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niencarstens's review against another edition
2.0
I really hoped that I would like this book, but alas, I thought it was boring and uninteresting. there were some beautiful passages but not enough for me to like it
rosiefpb's review against another edition
3.0
I think Ali Smith writes beautifully but I'm finding the story in these increasing hard to follow. Partly my fault maybe for picking the audiobooks - think I will actually read the last one to try and enjoy the meandering, flowy text more. They're beautiful and sad but I just didn't connect with this one as much as the first two.
spenkevich's review against another edition
5.0
‘You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming,’ wrote Chilean poet [a:Pablo Neruda|4026|Pablo Neruda|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651474656p2/4026.jpg] and this inevitability blooms hope in our hearts as the world awakes in a lovely and lush rebirth of blossoms and warmth after the long, cold death of winter. It is a promise of light after dark, a second chance, a reminder to keep going and the efforts of pushing out of darkness towards brighter horizons permeate Ali Smith’s Spring, the third novel of her seasonal quartet. With Smith’s signature wordplay, wit, and whimsicality, Spring straddles the personal and the political while positioning its characters on the heels of deaths both literal and figurative. Worlds collide as aging TV director Richard Lease— still reeling from the death of his older mentor, best friend and occasional lover, Paddy—chances upon Brittany Hall as she follows the pleasantly precocious 12-year old Florence away from job as a Custody Officer in a brutal deportations internment camp and onto a mysterious journey to Scotland. It is a kaleidoscopic novel of vast scope that, in keeping with the rest of the Seasonal set, creates its own cosmos of artistic references and history, both fictional and real, sliding into or colliding with the politics of the present. Its a maelstrom of marketing, misinformations, and migrant crisis, of simulated emotions and AI existences, its fear-mongering of daily news, social media trolls, paranoia, prisons, protest art, its dehumanization, deconstruction, deportations, dread, death…but most of all: hope. Ali Smith’s Spring exuberantly embodies its titular season as ‘the great connective’ as we shake off the darkness of winter and turn our faces towards hope and hope that we, like Florence, can humanize the machine that is bearing down upon us.
‘Real strength was a matter of sensing something alive in you bigger than just your own breathing.’
‘I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now,’ wrote [a:Virginia Woolf|6765|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1419596619p2/6765.jpg] in her diaries, ‘one does, I think, as one gets older.’ While I am personally an autumn lover, I too have found spring to be more and more agreeable with age. While both seasons are a conflicting blend of symbolic beginnings and endings, autumn bends in towards coziness while spring is a reaching out, an unfolding of life springing forth from the earth and our hearts like the landscape of a pop-up book bursting from its hiding in a closed binding and I’ve come to await this feeling after each long winter. Every May our town has its annual tulip festival and the way we flip like a light switch from the bleak, sparseness of winter into the sudden frenzy of activity and tourists that make us such a “summer town” destination has always felt like a metaphor for both spring and hypomania, but its also when I know the last snow has fallen and the sunlight will be longer. Perhaps its the body thirsting for the influx of vitamin D, the reprieve from seasonal affective disorder, the eager restlessness the poets have long called ‘spring fever’, but what makes spring and this book so alluring is the feeling of hope and that maybe the worst is behind us. As Ali Smith observes in an interview with Penguin publishers, Spring the novel takes place mostly in autumn, but so does the season too:
What makes this quartet of novels so incredible are how they capture their seasons and the ways ‘the seasons are never disconnected from each other anyway, they're the consequences of each other’ which is true too of the political and artistic histories represented in them. While traces of Brexit crop up in the character’s lives in the previous book, in Spring the consequences are directly in their faces. Especially with the Brittany and Florence story-line which intersects about halfway through. But, like the seasons, the two plotlines—Richard being the other—are not disconnected and the patchwork progression of narrative jumping between characters and threading back and forth along the timeline blurs the borders between them. Because borders are suddenly on everyone's mind in the floundering Brexit negotiations. Borders are a recurring theme in these novels and, as Smith said in an interview with LA Review of Books, are being used as a weapon of paranoia and political division:
These books are all set against a backdrop of mass paranoia and each novel riffs on the ways social media and partisan news distracts and divides while corporate interests convert civilians into consumer data. ‘We want it to be inconvenient for you not to use us,’ the voice of Big Tech states in one of the more post-modernist interludes, ‘we want you to look at us and as soon as you stop looking at us to feel the need to look at us again.’ Or, in the glorious opening rants that start each book:
Smith captures the forces that drive division in society, the ways “marketing” is just a more marketable way to say propaganda and the ways in which we mistake corporations for living entities that might actually care about us but don’t. It’s not a far cry from the artist in the novel who, using old photographs, creates fake histories of fake people in such moving ways the simulated lives produce real emotion he claims is no different than actual lives. Authentic living isn’t profitable the way simulated experience that can be editable to create a tight, controlled narrative is. These companies aren’t seeking your attention to help you, Smith reminds us, but to help their wallets. And division is profitable in an attention economy where clicks are capital. Why curb misinformation or extremist rhetoric when it only drives engagement from those opposing it as their supporters embrace the lies or views as a cudgel against detractors. It all becomes static so thick it’s hard to unearth truth and earnesty.
