Ali Smith
In “Eye” we follow George shortly after her mothers death, she is befriended by a popular girl at school who clearly would like to go further than friends.
This part of the story contains many discussions with her school friend and with her school counsellor as well as Georges memories of the last trip she took with her mum and young brother to see the fresco in Ferrera with which her Mum had become taken.
George becomes obsessed with Francesco del Cossa she hangs out in a gallery with one of his few pictures and with her friend plans a story written as though by him.
She is also troubled by a modern day female potter who became obsessed with her mother and with who her mother was in turn intrigued by the attention and devotion she received.
Her mother was revealed before her death as one of the founders of a subversive artist movement and was convinced she was being followed and George thinks the lady may be some form of Spy.
As the story ends, she is amazed when the lady comes into the viewing gallery and George stalks her back to and then outside her house,
“Camera” is more surreal we get Franceschos back story he like other artist at the time its implied is a girl disguised by his father as a boy so as to be able to pursue her artistic talents: the fact she is a girl is known by others but acceptable only as long as its unspoken and unacknowledged by them and her.
As with George we get flashbacks to her mother, as with George she is befriended by someone more popular : a son of one of the local important families, although it becomes clear that there is an unacknowledged not last because her very being a girl remains unspoken and unconsummated love for her from the friend.
The surreal element is that the book is seemingly written after “Eye” when Francescho is hurtled back into modern times and observes what we know to be George but he at first assumes is a boy, just as George and her mother automatically assume Francesco is a male painter as she continues to stalk her mothers friend.
Some parts of this section are either slightly false Franchesco mixes fauxmedieval speech "purgatorium" withst century teenage argot "just saying" albeit this is all part of Smith's deliberate blurring of time and slightly clichéd Ipads are seen as some form of votive tablet but other than the opening and close this is ultimately the better section.
Both George and the young Francescho, like it seems many of Smiths characters, are slightly too precocious children to be fully believable for example George and her friend swap Latin titles of popular songs.
The book also relies a lot on verbal descriptions ofth Century Art andth Century iconic photographs which George keeps on her wall which dont always really capture what is being described and which are much easier to follow for the one painting and one photo on the books jacket cover.
Overall a fascinating, ambitious and thought provoking book a long way from perfect but admirable for its attempt and one to return to frequently, This wonderful, playful, beautifully written book contains two different stories, In one story, we meet George short for Georgina, a teenage girl in present day London, George just lost her mother, and are having a difficult time handling the grief,
In the other story, we leapyears back in time to meet Fransesco del Cossa, a renaissance painter, Fransesco is an actual, historical figure, and the paintings that are described in this book does exist, Very little is known about him though, so the story of his life as presented in this book is Ali Smiths creation, For example, when we learn that Fransesco is a girl pretending to be a boy in order to pursue a career as a painter, there is no historical reference in support of that.
So, both protagonists in Smiths's book are girls with boy's names, which is typical of her play with gender, identity and stereotypes,
In addition to being beautifully written, these two stories are weaved together in a very clever way, Fransesco was George's mother's favorite painter, so George thinks about her quite a lot, and reminiscences about visiting a museum displaying Fransesco's paintings with her mother, Fransesco tells his story after his own death, He wakes up as a spirit in a world he does not understand our present day world, and his ghost follows George around, like he's stuck to her, It is fun to see how this renaissance ghost tries to make sense of George's world, with its cars, phones, ipads and so on:
and they look or talk or prey to these tablets or icons all the while by holding them next to their heads or stroking them with fingers and staring only at them, signifying they must be heavy in their despairs to be so consistently looking away from their world and so devoted to their icons.
So, in Fransesco's story, we see George from the outside, in addition to Fransesco telling us about his life and his painting career, In Georges story we see Fransesco from the outside, through his art,
Smith's stroke of genius in this book is that you can never know which story comes first, The book was published in two different versions at the same time, They look identical, but in one version George's story comes first, and in the other, Fransesco's, Which version you will get when you buy the book, is completely random in my version, George's story comes first,
So the question is: how will the first story one reads impact the second Since each story contains an outside view on the protagonist in the other story, we can only approach the first one with a clean slate.
