How to be Both

Locations
Call Number: Fiction / Smith, Ali, Adult Book / Fiction / General / Smith, Ali
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Traverwood Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Smith, Ali	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Smith, Ali	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Smith, Ali	4-week checkout	Due 05-13-2024

"SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real--and all life's givens get given a second chance"-- Provided by publisher.
"The brilliant Booker-nominated novel from one of our finest authors: How to Be Both is a daring, inventive tale that intertwines the stories of a defiant Renaissance painter and a modern teenage girl. How can one be both--near and far, past and present, male and female? In Ali Smith's new novel, two extraordinary characters inhabit the spaces between categories. In one half of the book, we follow the story of Francescho del Cossa, a Renaissance painter in fifteenth-century Italy who assumes a duel identity, living as both a man and a woman. In the novel's other half, George, a contemporary English teenage girl, is in mourning after the death of her brilliant, rebellious mother. As she struggles to fill the void in her life, George finds her thoughts circling again and again around a whimsical trip she and her mother once made to Italy, to see a certain Renaissance fresco... These two stories call out to each other in surprising and deeply resonant ways to form a veritable literary double-take, bending the conventions of genre, storytelling, and our own preconceptions"-- Provided by publisher.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Library Journal Review
Booklist Review
Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Excerpt
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Good for art fans submitted by samanthar on July 1, 2015, 10:53am I don't understand all of the acclaim for this book, specifically the "Ali Smith has invented a completely new form of novel" claim. The book is comprised of two seemingly different and non-related stories, and the physical copies of the book varies in which story is presented first. I will concede that this is a new idea. Aside from that, it is a very average book where two characters, living very different lives and in different time periods, connect through art, grief, and love. It seemed like Ali Smith started with the idea of many different lessons she wanted to include (move on but never forget, don't be afraid to let go of something for something that could be better, events of the past are never gone but run concurrent with the present, etc.) but a strong story around these lessons was not created, and they were just thrown in throughout the pages.

This book would probably be very enjoyable for art fanatics.

Immersive submitted by John Staunton on August 2, 2018, 2:34pm Fantastic writing and really interesting characterizations—both the historical and contemporary narrators.