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fetzpahs2002's review against another edition
3.0
An early effort and dabbling in historical fantasy. Very non-cohesive with little connection made between the characters and storylines.
cillehh's review against another edition
challenging
funny
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
4.0
Smith, as always, is witty and full of (life)stories. Loved the different perspectives, but it took me some time to finish the book so I lost track of different characters. I’ll have to read the book again some time.
teresatumminello's review against another edition
3.0
If you're new to Ali Smith and think you might like her (I can easily see that she's not everyone's 'thing'), read her brilliant short stories, or the novels [b:Hotel World|123036|Hotel World|Ali Smith|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348587043s/123036.jpg|118455] or [b:The Accidental|127630|The Accidental|Ali Smith|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1425382189s/127630.jpg|449610] first. I loved those.
And if you have read all of Ali Smith, as I have, I think you will find that this book is merely okay, even tedious near the end, and that maybe instead it could've been another brilliant short story. Because what feels like excessive padding and way too much language-play (especially with the last section belonging to the precocious 9-year old girl, Brooke, though when she's seen from others' viewpoints, she's a great character) ends up not meaning much at all, which is uncharacteristic of Ali Smith's other work.
What I did end up liking (as with the rest of her work) is the way the story ends, the way it folds upon itself, much like the tight, origami-like paper airplane described in the very first section of the book. The ending led me back to this beginning, but, unfortunately, on this revisit I didn't find as much there as I hoped I would.
And if you have read all of Ali Smith, as I have, I think you will find that this book is merely okay, even tedious near the end, and that maybe instead it could've been another brilliant short story. Because what feels like excessive padding and way too much language-play (especially with the last section belonging to the precocious 9-year old girl, Brooke, though when she's seen from others' viewpoints, she's a great character) ends up not meaning much at all, which is uncharacteristic of Ali Smith's other work.
What I did end up liking (as with the rest of her work) is the way the story ends, the way it folds upon itself, much like the tight, origami-like paper airplane described in the very first section of the book. The ending led me back to this beginning, but, unfortunately, on this revisit I didn't find as much there as I hoped I would.
aameliawoodd's review against another edition
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
marigolds_and_lavander's review against another edition
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
krimskrams's review against another edition
5.0
i've read all sorts of reviews and it's funny because they all say the novel is about something different. yet none of them are wrong. i think that's when you know a book is really good. this book has such an incredible amount of content there's about 100 themes commented on and somehow discussed to great lengths. now it's my turn to review, except you will see this is barely even a review :)
i'm going to begin with the title and maybe end with the title, we will see where this takes me.
with each word we get a new point of view. and each word is significant to that character's perspective.
THERE BUT FOR THE
in itself the title is 4 simple words. they are important words of course but they don't have much meaning in the way a noun or an adjective does. they aren't crisp, clear words. they're almost periphery words or words that are meant to lead you to the next word. that's what this book feels like. it's what's happening around the central character, who is doing this odd thing. it's these little moments and thoughts that are told through, sure strange, but also almost unimportant people. there's almost a sense of liminal but not really. it's quotidien but it's significant for the mere fact it's been recorded and it's happened, well fictionally but. big things are thought about but not by big people. the fact that the full extent of feelings and emotions and experiences can and are thought about by everyone and anyone, everyday all the time is a fact that can jolt anyone into great euphoria or sheer despair. but the fact is it is a fact and one we do know, just one we don't often think about, and that's what makes this novel so great. it is a piece of art. it moves you to not just one state but many. you feel everything and the characters do too.
to start we have THERE
'there was once a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party.
Anna talks to a man about journalism, he says it can be summarised as 'I was there, there I was', young Miles tells Anna his story about the future starts 'There was once, and there was only once. Once was all there was.' these phrases are almost abstract in their simplicity. is to be there enough? is to be there to care? 'There', presumes a sense of distance, 'there was' even more so, a sense of distance in time itself. 'there was once' is a memory, maybe even a forgotten memory, as is the case with Anna and her memories of young Miles. i saw one review say this book is about happenings, which yes, but arguably all of life and many many books are, ostensibly, about happenings. Brooke asks ‘who’s there?’ There’s a questioning in the word there. Anna basically asks what Miles (in the present, the Miles who locked himself in the spare bedroom of a house in Greenwich during a dinner party) is there (in the spare bedroom) for? but in the end the question asked is what humans are there (on the earth) for? a question that was (in the story's time) and is (in the timeline of the book) later asked by Miles' temporary somewhat partner and May's late daughter, Jennifer. Anna laughs and says Miles is 'making her join in all over again', and we as the reader also feel as though we are 'joining in'. I think this section is about time and it's about humanity's innate curiosity and it's a question of human connection and the importance of humanity. but also about the in between times (Anna's in between jobs, Mile's has temporarily locked himself in this room, in between the rest of his life)
next is BUT
'but would a man in shutting himself in / be asking things to stop or to begin?'