As with each book, Smith’s great experiment was to put out a book that captured the present seemingly as it happens and the era of post-Brexit, Trump and twitter when it was still a worthwhile service come screaming from the pages.
‘And in the spring I shed my skin, and it blows away with the changing winds.’
—Florence + The Machine, Rabbit Heart
These voices are the grinding gears of the machine Smith quips about when Brittany, while asking Florence where her machine is as a joke on the band name, realizes that she, the deportations officer, is actually her. Florence is a recurring motif in this quartet who, like Lux from Winter, brings an outside perspective (both being immigrants in the time of Brexit) but also charismatic dreamers who reinvigorate a sense of imagination and hope the other characters realize have long gone dormant inside them. Florence is the season of spring to their winter and a cipher of sorts from which the decryption of the novel can be read through her actions and words. She can also cross both the figurative and literal borders in the narrative, using her invisibility on the political scale as an useful invisibility in actual life:
Its a useful too in a society where ‘racism,’ as Richard points out, is ‘legitimized 24/7 on all the news and in all the papers, on so many screens, grace of the god of endless new beginnings, the god we call the internet.’ Florence serves to humanize the machine, to remind us that we aren’t data but people, to remind us, as Paddy tells her son, that we aren’t concepts but people: ‘Don't be calling it migrant crisis…I've told you a million times. It's people.’ Florence carries a book in which she writes stories and collects twitter arguments—the book is hinted to be the source of some of the disembodied interludes—and it is titled her “Hot Air” book, a title taken from her mother’s note that people will call her pleas for justice hot air but to not listen. Besides, as Smith reminds us ‘hot air rises and can not just carry us but help us rise above.’ And this is a book about rising above.
‘Sometimes, he says, we don’t know why people do what they do. But we can only do our best, the best we can do, in response, and try to be as good-humoured as possible while we do it.’
Paddy is another character who is an archetypal figure in the quart, serving a role like Daniel Gluck from Autumn as the elder mentor who is well versed in art history and politically conscious. She is known for her film Andy Hoffnung, a Holocaust film that takes it’s titular character name from Beethoven's An die Hoffnung, meaning ‘dedicated to hope’ and Paddy also serves as this driving force of hope. But in the wake of her death, she is also a reminder of winter and Richard finding the way to best honor her is thematic to this novel.
‘There’s ways to survive these times…and I think one way is the shape the telling takes.’
Paddy also serves to nudge the metafictional elements of Spring. ‘In a world of stories, maybe a door exists that opens to the possibility that the ending’s not always the same,’ writes [a:Nina MacLaughlin|8252557|Nina MacLaughlin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1570237452p2/8252557.jpg] in her essay on the winter solstice, ‘in a world of stories, maybe death is all potential, another means of moving on.’ In a story about moving on, Smith brings in multiple stories from art history to shape the telling of her own story and inform the ideas of the characters who are hoping to recover from the literal and figurative deaths. Each novel has used a work from [a:Charles Dickens|239579|Charles Dickens|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1387078070p2/239579.jpg] and here Paddy’s nickname for Richard—Doubledick—is drawn from The Story of Richard Doubledick (which you can read HERE) from [b:The Seven Poor Travellers|18943248|The Seven Poor Travellers|Charles Dickens|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1437669784l/18943248._SY75_.jpg|4971608]. It is a Christmas story that never caught on the way his [b:A Christmas Carol|5326|A Christmas Carol|Charles Dickens|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1406512317l/5326._SY75_.jpg|3097440]—a story highly influential to the imagery and narrative of Smith’s previous novel, Winter—and its theme of fighting side by side with people once thought of as enemies coincides with the dedication to hope. There is also Pericles from [a:William Shakespeare|947|William Shakespeare|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1654446514p2/947.jpg], a story of migration and family separation that replicated in the novel with Florence representative of the lost daughter, Marina, in the play. The play is also the inspiration for the artwork titled Why Cloud by British artist Tacita Dean, which appears on the final page of the novel while her The Montafon Letter, a mountain drawn from chalk on a blackboard, is viewed by Richard and inspires him to send a postcard to Paddy.
