Title: How to Be Both by Ali Smith
Book Beginnings quote: EYES, page 1
Friday56 quote: EYES, p. 47
Summary:
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.
A NOTE TO THE READER:
Who says stories reach everybody in the same order?
This novel can be read in two ways and this book provides you with both.
In half of all printed editions of the novel the narrative EYES comes before CAMERA. In the other half of printed editions the narrative CAMERA precedes EYES. The narratives are exactly the same in both versions, just in a different order.
Review: Oh boy. This book is unique. First, you can start it at the heading CAMERA or EYES. Together the two sides make up a complete story told from a different vantage point. The audiobook I listened to began at CAMERA which is a more modern story of a girl who is deep in grief after the death of her mother, thinking back when she and her mother interacted with art. One episode led them to Italy to visit a fresco done by a group of artists where one artist's work was clearly better than the others in the room. After finishing the CAMERA side I listened to the EYE side, which was the story of that good artist, what life was like during the Renaissance for artists. The first quote is when this artist is pulled into the 21st century and can see the girl as she goes about her daily life beginning with her sitting in front of a painting in an art museum.
The book is extremely clever and odd, frustrating and satisfying, and very unique. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I began the book and from the audio I heard the directions about starting at CAMERA or EYES. Oh boy, hang on, I thought. Why did I pick How to Be Both? Earlier in the year I set myself a challenge to read the winner or finalist for the last decade of Women's Prize Book Award winners. How to Be Both won the prize in 2015. It also won a ton of other awards that year, obviously because the book is so unique. It also ended up on the NYT list of 100 best books of the 21st century. I am attempting to some read books from that list, too, so I double-dipped with my selection of How to Be Both. That said, just because a book wins an award or ends up on a prestigious list doesn't make it popular or easy-to-read. And How to Be Both is not easy to read, as evidenced by the (pages-long) poem which starts the EYES half of the book. I think listening to the audiobook helped prevent some confusion but might have caused other issues. For one, I wasn't aware of the poem format, which may have been a blessing. And look at the punctuation in the second quote with all those colons. There are no colons in audiobooks!
An interesting side note: the photo on the cover of the two women makes it into the storyline several times. I found myself looking at that photo over and over again. Once again, the versatility of art!
My rating: 3.5. I liked the book but didn't fully understand it.
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