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acmarinho3's review against another edition
3.0
Ali Smith tem uma forma muito particular de escrever. Uma escrita que gosto, admito. No entanto, apesar de admirar como escreve, tenho dificuldade em ficar arrebatada com as suas histórias. Em "Inverno" senti exatamente o mesmo que em "Outono": um livro com uma beleza muito característica pela forma como é escrito, mas cuja história é um caos. Apesar de não estar a ficar fã da autora, prometi a mim mesma que iria ler esta tetralogia. Vamos lá ver como correm os próximos.
spenkevich's review against another edition
5.0
‘Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we’re supposed to be seeing.’
The winter months are a time of cold and dark, but also a sense of beauty and calm in the muffled silence of a world blanketed in wet snow. The winter ‘invites a turning in, a quieting, an upped interiority,’ writes [a:Nina MacLaughlin|8252557|Nina MacLaughlin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1570237452p2/8252557.jpg] in her essays on winter, and it is in this introspective spirit of the season that [a:Oscar Wilde|3565|Oscar Wilde|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1673611182p2/3565.jpg] asserts ‘wisdom comes with winter.’ But there is a duality to winter, for there is also the harshness, the chilling reminder of our frailty and mortality, and often we withdraw indoors and into ourselves. The political metaphor is right there for the grasping and Ali Smith manages to take and transcend it brilliantly in Winter, the second book of her seasonally thematic tetraology. The prose of Winter drifts down through puns and politics (there’s enough wordplay here to make Nabokov and Pynchon envious) as the novel becomes a kaleidoscopic expression of the essence of winter. Yet it is so much more than that, functioning as an investigation into the interplay of art, identity, truth, beauty and culture on social levels both political and personal as well as an effective publishing experiment to capture a current moment of social discordance as it unfolds in real time. It is a tale of British politics and British artists, yet it also feels a universal exploration of truth and beauty in a time of great anxieties. Set during the days surrounding Christmas and matching the intimacy and interiority of the season, Winter is as sharp and insightful as it is comical and redemptive and makes for the perfect cozy winter read.
‘That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.’
While this is the second of a four-set seasonal trilogy, Winter could still serve as a standalone. That said, there is a thematic unity with the previous book, Autumn, beyond capturing a literary expression of it’s titular season. Smith deftly knots past and present on both personal and political levels and garnishes the political landscapes in narratives of under-recognized women artists (the inclusion of Barbara Hepworth here isn’t as pronounced as that of Pauline Boty in Autumn yet her artistic story is still deeply integral to the themes) and fraught family dynamics. The fallout of the Brexit vote is less a backdrop and more the landscape upon which the narrative plays out, and Smith manages to position the reader in almost real-time of the events taking place. The story is set Christmas 2016 though by the end we have references to the Grenfell Tower fire and Donald Trump telling a crowd he will make retail employees say “merry christmas” at an October 2017 event with Winter being published just a month later in November.
Barbara Hepworth
This is particularly impressive as this event leads to a perfect closing statement in the novel, one that is a play on the final lines of [a:Charles Dickens|239579|Charles Dickens|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1387078070p2/239579.jpg]’ A Christmas Carol to mirror the playful opening reference. I had read Smith’s God is dead, to begin with as a great punchy opening only to watch later that day, Christmas Eve no less, a favorite Muppets adaption of the book and when the banter over the line ‘The Marleys were dead, to begin with’ came I had a eureka moment. I enjoyed how this was in keeping with the opening line of Autumn being a play on the opening to [b:A Tale of Two Cities|1953|A Tale of Two Cities|Charles Dickens|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344922523l/1953._SY75_.jpg|2956372]. The novel works within the framework of Dickens’ holiday classic as the story slips seamlessly into hauntings of Christmas past and visions of the future—‘That's one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once’—complete with a seasonal spectre of a floating child’s head.
‘Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition.’
