of all the people who made us and who in turn we’ll help to make) in every one of our consecutive moments / minutes / days / years, and I wonder if our real energy, our real history, is cyclic in continuance and at core, rather than consecutive.

Do you agree with the author that our history and thus our stories, individual and collective, are cyclical rather than chronological? Discuss this description of time.

4. The novel proceeds with flashbacks interspersed with the present rather than in a consecutive, chronological narrative. Why? And how does this connect with the author’s view on how we perceive time?

5. Describe the friendship between Elisabeth and Daniel and how it evolves through time and the novel. How is their relationship at the heart of the novel? Why does he always ask her, "What are you reading?"

6. How does their friendship revolve around stories, art, and literature?

7. What is the novel saying about creativity and creating and about witnessing and experiencing art and literature? And what is the novel saying about nature and our interactions with it?

8. Describe the relationship of Elisabeth and her mother. How does the relationship blossom by the end of the novel? Why does it change?

9. In Autumn, what is the importance of art and the human connections that come out of art and creativity? Give some examples.

10. How is Autumn collage-­like and thus similar to the art of Pauline Boty?

11. Why do you think the author has chosen this real-­life artist as a character and inspiration in this novel? What do Boty and her vision and art represent for Daniel and Elisabeth and how does she connect to the themes of Autumn?

12. Continuing with the collage theme, discuss Daniel’s wordplay and intermixing of college and collage. What do you think of the idea of college being a collage of different classes and experiences?

13. Why does the book open with a reference to Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and then there’s a longer reference to a divided country filled with polarities: "All across the country, people felt legitimized. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked" (p. 60)? What are the two cities or polarities in the novel?

14. Smith alludes to and mentions many other authors and literary works as well: William Shakespeare, John Keats, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell. Discuss them and why they are relevant to this novel.

15. Many reviewers have called this novel the first post-­Brexit novel. What does this mean? How has England changed after the Brexit vote? How does this tie into the United States’ 2016 election, or does it?

16. Find instances of tree imagery throughout the novel and discuss the various descriptions. How do the imagery and arboreal allusions connect with autumn and the changing seasons theme?

17. What is the novel saying about storytelling? "There’s always, there’ll always be, more story. That’s what story is" (p. 193).

18. Daniel tells Elisabeth, "So, always try to welcome people into the home of your story" (p. 119). Does this show that our stories don’t belong to us alone? Do you think this is a call by the author for inclusion and diversity rather than building fences and keeping people out?

19. Why doesn’t Daniel tell Elisabeth about his experience during World War II? "I know nothing, nothing really, about anyone" (p. 171). Can we ever know everything about another person?

20. How does Autumn fuse the present with the past?

21. What is the importance of politics and the effects of politics on the layperson in this novel? What does the fence and defying the fence represent?

22. Both Daniel and Elisabeth’s mother talk about lying to and being lied to by Daniel: "The power of the lie… Always seductive to the powerless" (p. 114). Elisabeth’s mother: "I’m tired of people not caring whether they’re being lied to any more" (p. 57). What are both of them talking about? And what is the connection of lies and truth in the novel?

23. On what note, despair or hope, does the novel end and why?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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