Here we have Mark. With him he carries an extraordinary amount of grief. The very first line of the chapter is his dead mother speaking. Mark is the man who brought Miles to the dinner party as a guest. at that dinner party many of the guests are comically, hyperbolically insufferable. everything is a discussion or debate, one reason 'but' is an apt name for this section. not only that but (haha) Mark seems to change his mind frequently 'but here ... he loses confidence' Art is a big discussion point among the group, and the importance, or unimportance, of it. Mark tells the group about an instance of a time Art (in this case a book) made an impact during Hitler's regime. Hannah, one of the members against Art, immediately makes a joke. 'Mark, shaken, realizes he has just made the terrible mistake of not just seeming to be but actually being sincere.' these outer appearances vs inner confines can merge which, in the wrong company, is completely dismissed. The sentiment even more painful as Mark's mother was Jewish. Jen comments: 'But of course you must have seen some terrible times yourself, Mark, if you were gay before it was legal to be gay, were you?' The reason for Mark's invite is revealed, his sexuality used as a kind of trophy to be collected. She uses but to change the topic of conversation onto what she wants. But is a word of contrast, opposition and juxtaposition as just seen. Long quotation time:
'He thinks about the couple of times he’s brought himself off by watching the free porn on the net: two men on the steps of a blue swimming pool, three men dressed as soldiers in a toilet. Both times he had to go in search of something else on there afterwards to make himself feel less degraded. The second time he had simply typed the words something beautiful into the Google images box. Up came a picture of some leaves against the sun. A picture of a blonde photoshop-smooth woman and baby sleeping. A picture of a bird. A picture of Mother Teresa. A picture of a modernist building made of shiny metal. A picture of two people sticking knives into their own hands. Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google. He surveys the strewn table. Sure, there’s a certain charm to being able to look up and watch Eartha Kitt singing Old Fashioned Millionaire in 1957 at three in the morning or Hayley Mills singing a song about femininity from an old Disney film. But the charm is a kind of deception about a whole new way of feeling lonely, a semblance of plenitude but really a new level of Dante’s inferno, a zombie-filled cemetery of spurious clues, beauty, pathos, pain, the faces of puppies, women and men from all over the world tied up and wanked over in site after site, a great sea of hidden shallows. More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities.'
just read it. I feel I don't have to say much about it. It's all there for you, yourself, to enjoy.
there are many times the sentences in Mark's section start with the word but. we were taught all the way back in childhood that this was against the rules. But but connotes rule breaking anyways. Miles tells Mark 'the thing I particularly like about the word but, now that I think about it, is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting.' So but doesn't always have to come with hate, but can also be full of curiosity and thought. being sincere can instead be wonderful if around the right people. The idea of changing your mind is so human. Other animals, most of the time, can't change their mind. If they change their mind they're dead.
FOR
'for there was no more talking out loud now, and there wouldn’t be neither, not for any money, not for anybody.'
with age, supposedly, comes wisdom. (for my sake let's hope so). there is definitely wisdom within May. there's also more grief, but grief that has been accepted, is grappled with less now, or maybe less is the wrong word. it's grappled with differently. there's more of an understanding that grief is love reshaped. unfortunately for the most part May's wisdom is forever internal, as she is cognitively and physically slowly failing. She has lost her husband and she lost her daughter, Jennifer, when she was 15. Even she, with the wisdom that comes with age, and the new way of seeing that she, and the rabbit she shot, has seemed to have gained on the precipice of death, cannot answer what it was all for. what love or grief or humankind is all for. she can't even really answer why the boy (Miles) comes every year on the anniversary of Jennifer's death.
but maybe for is the wrong word. maybe it isn't for anything at all. and so she dies and so we all do eventually.
finally THE
'the fact is, London might not always be here!'