- [a:Mignon McLaughlin|248519|Mignon McLaughlin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1256570798p2/248519.jpg]
The plot, as far as there is a “plot” in an Ali Smith, is a bit of a riff on a whole slew of familiar christmas narratives. Arthur, or Art—a name that’s usage in the book would seem heavy handed in lesser hands but the consistency of Smith’s witty and whimsical wordplay miraculously makes it work—hires Lux to be play the role of his recently ex-girlfriend, Charlotte, for a holiday trip to his mother’s in Cornwall. The Hallmark rom-com vibes are especially enhanced when Lux insists they phone mother Sophia’s estranged activist sister, Iris, to join them. And so the family drama and false personas all descend upon Cornwall (which was particularly charming to me because it nudges my absolute favorite rom-com film, About Time) and the family friction is bound to spark fire.
‘It isn’t a good enough answer, that one group of people can be in charge of the destinies of another group of people and choose whether to exclude them or include them. Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We’ve got to come up with a better answer.’
But this is a Christmas story at heart, and Dickens and all his holiday hoopla is not the only classic work integral to the Winter. [a:William Shakespeare|947|William Shakespeare|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1654446514p2/947.jpg]’s [b:Cymbeline|305510|Cymbeline|William Shakespeare|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1418615076l/305510._SY75_.jpg|745601] becomes a redemptive touchstone as fake-Charlotte/Lux, a Croatian woman with an uncertain future in the mindfield of Brexit laws shows a greater love of English literature than those of birthright citizenship, elucidates the plot almost as a metaphor for present day politics.
The telling of the story is an emotional turning point in the novel, especially juxtaposed with Sophia’s defense of her vote to leave the EU, with the reader clearly recognizing the importance of ‘a play about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, lies, powermongering, division and a great deal of poisoning and self-poisoning,’ but also Lux’s admission she came to the UK because of the way Shakespeare could take that and end it with balance and grace where ‘lies are revealed and all the losses are compensated.’ Smith ingeniously uses literary and art criticism as expressions of her own works, such as Sophia’s impressions of Hepworth’s sculptures:
The way her structure weaves in and out of perspectives, memories, visions, etc. lets us move about the story from a variety of vantage points. It isn’t just a family narrative, or a Brexit narrative, but a narrative of individual struggles, of political activism of the now and Iris’ history protesting nuclear stockpiling, of single-motherhood after giving up the love of one’s life for ones own life, and of all the hopes, dreams, fears, flaws, and possible futures a human life can have.
I just need to interrupt the flow of this review because I need to scream that this book is just so unbelievably good. Honestly, thinking about it makes me want to weep it’s just so good. There’s so much I can’t fit into this review but like, the way a remembered story is an amalgamation of two different storytellers and the implications in that, of the history of the anti-nuclear protests, or the ways Smith puts you in the minds of the two characters who are indifferent to the Brexit vote so a lot of the story is tongue-in-cheek but in a way that really slaps…this book is miraculously good. Okay I just needed to say that because this book is just intensely beautiful in a way that makes all the shit that life can be seem worthwhile to know a human can make something like this.
‘We all mine and undermine and landmine ourselves, in our own ways, in our own time.’
Truth, lie and beauty are central to the story. People living as characters of themselves are rampant in the novel and Smith nudges the way internet culture and personalities are more marketing than authentic selves. We see how truth has fallen second fiddle (Charlotte is a violin virtuoso, supposedly) to stories that satisfy, how we trade facts for useful details, and posturing for clicks replaces authenticity. ‘It is the dregs, really, to be living in a time when even your dreams have to be post-postmodern consciouser-than-thou.’
‘There was furious inteolderace at work in the world no matter when or where in history’
And so we asked ‘into who’s myth do we choose to buy?’ There is a literal sense, such as buying Sophia’s products that are new but made to look vintage, or the duality of present day Boris Johnson versus Samuel Johnson’s fight for reality, ‘A man interested in the meaning of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.’ Sophia calls Iris a “mythologizer,” though under Smith this seems more a compliment than anything else, Smith who is in turn mythologizing the Brexit era. Do we believe the government, or do we believe Iris and her friends trying to expose political and corporate corruption and pollution harming people. And this is why we have art. ‘I said, Art is seeing things. And your aunt said, that’s a great description of what art is,’ Smith playfully writes about Art’s hallucination, though it also hits home the idea that art mythologizes reality in order to see, process, and understand it better. And such is the purpose of Winter. And why artists are valued over politicians, because artists represent the human at the cost of power.
