How to be both: A novel
MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • A novel all about art's versatility, borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take.
"Cements Smith’s reputation as one of the finest and most innovative of our contemporary writers. By some divine alchemy, she is both funny and moving; she combines intellectual rigor with whimsy" —The Los Angeles Review of Books
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
How to be both is 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. Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else.
"Cements Smith’s reputation as one of the finest and most innovative of our contemporary writers. By some divine alchemy, she is both funny and moving; she combines intellectual rigor with whimsy" —The Los Angeles Review of Books
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
How to be both is 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. Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else.
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Community Reviews
May increase to 5 stars.
Terribly interesting, and the vision of art through the authors eyes, and subsequently the eyes of the artist, is magnificent. A really poetic and beautiful way to describe the creation of art.
Likely one of the only books I’ll ever read that successfully plays with jumping between past and present to develop characters in such a well rounded way- by literally showing the scenes which shaped them.
I learned that during the original publication, half of the copies were published with the girl’s story first and then the artist, and the other half were the other way around. I will have to reread this in the opposite order, with the artist story first next time, but based on what I read this time, I think the order really does make a difference in interpretation.
Terribly interesting, and the vision of art through the authors eyes, and subsequently the eyes of the artist, is magnificent. A really poetic and beautiful way to describe the creation of art.
Likely one of the only books I’ll ever read that successfully plays with jumping between past and present to develop characters in such a well rounded way- by literally showing the scenes which shaped them.
I learned that during the original publication, half of the copies were published with the girl’s story first and then the artist, and the other half were the other way around. I will have to reread this in the opposite order, with the artist story first next time, but based on what I read this time, I think the order really does make a difference in interpretation.
Two very good novellas, but their construction together is a little gimmicky for my taste. "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." I read a copy where the contemporary novella came before the historical novella and I wonder if I might have liked it better the other way around, especially as I liked the historical novella better (maybe?). I think I need to reread it as well because I think I missed some of the things that linked the two stories, beyond the larger themes at least.
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