and so the story is cyclical, as the first chapter (which does not start with the first word in the title) starts with 'the fact is' and now we know it came from the precocious 10yr old Brooke. The is a word that feels like it should start, and yet it ends, although it kind of also started, but mostly ends this book. Brooke is, i believe, obsessed with knowing. She is obsessed with knowledge and she is obsessed with history. she's still just a child though. 'The fact is, every tree that ever lived or lives has a history just like that tree has. It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don’t know. The fact is, history is actually all sorts of things nobody knows about.' here is the truth. everything and every person who has ever existed is important as they are history or the present or the future and without them there is nothing or something would be completely different, even if that something is just that there was one less person in the world. effectively Brooke answers the philosophical debate of if a tree falls and there's no one around to hear it...? with a simple yes. it still falls. it's still happened, a sound was still made. Brooke is too young to have grief to deal with and yet she does. She has this pressure of history. Of all the people who have ever died because of some historical event. there's almost a guilt that comes with enjoying history because of all the bad that has happened, all the horrible. 'So that is what history is, people and places that disappear, or are beheaded, or get damaged or nearly do, and things and places and people that get tortured and burned and so on. But this does not mean that history is not the unseen things as well.'
'Brooke is thinking about a joke about Madonna taking her babies that she has adopted from Africa to Oxford Street so they can be reunited with the clothes they made before she adopted them. It is funny, the joke, when you think about the babies shaking hands with say a cardigan with no hand in it, ... but it also makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man in the park with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume it’s there anyway.'
she questions presumptions. the voice of a child comes through as, despite her immense intelligence, emotionally she's not fully matured. she feels 'strange in her stomach'. i think many readers were probably guilty of assuming Brooke herself was white until she was introduced as Brooke Bayoude or her father's race became a topic of conversation during the dinner party. Brooke compares this with the assumption of 'the' being in a headline. She records the history of Miles' seclusion as a history, which at the end of the day is the same as memory. and memory is time mixed with feeling. so is history just a record of what humans care about? except as shown by the thoughts on assumptions some humans come to mind first. the humans in power, the humans who win, often with violence, the humans with money. but the unseen still matter there is someone or at least was still care for them. people like brooke will always care for them.
so in the end, and this is always how i conclude all art i write about, this novel, i think, is about curiosity and humanity itself. every theme is so human, from music to grief to identity to social interaction to happenings to history to art to life to death to, even, technology. maybe im just drawn to art about humanity though or maybe its impossible for a human to write something not imbued with humanity. and maybe that in itself is beautiful and tells us something. because it's really very special to be human. and this is why the grace of god is missing.
by the grace of Miles. he is omnipresent, created a narrative, above everyone (literally). he has brought the characters together and now they are thinking these thoughts because of it. but by the end he is gone. vanished. Left the throngs of people to blind faith. similar to the author themselves.
i'm going to begin with the title and maybe end with the title, we will see where this takes me.
with each word we get a new point of view. and each word is significant to that character's perspective.
THERE BUT FOR THE
in itself the title is 4 simple words. they are important words of course but they don't have much meaning in the way a noun or an adjective does. they aren't crisp, clear words. they're almost periphery words or words that are meant to lead you to the next word. that's what this book feels like. it's what's happening around the central character, who is doing this odd thing. it's these little moments and thoughts that are told through, sure strange, but also almost unimportant people. there's almost a sense of liminal but not really. it's quotidien but it's significant for the mere fact it's been recorded and it's happened, well fictionally but. big things are thought about but not by big people. the fact that the full extent of feelings and emotions and experiences can and are thought about by everyone and anyone, everyday all the time is a fact that can jolt anyone into great euphoria or sheer despair. but the fact is it is a fact and one we do know, just one we don't often think about, and that's what makes this novel so great. it is a piece of art. it moves you to not just one state but many. you feel everything and the characters do too.
to start we have THERE
'there was once a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party.
Anna talks to a man about journalism, he says it can be summarised as 'I was there, there I was', young Miles tells Anna his story about the future starts 'There was once, and there was only once. Once was all there was.' these phrases are almost abstract in their simplicity. is to be there enough? is to be there to care? 'There', presumes a sense of distance, 'there was' even more so, a sense of distance in time itself. 'there was once' is a memory, maybe even a forgotten memory, as is the case with Anna and her memories of young Miles. i saw one review say this book is about happenings, which yes, but arguably all of life and many many books are, ostensibly, about happenings. Brooke asks ‘who’s there?’ There’s a questioning in the word there. Anna basically asks what Miles (in the present, the Miles who locked himself in the spare bedroom of a house in Greenwich during a dinner party) is there (in the spare bedroom) for? but in the end the question asked is what humans are there (on the earth) for? a question that was (in the story's time) and is (in the timeline of the book) later asked by Miles' temporary somewhat partner and May's late daughter, Jennifer. Anna laughs and says Miles is 'making her join in all over again', and we as the reader also feel as though we are 'joining in'. I think this section is about time and it's about humanity's innate curiosity and it's a question of human connection and the importance of humanity. but also about the in between times (Anna's in between jobs, Mile's has temporarily locked himself in this room, in between the rest of his life)
next is BUT
'but would a man in shutting himself in / be asking things to stop or to begin?'
