How to be Both by Ali Smith
Ali Smith’s novels are unlike anything else because they are impassioned, empathic, creatively dynamic, and rigorously playful. A book called How to be both is all about the adaptability of art. It’s a quick-witted, genre-bending debate between forms, times, truths, and fiction that borrows from the fresco style of painting to create an innovative literary double-take. A Renaissance artist from the 1460s exists. There is a youngster who was born in the 1960s. Two stories of love and injustice are woven together into one story where time becomes timeless, the structure becomes playful, knowledge becomes enigmatic, the imaginary becomes real, and all of life’s givens are given a second chance.
How to be Both by Ali Smith
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A beautiful, wise book with poetic writing that might be difficult at times. In reality, there are two volumes about a young English woman who loses her mother suddenly and must deal with the bereavement, growing up, her alcoholic father, her bothersome younger brother, and her conflicted feelings for another teen at her school. The present-day book is about a young woman. She recalls how they communicated, how she may have loved her mother more or been kinder to her, and how she felt when she saw the 15th-century fresco. She also recalls her mother’s surprise journey to Italy to view the fresco.
The literary counterpart of that Escher print of a hand drawing the hand that is drawing it has been created by Ali Smith. Her book could be compared to a diptych in terms of art, which consists of two parallel panels of similar size and subject matter. In her case, two stories from various eras make comments about, mirror, and (in that Escher twist) occasionally even write to each other. An Italian painter from the 15th century who has been transported back in time speaks in the first half as he observes a young person admiring one of the artist’s pieces at a gallery. The artist follows the young person around the city and notices what appear to be obsessional symptoms.
In a scene from the movie How to Be Both, a mother and child debate whether the top of the painting, which the observer sees when looking at a canvas or the underlayer of the painting, which is hidden from view, comes first. The entire urge for self-help, which is so focused on what acts, behaviours, or principles get you to a definite end goal of happiness, is interestingly related to this philosophical question.
The story starts with the spirit of a Renaissance artist observing a young girl deal with her mother’s death. I had to read numerous parts again since the wording is so challenging to understand. While viewing the girl, the ghost narrates her own life, which is slightly intriguing. Her (now deceased) mother, who was intrigued by a fresco the artist painted, connects the little girl to the artist in the novel’s second section about her. The idea that a female artist had to pass herself off as a man in order to be granted the same possibilities as men in her period seems a little outmoded in today’s society.
