How to be Both
Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. How to be Bothis 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...
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Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. How to be Bothis 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.Please Note: This book has a dual structure and can be read in two ways. There are two stories in the book and they can be read in either order.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780241146828 (0241146828)
ASIN: 0241146828
Publish date: 2014-08-28
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Ltd
Pages no: 384
Edition language: English
I love Ali Smith, but this one was a real slow starter for me. The second half is much more engaging than the first, at least it was for me.
"...and how to tell a story, but tell it more than one way at once, and tell another underneath it up-rising through the skin of it) –" This book is a complete and utter but strangely beautiful mess - at least structurally. But then there are different editions to this book and depending on which ...
Requested from NetGalley!
It's hard to put my finger on what makes this novel enjoyable. A contender for the Booker Prize, How to be both is, not surprisingly, a very literary read. The writing style is largely stream of consciousness, and though it is done well, this usually turns me off. The characters are well drawn, but ...
What a mesmerizing novel! At first, I found the writing style odd and difficult to follow, however the story itself was definitely redeeming. The version I got had Francesco's story first, and I enjoyed it so much more, the eeriness of the plot and the fragmentary style totally grabbed my attention ...
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