Here we have Mark. With him he carries an extraordinary amount of grief. The very first line of the chapter is his dead mother speaking. Mark is the man who brought Miles to the dinner party as a guest. at that dinner party many of the guests are comically, hyperbolically insufferable. everything is a discussion or debate, one reason 'but' is an apt name for this section. not only that but (haha) Mark seems to change his mind frequently 'but here ... he loses confidence' Art is a big discussion point among the group, and the importance, or unimportance, of it. Mark tells the group about an instance of a time Art (in this case a book) made an impact during Hitler's regime. Hannah, one of the members against Art, immediately makes a joke. 'Mark, shaken, realizes he has just made the terrible mistake of not just seeming to be but actually being sincere.' these outer appearances vs inner confines can merge which, in the wrong company, is completely dismissed. The sentiment even more painful as Mark's mother was Jewish. Jen comments: 'But of course you must have seen some terrible times yourself, Mark, if you were gay before it was legal to be gay, were you?' The reason for Mark's invite is revealed, his sexuality used as a kind of trophy to be collected. She uses but to change the topic of conversation onto what she wants. But is a word of contrast, opposition and juxtaposition as just seen. Long quotation time:
'He thinks about the couple of times he’s brought himself off by watching the free porn on the net: two men on the steps of a blue swimming pool, three men dressed as soldiers in a toilet. Both times he had to go in search of something else on there afterwards to make himself feel less degraded. The second time he had simply typed the words something beautiful into the Google images box. Up came a picture of some leaves against the sun. A picture of a blonde photoshop-smooth woman and baby sleeping. A picture of a bird. A picture of Mother Teresa. A picture of a modernist building made of shiny metal. A picture of two people sticking knives into their own hands. Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google. He surveys the strewn table. Sure, there’s a certain charm to being able to look up and watch Eartha Kitt singing Old Fashioned Millionaire in 1957 at three in the morning or Hayley Mills singing a song about femininity from an old Disney film. But the charm is a kind of deception about a whole new way of feeling lonely, a semblance of plenitude but really a new level of Dante’s inferno, a zombie-filled cemetery of spurious clues, beauty, pathos, pain, the faces of puppies, women and men from all over the world tied up and wanked over in site after site, a great sea of hidden shallows. More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities.'
just read it. I feel I don't have to say much about it. It's all there for you, yourself, to enjoy.
there are many times the sentences in Mark's section start with the word but. we were taught all the way back in childhood that this was against the rules. But but connotes rule breaking anyways. Miles tells Mark 'the thing I particularly like about the word but, now that I think about it, is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting.' So but doesn't always have to come with hate, but can also be full of curiosity and thought. being sincere can instead be wonderful if around the right people. The idea of changing your mind is so human. Other animals, most of the time, can't change their mind. If they change their mind they're dead.
FOR
'for there was no more talking out loud now, and there wouldn’t be neither, not for any money, not for anybody.'
with age, supposedly, comes wisdom. (for my sake let's hope so). there is definitely wisdom within May. there's also more grief, but grief that has been accepted, is grappled with less now, or maybe less is the wrong word. it's grappled with differently. there's more of an understanding that grief is love reshaped. unfortunately for the most part May's wisdom is forever internal, as she is cognitively and physically slowly failing. She has lost her husband and she lost her daughter, Jennifer, when she was 15. Even she, with the wisdom that comes with age, and the new way of seeing that she, and the rabbit she shot, has seemed to have gained on the precipice of death, cannot answer what it was all for. what love or grief or humankind is all for. she can't even really answer why the boy (Miles) comes every year on the anniversary of Jennifer's death.
but maybe for is the wrong word. maybe it isn't for anything at all. and so she dies and so we all do eventually.
finally THE
'the fact is, London might not always be here!'