‘He thinks about how, whatever being alive is, with all its pasts and presents and futures, it is most itself in the moments when you surface from a depth of numbness or forgetfulness that you didn't even know you were at, and break the surface.’
The French writer and philosopher [a:Albert Camus|957894|Albert Camus|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1686463588p2/957894.jpg] once wrote ‘in the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.’ Such is the lesson here, that in this season of cold, of withdrawing, or introspection, we can choose to release ourselves from the shackles of the characters we choose to present ourselves as and find the beautiful summer of truth and hope within us. This is a gorgeous novel, one that moves slowly yet surely through both the heart and mind and balances both the personal and political in a way that transcends them both. Winter, like Autumn before it, is an impressive expression of its season and a story that warmed my heart like a yule log during the holidays. I only hope winter passes quickly so I can read the next seasonal installment.
4.5/5
‘Mind and matter are mysterious and, when they come together, bounteous.’
The winter months are a time of cold and dark, but also a sense of beauty and calm in the muffled silence of a world blanketed in wet snow. The winter ‘invites a turning in, a quieting, an upped interiority,’ writes [a:Nina MacLaughlin|8252557|Nina MacLaughlin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1570237452p2/8252557.jpg] in her essays on winter, and it is in this introspective spirit of the season that [a:Oscar Wilde|3565|Oscar Wilde|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1673611182p2/3565.jpg] asserts ‘wisdom comes with winter.’ But there is a duality to winter, for there is also the harshness, the chilling reminder of our frailty and mortality, and often we withdraw indoors and into ourselves. The political metaphor is right there for the grasping and Ali Smith manages to take and transcend it brilliantly in Winter, the second book of her seasonally thematic tetraology. The prose of Winter drifts down through puns and politics (there’s enough wordplay here to make Nabokov and Pynchon envious) as the novel becomes a kaleidoscopic expression of the essence of winter. Yet it is so much more than that, functioning as an investigation into the interplay of art, identity, truth, beauty and culture on social levels both political and personal as well as an effective publishing experiment to capture a current moment of social discordance as it unfolds in real time. It is a tale of British politics and British artists, yet it also feels a universal exploration of truth and beauty in a time of great anxieties. Set during the days surrounding Christmas and matching the intimacy and interiority of the season, Winter is as sharp and insightful as it is comical and redemptive and makes for the perfect cozy winter read.
‘That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.’
While this is the second of a four-set seasonal trilogy, Winter could still serve as a standalone. That said, there is a thematic unity with the previous book, Autumn, beyond capturing a literary expression of it’s titular season. Smith deftly knots past and present on both personal and political levels and garnishes the political landscapes in narratives of under-recognized women artists (the inclusion of Barbara Hepworth here isn’t as pronounced as that of Pauline Boty in Autumn yet her artistic story is still deeply integral to the themes) and fraught family dynamics. The fallout of the Brexit vote is less a backdrop and more the landscape upon which the narrative plays out, and Smith manages to position the reader in almost real-time of the events taking place. The story is set Christmas 2016 though by the end we have references to the Grenfell Tower fire and Donald Trump telling a crowd he will make retail employees say “merry christmas” at an October 2017 event with Winter being published just a month later in November.
Barbara Hepworth
This is particularly impressive as this event leads to a perfect closing statement in the novel, one that is a play on the final lines of [a:Charles Dickens|239579|Charles Dickens|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1387078070p2/239579.jpg]’ A Christmas Carol to mirror the playful opening reference. I had read Smith’s God is dead, to begin with as a great punchy opening only to watch later that day, Christmas Eve no less, a favorite Muppets adaption of the book and when the banter over the line ‘The Marleys were dead, to begin with’ came I had a eureka moment. I enjoyed how this was in keeping with the opening line of Autumn being a play on the opening to [b:A Tale of Two Cities|1953|A Tale of Two Cities|Charles Dickens|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344922523l/1953._SY75_.jpg|2956372]. The novel works within the framework of Dickens’ holiday classic as the story slips seamlessly into hauntings of Christmas past and visions of the future—‘That's one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once’—complete with a seasonal spectre of a floating child’s head.
