Autumn is the first book in Smith’s seasonal quartet, a four-part series that explores how we experience and feel time. The story begins with an old man named Daniel Gluck on a beach, convinced that he has died. Bodies of refugees are scattered along the shore, and somehow, the sunbathers and children nearby just carry on. Playing, laughing, unfazed. It is a strange and striking scene to imagine.
Turns out, Daniel is actually in a coma and very much alive. A young woman named Elisabeth visits him almost every day. The hospital staff think she is his granddaughter. She is not. They are just two people whose lives became encountered and connected. Elisabeth is really who this story belongs to.
Her life, her memories, and her world is the main part of the story. And woven all around that is something bigger, the mood and tension of Britain right after the Brexit vote. The confusion, the divide, the unsettled feeling of a country figuring out what comes next.
I have to admit that this book took me a while to get through, and even longer to fully process during and after I finished it. Ali Smith writes in a way that is unlike most authors out there. Her storytelling is artistic and layered, and it really does ask you to slow down and pay close attention.
She plays with words and scenes in her own way. It can feel a little disorienting at first, especially if you go in expecting a literal and linear story. But once you just let the book take you wherever it wants to go, you start to grasp the story.
If literary fiction that makes you think and feel is your kind of read, this one is definitely worth picking up.
Will I read the rest of the quartet? Probably yes, but not just yet. This book needs some time to breathe, and honestly, so do I.
My Favorite Bits
- I’m tired of the news. I’m tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren’t, and deals so simplistically with what’s truly appalling. I’m tired of the vitriol. I’m tired of the anger. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of the selfishness. I’m tired of how we’re doing nothing to stop it. I’m tired of how we’re encouraging it. I’m tired of the violence there is and I’m tired of the violence that’s on its way, that’s coming, that hasn’t happened yet. I’m tired of liars. I’m tired of sanctified liars. I’m tired of how those liars have let this happen. I’m tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I’m tired of lying governments. I’m tired of people not caring whether they’re being lied to any more. I’m tired of being made to feel this fearful. I’m tired of animosity. I’m tired of pusillanimosity.
- Always be reading something, he said. Even when we’re not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant. A constant what? Elisabeth said. A constant constancy, Daniel said.
- It depends on how you’d define normal, Elisabeth said. Which would be different from how I’d define normal. Since we all live in relativity and mine at the moment is not and I suspect never will be the same as yours.
Author: Ali Smith
Publication date: 20 October 2016
Number of page: 264 pages
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