I don't think I would have read Fransesco's story in the same way if I didn't already
know George's side of things, This means that each reader is only capable of reading one of the stories, without having it colored by the other one, This is a very clever mechanism, that makes you think about how texts interact with and influence each other,
When you read George's story first, it seems natural to think that she's simply making up the story of Fransesco, In other words, that the second story is nothing more than George's fantasy or daydream, something she thinks about while she's sitting in a museum looking at Fransesco's paintings, This interpretation does find some support in the text, for example in the conversations between George and her friend Helen, When they're working on a school presentation on empathy, they consider basing it on Fransesco's art, They try to imagine how he/she would have talked and behaved, and how he/she would have reacted if brought into the present time, In addition to this, we see George's mother at one point asking George to imagine being a painter, as part of a thought experiment:
Okay, Youre an artist, her mother says,
Am I George says, Since when And is that a moral conundrum
Ha ha, her mother says. Humour me. Imagine it. Youre an artist.
Maybe George is simply doing what her mother told her to do, and dreaming herself into the life of Fransesco That could also explain why Fransesco is described as a woman.
If I had read Fransesco's story first, I would probably be less inclined to interpret it as George's daydream, Fransesco's language is so different from George's, It's very believable, fresh, alive, colorful, and just wonderful to read, George's voice is good to, but very different, The way Fransesco sees and describes shapes, colors and motives are incredible, as are the ideas and thinking process involved in making a painting, If you read Fransesco's story first, you could argue that Georges knowledge of the renaissance, and her life experience in general, is too small to imagine something like this, So both interpretations find some support in the text, and it's fascinating to watch how Smith has managed to balance the two stories up against each other,
Fransesco and George has a lot in common, Both are women with a man's name, Both lost their mother while young and both are excellent observers, The book often dwells on pictures and situations, and describes them in a completely fascinating way, Both the picture on the cover, and the paintings on the inside jacket are described wonderfully in the text, How To Be Both is beautiful, tactile, playful and experimental, and I had to really study the pictures described in it, and google Fransesco's art to see for myself.
At the same time the language always seems oral, spontaneous, and seamlessly moving from one topic to the next, This was the most beautiful book I've read in a long time, .
ofRevisited for theMookse Madness tournament,
The novel takes its inspiration from the fresco painted by theth Century artist Francesco del Cossa at the Ducal Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara known only for a letter he wrote to the Duke asking if he could be paid more than the other artists given his clearly superior work.
The novel has two first person sections: one "Eye" narrated by the painter Francescho in the book, and the other, "Camera", the tale of ast Century girl, George the precocious teenage daughter of a bohemian artloving mother who has died a few months before her section is narrated.
Both are written in a stream of consciousness style jumping around in time and place “Eye” in particular especially for the opening and closing sections which are hard to follow as a result.
Crucially the two stories overlap and interleave and different versions of the book have different sections as the first section: which comes first is in Smiths ideas related to a wider idea of Frescos painted over other Frescos and later uncovered :
"You have the very first version of the fresco underneath the skin, as it were, of the real fresco.
There's a fresco on the wall: there it is, you and I look at it, we see it right in front of us underneath that there's another version of the story and it may or may not be connected to the surface.
And they're both in front of our eyes, but you can only see one, or you see one first, So it's about the understory, "
In “Eye” we follow George shortly after her mothers death, she is befriended by a popular girl at school who clearly would like to go further than friends.
This part of the story contains many discussions with her school friend and with her school counsellor as well as Georges memories of the last trip she took with her mum and young brother to see the fresco in Ferrera with which her Mum had become taken.
George becomes obsessed with Francesco del Cossa she hangs out in a gallery with one of his few pictures and with her friend plans a story written as though by him.
She is also troubled by a modern day female potter who became obsessed with her mother and with who her mother was in turn intrigued by the attention and devotion she received.
Her mother was revealed before her death as one of the founders of a subversive artist movement and was convinced she was being followed and George thinks the lady may be some form of Spy.
As the story ends, she is amazed when the lady comes into the viewing gallery and George stalks her back to and then outside her house,
“Camera” is more surreal we get Franceschos back story he like other artist at the time its implied is a girl disguised by his father as a boy so as to be able to pursue her artistic talents: the fact she is a girl is known by others but acceptable only as long as its unspoken and unacknowledged by them and her.
As with George we get flashbacks to her mother, as with George she is befriended by someone more popular : a son of one of the local important families, although it becomes clear that there is an unacknowledged not last because her very being a girl remains unspoken and unconsummated love for her from the friend.
The surreal element is that the book is seemingly written after “Eye” when Francescho is hurtled back into modern times and observes what we know to be George but he at first assumes is a boy, just as George and her mother automatically assume Francesco is a male painter as she continues to stalk her mothers friend.
Some parts of this section are either slightly false Franchesco mixes fauxmedieval speech "purgatorium" withst century teenage argot "just saying" albeit this is all part of Smith's deliberate blurring of time and slightly clichéd Ipads are seen as some form of votive tablet but other than the opening and close this is ultimately the better section.
