A review by colinlusk
How to Be Both by Ali Smith

5.0

I took this on holiday to be my delicious beach read. It was harder-going than I expected though, and not even nearly as munchable as the seasonal quartet. As you probably know, it's in two parts, and some editions have the "modern" part before the historical part. Mine was in what I regard as the "right" order, but that means I was immediately thrown in at the deep end with some very non-beachy reading. It faded in via some odd poetry, followed by some strange, broken-up sentences before solidifying into a narrative. The protagonist is a renaissance artist who has died and is looking back on his/her life. The painter is real - Francesco del Cossa - so why do I say "his/her"? Well, have a read and you'll see. It's fascinating but it's pretty hard work at first, and it took me about 3 days to warm to it. Finally, after telling its story, it fades out in much the same way as it started, breaking up into looser language and poetry
The second (in my edition) part is much easier and I flew through it. A pedantic teenager is looking back not on her own life and death but her mother's. There are all sorts of callbacks to the first story, not least that the mother became obsessed with the artist and the palace whose decoraction forms the backdrop of their story. On one level, the book is about loss and mourning, but there's a deeper theme about memory and whether something, or somebody really leaves a mark when they're not remembered. Along the way, there's some good stuff about friendship, about the different ways men and women create art and about the value of artistic creation itself. So in the end, despite worrying I'd picked the wrong book, it turned out to be a hugely entertaining and rewarding read.