Tacita Dean’s The Montafon Letter
‘It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.’
—[a:Rainer Maria Rilke|7906|Rainer Maria Rilke|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651322555p2/7906.jpg]
Postcards, a form of connection and communication that often cross borders, are frequent in the novel, such as the postcard of the Orpheus a lover of poet [a:Rainer Maria Rilke|7906|Rainer Maria Rilke|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651322555p2/7906.jpg]’s tacked to his wall and inspired him to write the [b:The Sonnets to Orpheus|516040|The Sonnets to Orpheus|Rainer Maria Rilke|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348892761l/516040._SX50_.jpg|1210412]. As the novel opens, Richard is avoiding his work on a film by a popular director he believes is over sexualizing and undercutting the beauty of a fictional recent novel about Rilke and [a:Katherine Mansfield|45712|Katherine Mansfield|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1216670886p2/45712.jpg] who once stayed in the same Swiss hotel in 1922. While they are ‘famous writers with seemingly well-documented lives, we still know next to nothing’ and while they may have crossed paths, the direction of the film to include frequent erotic encounters Paddy points out is ‘not just laughable, it’s impossible’ considering ‘Mansfield had fully developed TB by 1922,’ which serves another instance of simulated emotions overriding authenticity in the world. Though for another real world connection, Richard receives an old copy of [b:The Collected Stories|598720|The Collected Stories|Katherine Mansfield|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1176154854l/598720._SY75_.jpg|181806] by Mansfield, a collection that was reissued in 2007 with an introduction by Ali Smith herself.
'April. It teaches us everything.'
This scene with Richard and Paddy discussing the history of 1922, however, is a perfect metafictional discussion of what Smith aims at with her novels. The Swiss mountain in the background of the Rilke/Mansfield is more than a mountain for Paddy, it’s the history of 1922 with Mussolini’s march on Rome, or the assassinations of Michael Collins, or Sir Henry Wilson, its the backdrop that is ‘everything that a mountain can mean’ as it looms behind the events of the story. And the Irish revolution looming then isn’t unlike their present.
Which is all exactly what the real world events of the present are doing in Smith’s seasonal quartet. ‘I realized that the books we write aren’t chosen by us, they choose us,’ Smith said to LA Review of Books, and her books are being created with the history unfolding around her, ‘I’m going with their momentum.’
‘True hope is actually the absence of hope.’
While of the three this book is the darkest and saddest, it never feels weighed down by it. Smith’s wordplay is always joyful and she infuses so much humor into every aspect of the novel. Even dark moments inside the detention center, Brit’s lack of self-awareness is playful when she corrects a detainee saying ‘this isn’t a prison, it’s a purpose-built Immigration Removal Center with a prison design.’ Meanwhile the constant chatter of Florence and the bewilderment of those around her is delightful and keeps the novel buoyant, though I am just always in amazement at the witty ways Smith can experiment with language for multi-faceted effect.
‘We’ll begin again. We’ll revolve.
You mean we’ll evolve, Brit says.
No, I mean revolve, the girl says. As in revolution. We’ll roll forward to a new place.
You mean revolt, Brit says. You’re talking about revolting.
I mean revolve, the girl says.
No you don’t, Brit says.
I do. We’ll turn it round, the girl says. We’ll do it all differently.’
Ultimately, Spring is a novel coming out of the darkness and towards hope. And in dark tales we often find heroes who, like in fairy tales, will go to great lengths to do great things. Such as a group ‘disappearing people from a system which has already disappeared them’ and getting them to safety, or a little girl who can walk past security and get a prison to clean its toilets. Spring is about looking the great grinding machine in the face and not being afraid to tell it no. It is about humanizing the machine. It is a wonderful novel and another perfect installment in a series that has taken me by the head and heart and quickly become one of my favorite reading experiences to read each in their proper season. In Spring, you truly feel the essence of springtime.