Both George and the young Francescho, like it seems many of Smiths characters, are slightly too precocious children to be fully believable for example George and her friend swap Latin titles of popular songs.
The book also relies a lot on verbal descriptions ofth Century Art andth Century iconic photographs which George keeps on her wall which dont always really capture what is being described and which are much easier to follow for the one painting and one photo on the books jacket cover.
Overall a fascinating, ambitious and thought provoking book a long way from perfect but admirable for its attempt and one to return to frequently, This wonderful, playful, beautifully written book contains two different stories, In one story, we meet George short for Georgina, a teenage girl in present day London, George just lost her mother, and are having a difficult time handling the grief,
In the other story, we leapyears back in time to meet Fransesco del Cossa, a renaissance painter, Fransesco is an actual, historical figure, and the paintings that are described in this book does exist, Very little is known about him though, so the story of his life as presented in this book is Ali Smiths creation, For example, when we learn that Fransesco is a girl pretending to be a boy in order to pursue a career as a painter, there is no historical reference in support of that.
So, both protagonists in Smiths's book are girls with boy's names, which is typical of her play with gender, identity and stereotypes,
In addition to being beautifully written, these two stories are weaved together in a very clever way, Fransesco was George's mother's favorite painter, so George thinks about her quite a lot, and reminiscences about visiting a museum displaying Fransesco's paintings with her mother, Fransesco tells his story after his own death, He wakes up as a spirit in a world he does not understand our present day world, and his ghost follows George around, like he's stuck to her, It is fun to see how this renaissance ghost tries to make sense of George's world, with its cars, phones, ipads and so on:
and they look or talk or prey to these tablets or icons all the while by holding them next to their heads or stroking them with fingers and staring only at them, signifying they must be heavy in their despairs to be so consistently looking away from their world and so devoted to their icons.
So, in Fransesco's story, we see George from the outside, in addition to Fransesco telling us about his life and his painting career, In Georges story we see Fransesco from the outside, through his art,
Smith's stroke of genius in this book is that you can never know which story comes first, The book was published in two different versions at the same time, They look identical, but in one version George's story comes first, and in the other, Fransesco's, Which version you will get when you buy the book, is completely random in my version, George's story comes first,
So the question is: how will the first story one reads impact the second Since each story contains an outside view on the protagonist in the other story, we can only approach the first one with a clean slate.
I don't think I would have read Fransesco's story in the same way if I didn't already
know George's side of things, This means that each reader is only capable of reading one of the stories, without having it colored by the other one, This is a very clever mechanism, that makes you think about how texts interact with and influence each other,
When you read George's story first, it seems natural to think that she's simply making up the story of Fransesco, In other words, that the second story is nothing more than George's fantasy or daydream, something she thinks about while she's sitting in a museum looking at Fransesco's paintings, This interpretation does find some support in the text, for example in the conversations between George and her friend Helen, When they're working on a school presentation on empathy, they consider basing it on Fransesco's art, They try to imagine how he/she would have talked and behaved, and how he/she would have reacted if brought into the present time, In addition to this, we see George's mother at one point asking George to imagine being a painter, as part of a thought experiment:
Okay, Youre an artist, her mother says,
Am I George says, Since when And is that a moral conundrum
Ha ha, her mother says. Humour me. Imagine it. Youre an artist.
Maybe George is simply doing what her mother told her to do, and dreaming herself into the life of Fransesco That could also explain why Fransesco is described as a woman.
If I had read Fransesco's story first, I would probably be less inclined to interpret it as George's daydream, Fransesco's language is so different from George's, It's very believable, fresh, alive, colorful, and just wonderful to read, George's voice is good to, but very different, The way Fransesco sees and describes shapes, colors and motives are incredible, as are the ideas and thinking process involved in making a painting, If you read Fransesco's story first, you could argue that Georges knowledge of the renaissance, and her life experience in general, is too small to imagine something like this, So both interpretations find some support in the text, and it's fascinating to watch how Smith has managed to balance the two stories up against each other,
Fransesco and George has a lot in common, Both are women with a man's name, Both lost their mother while young and both are excellent observers, The book often dwells on pictures and situations, and describes them in a completely fascinating way, Both the picture on the cover, and the paintings on the inside jacket are described wonderfully in the text, How To Be Both is beautiful, tactile, playful and experimental, and I had to really study the pictures described in it, and google Fransesco's art to see for myself.
At the same time the language always seems oral, spontaneous, and seamlessly moving from one topic to the next, This was the most beautiful book I've read in a long time, .