and so the story is cyclical, as the first chapter (which does not start with the first word in the title) starts with 'the fact is' and now we know it came from the precocious 10yr old Brooke. The is a word that feels like it should start, and yet it ends, although it kind of also started, but mostly ends this book. Brooke is, i believe, obsessed with knowing. She is obsessed with knowledge and she is obsessed with history. she's still just a child though. 'The fact is, every tree that ever lived or lives has a history just like that tree has. It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don’t know. The fact is, history is actually all sorts of things nobody knows about.' here is the truth. everything and every person who has ever existed is important as they are history or the present or the future and without them there is nothing or something would be completely different, even if that something is just that there was one less person in the world. effectively Brooke answers the philosophical debate of if a tree falls and there's no one around to hear it...? with a simple yes. it still falls. it's still happened, a sound was still made. Brooke is too young to have grief to deal with and yet she does. She has this pressure of history. Of all the people who have ever died because of some historical event. there's almost a guilt that comes with enjoying history because of all the bad that has happened, all the horrible. 'So that is what history is, people and places that disappear, or are beheaded, or get damaged or nearly do, and things and places and people that get tortured and burned and so on. But this does not mean that history is not the unseen things as well.'
'Brooke is thinking about a joke about Madonna taking her babies that she has adopted from Africa to Oxford Street so they can be reunited with the clothes they made before she adopted them. It is funny, the joke, when you think about the babies shaking hands with say a cardigan with no hand in it, ... but it also makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man in the park with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume it’s there anyway.'
she questions presumptions. the voice of a child comes through as, despite her immense intelligence, emotionally she's not fully matured. she feels 'strange in her stomach'. i think many readers were probably guilty of assuming Brooke herself was white until she was introduced as Brooke Bayoude or her father's race became a topic of conversation during the dinner party. Brooke compares this with the assumption of 'the' being in a headline. She records the history of Miles' seclusion as a history, which at the end of the day is the same as memory. and memory is time mixed with feeling. so is history just a record of what humans care about? except as shown by the thoughts on assumptions some humans come to mind first. the humans in power, the humans who win, often with violence, the humans with money. but the unseen still matter there is someone or at least was still care for them. people like brooke will always care for them.
so in the end, and this is always how i conclude all art i write about, this novel, i think, is about curiosity and humanity itself. every theme is so human, from music to grief to identity to social interaction to happenings to history to art to life to death to, even, technology. maybe im just drawn to art about humanity though or maybe its impossible for a human to write something not imbued with humanity. and maybe that in itself is beautiful and tells us something. because it's really very special to be human. and this is why the grace of god is missing.
by the grace of Miles. he is omnipresent, created a narrative, above everyone (literally). he has brought the characters together and now they are thinking these thoughts because of it. but by the end he is gone. vanished. Left the throngs of people to blind faith. similar to the author themselves.
fionnualalirsdottir's review against another edition
Reviewed in February 2013
There is no doubt in my mind that Ali Smith is a fine writer, a reader’s writer, maybe even a writer’s writer, although I suspect there are writers out there who think she makes it all look as easy as an unmade bed. There you go, people differ hugely in what they rate as interesting or significant, but whatever kind of writer Smith is, she’s definitely my kind, and for the long term. There will be, I hope, many more of her books to enjoy in the years to come. There's a positive thought to treasure!
But what is this book about, you ask, with a title like that? There but for the..what? But for the accidents of birth and death, the accidents of time and place, me here, you there, me now, you then, the inhumanity of man towards his fellow, all of the terrible things which, because they happen to you, can't happen to me. There but for the grace of God go I, as my parents' generation used to remark, in a kind of incantatory and consolatory refrain whenever they were faced with tragedy happening to other people. But the book is also about the fact that none of that matters in the end since in spite of the average reader’s better rather than worse life circumstances, in spite of our living in peace times rather than in war times or hunger times or pestilential times or ‘disappeared’ times, in spite of the advances in technology we enjoy, in spite of life, there is always and only death. There but for...nothing because we all will die. That’s how I interpreted the title. But the title viewed as a whole is only part of what's going on here; Smith wants us to view it in sections too: There. But. For. The. And the sections serve to reveal the whole. The sections allow many interesting things to happen, many big themes to be thrashed out.
For this book is about happenings, and there is certainly a lot happening: bad things, sad things but sometimes miraculously brave things too. Some of the characters make things happen, others are acted upon in a kind of parallel with the artist/spectator relationship. Smith is the artist, manipulating events so that we, the readers, are caught up in the spectacle. To paraphrase herself, Smith catches us at exactly the moment of letting us go, she defies belief and then shows us that we were wrong ever to doubt her. For with Smith, we laugh until we cry and then we cry until we laugh again.