4.5/5
‘And if you die before me, he says, I will spend all the time I’m alive and not with you negotiating the various time differences across the world so that I can spend as much time as a man possibly can on this planet in springtime.’
‘Real strength was a matter of sensing something alive in you bigger than just your own breathing.’
‘I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now,’ wrote [a:Virginia Woolf|6765|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1419596619p2/6765.jpg] in her diaries, ‘one does, I think, as one gets older.’ While I am personally an autumn lover, I too have found spring to be more and more agreeable with age. While both seasons are a conflicting blend of symbolic beginnings and endings, autumn bends in towards coziness while spring is a reaching out, an unfolding of life springing forth from the earth and our hearts like the landscape of a pop-up book bursting from its hiding in a closed binding and I’ve come to await this feeling after each long winter. Every May our town has its annual tulip festival and the way we flip like a light switch from the bleak, sparseness of winter into the sudden frenzy of activity and tourists that make us such a “summer town” destination has always felt like a metaphor for both spring and hypomania, but its also when I know the last snow has fallen and the sunlight will be longer. Perhaps its the body thirsting for the influx of vitamin D, the reprieve from seasonal affective disorder, the eager restlessness the poets have long called ‘spring fever’, but what makes spring and this book so alluring is the feeling of hope and that maybe the worst is behind us. As Ali Smith observes in an interview with Penguin publishers, Spring the novel takes place mostly in autumn, but so does the season too:
‘this is actually true, not just of the novel but of the seasonal shift in nature – it's in autumn that the processes which will produce the next flowering and the next open leaves on the trees actually starts – the leaf falls off the tree to make way for the new bud. And spring is, traditionally, a pretty tough time, even though it's a liberation from winter; April's the cruellest month, and the light is notoriously tough to take after the dark, as well as a relief.’
What makes this quartet of novels so incredible are how they capture their seasons and the ways ‘the seasons are never disconnected from each other anyway, they're the consequences of each other’ which is true too of the political and artistic histories represented in them. While traces of Brexit crop up in the character’s lives in the previous book, in Spring the consequences are directly in their faces. Especially with the Brittany and Florence story-line which intersects about halfway through. But, like the seasons, the two plotlines—Richard being the other—are not disconnected and the patchwork progression of narrative jumping between characters and threading back and forth along the timeline blurs the borders between them. Because borders are suddenly on everyone's mind in the floundering Brexit negotiations. Borders are a recurring theme in these novels and, as Smith said in an interview with LA Review of Books, are being used as a weapon of paranoia and political division:
‘the way human beings are using borders right now, all across the world, as if their purpose is a kind of prison architecture, is heinous, deeply dishonorable, self-defeating, useful to powerful politicians and demagogues as a divisive tool, expedient for a politics of mass paranoia and neurosis. It goes against everything good in us, and we know it.’
These books are all set against a backdrop of mass paranoia and each novel riffs on the ways social media and partisan news distracts and divides while corporate interests convert civilians into consumer data. ‘We want it to be inconvenient for you not to use us,’ the voice of Big Tech states in one of the more post-modernist interludes, ‘we want you to look at us and as soon as you stop looking at us to feel the need to look at us again.’ Or, in the glorious opening rants that start each book:
‘We need to suggest the enemy within. We need enemies of the people we want their judges called enemies of the people we want their journalists called enemies of the people we want the people we decide to call enemies of the people called enemies of the people we want to say loudly over and over again on as many tv and radio shows as possible how they're silencing us. We need to say all the old stuff like it's new. We need news to be what we say it is. We need words to mean what we say they mean. We need to deny what we're saying while we're saying it. We need it not to matter what words mean.
Smith captures the forces that drive division in society, the ways “marketing” is just a more marketable way to say propaganda and the ways in which we mistake corporations for living entities that might actually care about us but don’t. It’s not a far cry from the artist in the novel who, using old photographs, creates fake histories of fake people in such moving ways the simulated lives produce real emotion he claims is no different than actual lives. Authentic living isn’t profitable the way simulated experience that can be editable to create a tight, controlled narrative is. These companies aren’t seeking your attention to help you, Smith reminds us, but to help their wallets. And division is profitable in an attention economy where clicks are capital. Why curb misinformation or extremist rhetoric when it only drives engagement from those opposing it as their supporters embrace the lies or views as a cudgel against detractors. It all becomes static so thick it’s hard to unearth truth and earnesty.
