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A review by sarahglen
Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith
5.0
Dear reader,
In this year that already feels so unrepentingly bleak, Ali Smith has forced me to embrace my inner romantic. Girl Meets Boy is the modern queer myth we all need in this moment. You will laugh at capitalism, you will cry tears of longing, you will see the kind of wedding present the Loch Ness Monster gives. 10/10 recommend.
Some excerpts that felt worth saving:
“Midge, my sweet fierce cynical heart, our grandfather says. You’re going to have to learn the kind of hope that makes things history. Otherwise there’ll be no good hope for your own grand truths and no good truths for your own grandchildren.”
“I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like thin white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. And whenever I tried to access myself, whenever I’d try to click on me, try to go any deeper when it came to the meaning of ‘I,’ I mean deeper than a single fast-loading page on Facebook or Myspace, it was as if I knew that one morning I’d wake up and try to log on to find that not even that version of ‘I’ existed any more, because the serves all over the world were all down. And that’s how rootless. And that’s how fragile. And what would poor Anthea do then, poor thing?”
“I mean, do myths spring fully formed from the imagination and the needs of a society, I said, as if they emerged from society’s subconscious? Or are myths conscious creations by the various money-making forces? For instance, is advertising a new kind of myth-making? Do companies sell their water etc by telling us the right kind of persuasive myth? Is that why people who really don’t need to buy something that’s practically free still go out and buy bottles of it? Will they soon be thinking up a myth to sell us air?”
“Nobody grows up myth-less, Robin said. It’s what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters.”
“Then I saw her smile so close to my eyes that there was nothing to see but the smile, and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before, who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once?”
“Was I nothing but grass, a patch of course grasses? was that incredible color coming out of me? The shining heads of — what? buttercups? because the scent of them , farmy and delicate, came into my head and out of my eyes, my ears, out of my mouth, out of my nose, I was scent that could see, I was eyes that could taste, I loved butter. I loved everything. Hold everything under my chin! I was all my open senses held together on the head of a pin, and was it an angel who knew how to use hands like that, as wings?”
In this year that already feels so unrepentingly bleak, Ali Smith has forced me to embrace my inner romantic. Girl Meets Boy is the modern queer myth we all need in this moment. You will laugh at capitalism, you will cry tears of longing, you will see the kind of wedding present the Loch Ness Monster gives. 10/10 recommend.
Some excerpts that felt worth saving:
“Midge, my sweet fierce cynical heart, our grandfather says. You’re going to have to learn the kind of hope that makes things history. Otherwise there’ll be no good hope for your own grand truths and no good truths for your own grandchildren.”
“I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like thin white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. And whenever I tried to access myself, whenever I’d try to click on me, try to go any deeper when it came to the meaning of ‘I,’ I mean deeper than a single fast-loading page on Facebook or Myspace, it was as if I knew that one morning I’d wake up and try to log on to find that not even that version of ‘I’ existed any more, because the serves all over the world were all down. And that’s how rootless. And that’s how fragile. And what would poor Anthea do then, poor thing?”
“I mean, do myths spring fully formed from the imagination and the needs of a society, I said, as if they emerged from society’s subconscious? Or are myths conscious creations by the various money-making forces? For instance, is advertising a new kind of myth-making? Do companies sell their water etc by telling us the right kind of persuasive myth? Is that why people who really don’t need to buy something that’s practically free still go out and buy bottles of it? Will they soon be thinking up a myth to sell us air?”
“Nobody grows up myth-less, Robin said. It’s what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters.”
“Then I saw her smile so close to my eyes that there was nothing to see but the smile, and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before, who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once?”
“Was I nothing but grass, a patch of course grasses? was that incredible color coming out of me? The shining heads of — what? buttercups? because the scent of them , farmy and delicate, came into my head and out of my eyes, my ears, out of my mouth, out of my nose, I was scent that could see, I was eyes that could taste, I loved butter. I loved everything. Hold everything under my chin! I was all my open senses held together on the head of a pin, and was it an angel who knew how to use hands like that, as wings?”