‘Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition.’
- [a:Mignon McLaughlin|248519|Mignon McLaughlin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1256570798p2/248519.jpg]
The plot, as far as there is a “plot” in an Ali Smith, is a bit of a riff on a whole slew of familiar christmas narratives. Arthur, or Art—a name that’s usage in the book would seem heavy handed in lesser hands but the consistency of Smith’s witty and whimsical wordplay miraculously makes it work—hires Lux to be play the role of his recently ex-girlfriend, Charlotte, for a holiday trip to his mother’s in Cornwall. The Hallmark rom-com vibes are especially enhanced when Lux insists they phone mother Sophia’s estranged activist sister, Iris, to join them. And so the family drama and false personas all descend upon Cornwall (which was particularly charming to me because it nudges my absolute favorite rom-com film, About Time) and the family friction is bound to spark fire.
‘It isn’t a good enough answer, that one group of people can be in charge of the destinies of another group of people and choose whether to exclude them or include them. Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We’ve got to come up with a better answer.’
But this is a Christmas story at heart, and Dickens and all his holiday hoopla is not the only classic work integral to the Winter. [a:William Shakespeare|947|William Shakespeare|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1654446514p2/947.jpg]’s [b:Cymbeline|305510|Cymbeline|William Shakespeare|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1418615076l/305510._SY75_.jpg|745601] becomes a redemptive touchstone as fake-Charlotte/Lux, a Croatian woman with an uncertain future in the mindfield of Brexit laws shows a greater love of English literature than those of birthright citizenship, elucidates the plot almost as a metaphor for present day politics.
‘[Characters] living in the same world but separately from each other, like their worlds have somehow become disjointed or broken off each other's worlds. But if they could just step out of themselves, or just hear and see what’s happening right next to their ears and eyes, they’d see it’s the same play they’re all in, the same world, that they’re all part of the same story.’
The telling of the story is an emotional turning point in the novel, especially juxtaposed with Sophia’s defense of her vote to leave the EU, with the reader clearly recognizing the importance of ‘a play about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, lies, powermongering, division and a great deal of poisoning and self-poisoning,’ but also Lux’s admission she came to the UK because of the way Shakespeare could take that and end it with balance and grace where ‘lies are revealed and all the losses are compensated.’ Smith ingeniously uses literary and art criticism as expressions of her own works, such as Sophia’s impressions of Hepworth’s sculptures:
‘It makes you walk round it, it makes you look through it from different sides, see different things from different positions,. It’s also like seeing inside and outside something at once.’
The way her structure weaves in and out of perspectives, memories, visions, etc. lets us move about the story from a variety of vantage points. It isn’t just a family narrative, or a Brexit narrative, but a narrative of individual struggles, of political activism of the now and Iris’ history protesting nuclear stockpiling, of single-motherhood after giving up the love of one’s life for ones own life
Spoiler
and having a child with who is plausibly Daniel Gluck from the novel Autumn, though he is only referenced briefly as Danny hereI just need to interrupt the flow of this review because I need to scream that this book is just so unbelievably good. Honestly, thinking about it makes me want to weep it’s just so good. There’s so much I can’t fit into this review but like, the way a remembered story is an amalgamation of two different storytellers and the implications in that, of the history of the anti-nuclear protests, or the ways Smith puts you in the minds of the two characters who are indifferent to the Brexit vote so a lot of the story is tongue-in-cheek but in a way that really slaps…this book is miraculously good. Okay I just needed to say that because this book is just intensely beautiful in a way that makes all the shit that life can be seem worthwhile to know a human can make something like this.
‘We all mine and undermine and landmine ourselves, in our own ways, in our own time.’