‘You don't care what we think. You just want a fight. You just want us to air. Tell what it's doing. It's making us all meaningless…and the people in power, doing it all for us, for democracy, yeah, right, pull the other one. They're doing it for their pay-off. They make us more meaningless every day.’
As with each book, Smith’s great experiment was to put out a book that captured the present seemingly as it happens and the era of post-Brexit, Trump and twitter when it was still a worthwhile service come screaming from the pages.
‘And in the spring I shed my skin, and it blows away with the changing winds.’
—Florence + The Machine, Rabbit Heart
These voices are the grinding gears of the machine Smith quips about when Brittany, while asking Florence where her machine is as a joke on the band name, realizes that she, the deportations officer, is actually her. Florence is a recurring motif in this quartet who, like Lux from Winter, brings an outside perspective (both being immigrants in the time of Brexit) but also charismatic dreamers who reinvigorate a sense of imagination and hope the other characters realize have long gone dormant inside them. Florence is the season of spring to their winter and a cipher of sorts from which the decryption of the novel can be read through her actions and words. She can also cross both the figurative and literal borders in the narrative, using her invisibility on the political scale as an useful invisibility in actual life:
‘Certain white people in particular can look right through young people and also black and mixed race people like we aren't here.’
Its a useful too in a society where ‘racism,’ as Richard points out, is ‘legitimized 24/7 on all the news and in all the papers, on so many screens, grace of the god of endless new beginnings, the god we call the internet.’ Florence serves to humanize the machine, to remind us that we aren’t data but people, to remind us, as Paddy tells her son, that we aren’t concepts but people: ‘Don't be calling it migrant crisis…I've told you a million times. It's people.’ Florence carries a book in which she writes stories and collects twitter arguments—the book is hinted to be the source of some of the disembodied interludes—and it is titled her “Hot Air” book, a title taken from her mother’s note that people will call her pleas for justice hot air but to not listen. Besides, as Smith reminds us ‘hot air rises and can not just carry us but help us rise above.’ And this is a book about rising above.
‘Sometimes, he says, we don’t know why people do what they do. But we can only do our best, the best we can do, in response, and try to be as good-humoured as possible while we do it.’
Paddy is another character who is an archetypal figure in the quart, serving a role like Daniel Gluck from Autumn as the elder mentor who is well versed in art history and politically conscious. She is known for her film Andy Hoffnung, a Holocaust film that takes it’s titular character name from Beethoven's An die Hoffnung, meaning ‘dedicated to hope’ and Paddy also serves as this driving force of hope. But in the wake of her death, she is also a reminder of winter and Richard finding the way to best honor her is thematic to this novel.
‘There’s ways to survive these times…and I think one way is the shape the telling takes.’
Paddy also serves to nudge the metafictional elements of Spring. ‘In a world of stories, maybe a door exists that opens to the possibility that the ending’s not always the same,’ writes [a:Nina MacLaughlin|8252557|Nina MacLaughlin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1570237452p2/8252557.jpg] in her essay on the winter solstice, ‘in a world of stories, maybe death is all potential, another means of moving on.’ In a story about moving on, Smith brings in multiple stories from art history to shape the telling of her own story and inform the ideas of the characters who are hoping to recover from the literal and figurative deaths. Each novel has used a work from [a:Charles Dickens|239579|Charles Dickens|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1387078070p2/239579.jpg] and here Paddy’s nickname for Richard—Doubledick—is drawn from The Story of Richard Doubledick (which you can read HERE) from [b:The Seven Poor Travellers|18943248|The Seven Poor Travellers|Charles Dickens|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1437669784l/18943248._SY75_.jpg|4971608]. It is a Christmas story that never caught on the way his [b:A Christmas Carol|5326|A Christmas Carol|Charles Dickens|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1406512317l/5326._SY75_.jpg|3097440]—a story highly influential to the imagery and narrative of Smith’s previous novel, Winter—and its theme of fighting side by side with people once thought of as enemies coincides with the dedication to hope. There is also Pericles from [a:William Shakespeare|947|William Shakespeare|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1654446514p2/947.jpg], a story of migration and family separation that replicated in the novel with Florence representative of the lost daughter, Marina, in the play. The play is also the inspiration for the artwork titled Why Cloud by British artist Tacita Dean, which appears on the final page of the novel while her The Montafon Letter, a mountain drawn from chalk on a blackboard, is viewed by Richard and inspires him to send a postcard to Paddy.
Tacita Dean’s The Montafon Letter
‘It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.’