The really funny thing is that I'm reading Proust at the moment and I can't help noticing the similar themes which emerge in these radically different books. The action of this book takes place mostly in Greenwich and one of the major themes is Time. There but for the is, in its own way, a search for lost time. And once I’d noticed this initial parallel with Proust, I found more and more convergences between the two books, and was pleased when Smith briefly mentions Proust, along with Joyce, near the end. The narrative of this novel takes us through forgotten time, remembered time, fugitive time, historical time, chronological time, dream time. The journey through time, just as in Proust, is enabled partly by music and song lyrics, partly through references to the performances of great artists of the past. Gracie Fields in one, Sarah Bernhardt in the other, rhyming couplets in one, alexandrine verse in the other. Mother obsessions in both, a precocious child in both and always, always, time passing, history happening.
There is no doubt in my mind that Ali Smith is a fine writer, a reader’s writer, maybe even a writer’s writer, although I suspect there are writers out there who think she makes it all look as easy as an unmade bed. There you go, people differ hugely in what they rate as interesting or significant, but whatever kind of writer Smith is, she’s definitely my kind, and for the long term. There will be, I hope, many more of her books to enjoy in the years to come. There's a positive thought to treasure!
But what is this book about, you ask, with a title like that? There but for the..what? But for the accidents of birth and death, the accidents of time and place, me here, you there, me now, you then, the inhumanity of man towards his fellow, all of the terrible things which, because they happen to you, can't happen to me. There but for the grace of God go I, as my parents' generation used to remark, in a kind of incantatory and consolatory refrain whenever they were faced with tragedy happening to other people. But the book is also about the fact that none of that matters in the end since in spite of the average reader’s better rather than worse life circumstances, in spite of our living in peace times rather than in war times or hunger times or pestilential times or ‘disappeared’ times, in spite of the advances in technology we enjoy, in spite of life, there is always and only death. There but for...nothing because we all will die. That’s how I interpreted the title. But the title viewed as a whole is only part of what's going on here; Smith wants us to view it in sections too: There. But. For. The. And the sections serve to reveal the whole. The sections allow many interesting things to happen, many big themes to be thrashed out.
For this book is about happenings, and there is certainly a lot happening: bad things, sad things but sometimes miraculously brave things too. Some of the characters make things happen, others are acted upon in a kind of parallel with the artist/spectator relationship. Smith is the artist, manipulating events so that we, the readers, are caught up in the spectacle. To paraphrase herself, Smith catches us at exactly the moment of letting us go, she defies belief and then shows us that we were wrong ever to doubt her. For with Smith, we laugh until we cry and then we cry until we laugh again.
The really funny thing is that I'm reading Proust at the moment and I can't help noticing the similar themes which emerge in these radically different books. The action of this book takes place mostly in Greenwich and one of the major themes is Time. There but for the is, in its own way, a search for lost time. And once I’d noticed this initial parallel with Proust, I found more and more convergences between the two books, and was pleased when Smith briefly mentions Proust, along with Joyce, near the end. The narrative of this novel takes us through forgotten time, remembered time, fugitive time, historical time, chronological time, dream time. The journey through time, just as in Proust, is enabled partly by music and song lyrics, partly through references to the performances of great artists of the past. Gracie Fields in one, Sarah Bernhardt in the other, rhyming couplets in one, alexandrine verse in the other. Mother obsessions in both, a precocious child in both and always, always, time passing, history happening.
katyboo52's review against another edition
5.0
Everything I read by Ali Smith, delights me. This is the story of a man who is invited to a stranger's dinner party at which he disappears half way through and takes up residence in the spare room for months. He doesn't say why he is there or if he will be going. He just exists there. In the meanwhile, the lives of the owners of the house, the other guests and people who knew him before he went into the room, feature as satellites around him and as ways to get to know him and them. A book about connection, about modern life, about community, about time and perception and about people. This is charming, with a serious edge, funny with a dark undertone and beautifully, beautifully written. I loved everything about it.
rdellavalle's review against another edition
reflective
medium-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
jitka_c's review against another edition
4.0
Tahle knížka rozhodně nesedne každému, mě ale potěšila. To bylo tak úžasně napsané! Faktem ale je, že když jsem čtení na den přerušila, trvalo mi, než jsem se znovu naladila na autorčinu vlnu. Každopádně zasloužené 4*