Smith has had “How to Be Both” published in two editions, so that the sequence of its halves varies from copy to copy: Some have George’s story first, some the Renaissance artist’s. This is not a book to be read passively, or even to be read once, especially since it takes a while to figure out how its two parts are connected. This same question, and many others, will arise in both halves of the novel, though in drastically different circumstances. So does that mean it comes first after all? And does that mean the other picture, if we don’t know about it, may as well not exist?” Because it was done first.īut the first thing we see, her mother said, and most times the only thing we see, is the one on the surface. The picture below came first, George says.
The chicken or the egg? The picture underneath or the picture on the surface? Mother and daughter are talking about the restoration of frescoes. In George’s memory, it is “last May in Italy.” Mother, daughter and George’s brother, Henry, have traveled south from their home in Cambridge, England, to see an early Renaissance fresco by an artist whose seemingly unrelated story is the other half of “How to Be Both.” The mother is dead, and the conversation is taking place in George’s memory. As an introduction to the conundrums and complexities of Ali Smith’s bicameral novel “How to Be Both,” consider this conversation between a hairsplitting teenage girl named George and her more loosely cerebral mother.
0 kommentar(er)