—[a:Rainer Maria Rilke|7906|Rainer Maria Rilke|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651322555p2/7906.jpg]
Postcards, a form of connection and communication that often cross borders, are frequent in the novel, such as the postcard of the Orpheus a lover of poet [a:Rainer Maria Rilke|7906|Rainer Maria Rilke|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651322555p2/7906.jpg]’s tacked to his wall and inspired him to write the [b:The Sonnets to Orpheus|516040|The Sonnets to Orpheus|Rainer Maria Rilke|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348892761l/516040._SX50_.jpg|1210412]. As the novel opens, Richard is avoiding his work on a film by a popular director he believes is over sexualizing and undercutting the beauty of a fictional recent novel about Rilke and [a:Katherine Mansfield|45712|Katherine Mansfield|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1216670886p2/45712.jpg] who once stayed in the same Swiss hotel in 1922. While they are ‘famous writers with seemingly well-documented lives, we still know next to nothing’ and while they may have crossed paths, the direction of the film to include frequent erotic encounters Paddy points out is ‘not just laughable, it’s impossible’ considering ‘Mansfield had fully developed TB by 1922,’ which serves another instance of simulated emotions overriding authenticity in the world. Though for another real world connection, Richard receives an old copy of [b:The Collected Stories|598720|The Collected Stories|Katherine Mansfield|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1176154854l/598720._SY75_.jpg|181806] by Mansfield, a collection that was reissued in 2007 with an introduction by Ali Smith herself.
'April. It teaches us everything.'
This scene with Richard and Paddy discussing the history of 1922, however, is a perfect metafictional discussion of what Smith aims at with her novels. The Swiss mountain in the background of the Rilke/Mansfield is more than a mountain for Paddy, it’s the history of 1922 with Mussolini’s march on Rome, or the assassinations of Michael Collins, or Sir Henry Wilson, its the backdrop that is ‘everything that a mountain can mean’ as it looms behind the events of the story. And the Irish revolution looming then isn’t unlike their present.
‘Think about it, Paddy says. Ireland in uproar. Brand new union. Brand new border. Brand new ancient Irish civil unrest. Don’t tell me this isn’t relevant again in its brand new same old way.
Which is all exactly what the real world events of the present are doing in Smith’s seasonal quartet. ‘I realized that the books we write aren’t chosen by us, they choose us,’ Smith said to LA Review of Books, and her books are being created with the history unfolding around her, ‘I’m going with their momentum.’
‘True hope is actually the absence of hope.’
While of the three this book is the darkest and saddest, it never feels weighed down by it. Smith’s wordplay is always joyful and she infuses so much humor into every aspect of the novel. Even dark moments inside the detention center, Brit’s lack of self-awareness is playful when she corrects a detainee saying ‘this isn’t a prison, it’s a purpose-built Immigration Removal Center with a prison design.’ Meanwhile the constant chatter of Florence and the bewilderment of those around her is delightful and keeps the novel buoyant, though I am just always in amazement at the witty ways Smith can experiment with language for multi-faceted effect.
‘We’ll begin again. We’ll revolve.
You mean we’ll evolve, Brit says.
No, I mean revolve, the girl says. As in revolution. We’ll roll forward to a new place.
You mean revolt, Brit says. You’re talking about revolting.
I mean revolve, the girl says.
No you don’t, Brit says.
I do. We’ll turn it round, the girl says. We’ll do it all differently.’
Ultimately, Spring is a novel coming out of the darkness and towards hope. And in dark tales we often find heroes who, like in fairy tales, will go to great lengths to do great things. Such as a group ‘disappearing people from a system which has already disappeared them’ and getting them to safety, or a little girl who can walk past security and get a prison to clean its toilets. Spring is about looking the great grinding machine in the face and not being afraid to tell it no. It is about humanizing the machine. It is a wonderful novel and another perfect installment in a series that has taken me by the head and heart and quickly become one of my favorite reading experiences to read each in their proper season. In Spring, you truly feel the essence of springtime.
4.5/5
‘And if you die before me, he says, I will spend all the time I’m alive and not with you negotiating the various time differences across the world so that I can spend as much time as a man possibly can on this planet in springtime.’
kateolivia's review against another edition
1.0
in short: i have tried, but i don't like ali smith's writing.
miffy4real's review against another edition
4.0
narrative spirals ! read on a beach that was sponsored by the eu revitalization project — prescient for the book
aaanna_'s review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
3.0