Truth, lie and beauty are central to the story. People living as characters of themselves are rampant in the novel and Smith nudges the way internet culture and personalities are more marketing than authentic selves. We see how truth has fallen second fiddle (Charlotte is a violin virtuoso, supposedly) to stories that satisfy, how we trade facts for useful details, and posturing for clicks replaces authenticity. ‘It is the dregs, really, to be living in a time when even your dreams have to be post-postmodern consciouser-than-thou.’
‘There was furious inteolderace at work in the world no matter when or where in history’
And so we asked ‘into who’s myth do we choose to buy?’ There is a literal sense, such as buying Sophia’s products that are new but made to look vintage, or the duality of present day Boris Johnson versus Samuel Johnson’s fight for reality, ‘A man interested in the meaning of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.’ Sophia calls Iris a “mythologizer,” though under Smith this seems more a compliment than anything else, Smith who is in turn mythologizing the Brexit era. Do we believe the government, or do we believe Iris and her friends trying to expose political and corporate corruption and pollution harming people. And this is why we have art. ‘I said, Art is seeing things. And your aunt said, that’s a great description of what art is,’ Smith playfully writes about Art’s hallucination, though it also hits home the idea that art mythologizes reality in order to see, process, and understand it better. And such is the purpose of Winter. And why artists are valued over politicians, because artists represent the human at the cost of power.
‘He thinks about how, whatever being alive is, with all its pasts and presents and futures, it is most itself in the moments when you surface from a depth of numbness or forgetfulness that you didn't even know you were at, and break the surface.’
The French writer and philosopher [a:Albert Camus|957894|Albert Camus|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1686463588p2/957894.jpg] once wrote ‘in the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.’ Such is the lesson here, that in this season of cold, of withdrawing, or introspection, we can choose to release ourselves from the shackles of the characters we choose to present ourselves as and find the beautiful summer of truth and hope within us. This is a gorgeous novel, one that moves slowly yet surely through both the heart and mind and balances both the personal and political in a way that transcends them both. Winter, like Autumn before it, is an impressive expression of its season and a story that warmed my heart like a yule log during the holidays. I only hope winter passes quickly so I can read the next seasonal installment.
4.5/5
‘Mind and matter are mysterious and, when they come together, bounteous.’
emmabeckman's review against another edition
3.0
One thing Ali Smith does really well in this book is weaving in really current events, which is the point, but she does it very seamlessly. However, I liked Autumn better than I liked this one and her writing style is still not my cup of tea. I would still recommend it though.
vera_cologne's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Ali Smith’s writing style is always interesting and there are some beautiful phrases and important messages in here, but all in all I found this a bit confusing and clunky. I did not get the part with the floating head at all and there were a lot of other things that maybe I didn’t know the right reference to or maybe they were just a bit too mysterious.
lillibooks's review against another edition
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
trishgcruz's review against another edition
2.0
this book put me into a reading slump so I've decided not to finish it.
I think i had really high expectations for this book and that might have affected my reading experience. The beginning was so confusing to me. It got better overtime and I was finally kind of understanding the correlation between each character, but it also felt like a chore to keep reading this book. It wasn't awful, I just didn't have much interest in the story and didn't really like any of the characters.
I think i had really high expectations for this book and that might have affected my reading experience. The beginning was so confusing to me. It got better overtime and I was finally kind of understanding the correlation between each character, but it also felt like a chore to keep reading this book. It wasn't awful, I just didn't have much interest in the story and didn't really like any of the characters.
nooneyouknow's review against another edition
3.0
I preferred Autumn, but this one was also lovely (and seemed to grow even lovelier in the second half of the book). Looking forward to Spring. (And again, Melody Grove is a delightful narrator for these books.)
derigibleplums's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
There were parts here that I loved, especially the blurring between reality and imagination. But because of its floaty backwards forwards impressionistic storytelling (and probably because I kept having to put it down) it meant that I kept kind of just losing where I was and instead of being able to float down this river with everyone calmly, I just felt lost and like I was always looking the wrong way. I enjoy Smith’s writing, but I think I preferred the collage of the shorter Autumn.
whatisshereading's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
i should of put more critical thinking into this book - but i simply did not... interesting and enjoyable- i feel i enjoyed autumn more though. i did skim some parts (by accident!)