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As rich and linguistically playful as its predecessor, I am continually stunned by the treasure that is Ali Smith, and mortified that it took me so long to truly get into her work!
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Slabije mi je od Jeseni, ali to je i dalje Ali, tako da moram dati 5 ⭐.
That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you.
ali smith is a master at fleshing out the brain of a character for us blessed readers to follow! i can't say winter is at the same level as autumn for me — there were running jokes that got boring to me (lux being "dumb", celebrities passing) but you can definitely still find fun anecdotes as you read. perhaps disliking most characters made it hard to care about wherever the story is going. i essentially got through the book to know what ali smith would come up with next, in what way would she express a certain character's specific world view in a moment in time
It took me a while to realise it, but this book (well, this quartet) is brilliant. It is reading something that is so other-worldly, yet so familiar. Incredibly experimental in its devices and storytelling, yet so deeply entrenched in our world and our lives. I typically steer away from modern narrative that touches on current events and politics (as it is easy to get overwhelmed), but Smith does it in such a unique and compelling way that it actually increases the impact. By reorganising and imagining our current crises and events, we reconsider our perception of them, as we have become so desensitized by everything bad that it takes new and creative ways of depicting them to truly understand their force. For example, the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017. I watch it on the news, feel bad momentarily, and then move on. It's insane. But in this book? Devastating. And yet, there's hope? It's hard to explain, really hard to explain. The story is so abstract that it's difficult to pin down, as new symbols and motifs appear seemingly with every page, drawing your attention to a wide array of interpretations. It's easy to get overwhelmed by everything, but that's not dissimilar to what we experience every day. All you can do is find the glimmers of hope amidst the rubble, and when you do, it's beautiful. Great book.
challenging
funny
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Really I don’t know how you can review this book within a few paragraphs or at all (a skill I find difficult anyway). It’s both complicated and simple.
It’s a book that often made me sit and wonder, am I missing something? Is there more to this sentence? What does this really mean? I definitely went into this read knowing it would be different and definitely have to caveat that this is my first of the quartet series, I knew it would challenge me in many ways and so I think part of that also led me to have these questions preset, I was determined to keep up with the book (and the very clever people I was reading it with). In hindsight, I am not sure I needed to. But I am really glad I did have those questions and the context of when the book was written (Trump just elected, Brexit actually became a thing - remember that the reality that both of those things actually happened, still gives me the chills) it did enable me to pick up on more symbolism but I know I missed so many more.
I think the feel of Dickens in this is magical, as with a Christmas Carol, it's a book of its times. It’s a book about humans and our responsibility to do more and do it better ‘Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We’ve got to come up with a better answer.’ It’s a book about realising that each person we meet has their own context, relationships, memories (that can be both shared but remembered differently) and lives and of all the things we carry around with us, the layers of baskets we carry handed to us by the generations before us and added to by ourselves before we too pass it on. It’s also so much more than this but to dissect it all would be too much.
What I totally wasn’t expecting about this book was humour, lightness, the characters both lovable and relatable. I was expecting deep and complicated (which it was) but as with Winter the light surprises you sometimes and breaks the dark and it is exactly what you needed.
I come away from this book still with a million questions and thoughts. Still not totally sure how I feel about it. But I come away as a better reader because I was challenged by the book and by the group I read it with. I come away with a renewed sense that literature is Art and we all take different things from it. Whether it's 5 stars or 1 doesn’t seem to matter so much with this because whatever way you look at it, it's a masterpiece and that’s the point you can look at it so many different ways.
It’s a book that often made me sit and wonder, am I missing something? Is there more to this sentence? What does this really mean? I definitely went into this read knowing it would be different and definitely have to caveat that this is my first of the quartet series, I knew it would challenge me in many ways and so I think part of that also led me to have these questions preset, I was determined to keep up with the book (and the very clever people I was reading it with). In hindsight, I am not sure I needed to. But I am really glad I did have those questions and the context of when the book was written (Trump just elected, Brexit actually became a thing - remember that the reality that both of those things actually happened, still gives me the chills) it did enable me to pick up on more symbolism but I know I missed so many more.
I think the feel of Dickens in this is magical, as with a Christmas Carol, it's a book of its times. It’s a book about humans and our responsibility to do more and do it better ‘Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We’ve got to come up with a better answer.’ It’s a book about realising that each person we meet has their own context, relationships, memories (that can be both shared but remembered differently) and lives and of all the things we carry around with us, the layers of baskets we carry handed to us by the generations before us and added to by ourselves before we too pass it on. It’s also so much more than this but to dissect it all would be too much.
What I totally wasn’t expecting about this book was humour, lightness, the characters both lovable and relatable. I was expecting deep and complicated (which it was) but as with Winter the light surprises you sometimes and breaks the dark and it is exactly what you needed.
I come away from this book still with a million questions and thoughts. Still not totally sure how I feel about it. But I come away as a better reader because I was challenged by the book and by the group I read it with. I come away with a renewed sense that literature is Art and we all take different things from it. Whether it's 5 stars or 1 doesn’t seem to matter so much with this because whatever way you look at it, it's a masterpiece and that’s the point you can look at it so many different ways.
I was hoping Winter would be as good as Autumn, but it didn't have the same lyrical quality (at least to me).