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A review by ingeborg_frey
Autumn by Ali Smith
16.08.2020
Ahhh!!
Only two pages into Autumn and just half-way in August, and it already gave me a massive heart-ache. Each autumn it is the same thing. When the book shops set out signs in their windows advertising "huge sale on back-packs and note books! Are you ready for the school year??" and the air freshens and the attitudes of people in the streets change slightly, from lazy calm relaxed summer strolling, into walking with a purpose, looking into stores not to pass time but to buy something specific, like a marker or a new bread knife or a pack of socks. This is multiplied by me living in a student city, where anywhere you look there are students packing and unpacking cars with their stuff into or out of shared apartments, students walking by carrying lamp shades and drying racks, students in small groups with their necks bent back as they pass the university buildings. I start looking for Norwegian apples in the grocery stores - anytime now. The flower beds in town are blooming. About six o'clock in the afternoon you need a jacket or sweater to keep warm. This happens every autumn.
this leads to the anticipation of a new year
The feeling of leaving something behind and also beginning on something new (one can not exist without the other)
the beginning of a school year
Nostalgia and hopefulness at the same time.
The idea Ali Smith has is that each season is a reliving of all the other experiences of that season, and that each season also holds within it the other seasons (F.eks. it seems like there are actually more flowers in bloom in the beginning of autumn than in the spring/summer. And the autumn is the symbol of something coming to an end, with leaves falling off branches and rotting in slimy, beautiful piles on pavements and clinging to shoe soles. But it is also a beginning of a new year (students) and the anticipation of learning something new, (who have my friends become over the summer holiday and what will the friendship bring now), the unpacking of new note-books and calculators and turning the backpack upside down out of the window to shake out all the pencil shavings from last semester. And in spring the flowers are opening and the streets dry up and everything grows out of hard tiny buds into bright, yellow-green waxy material. But spring is also the end of the year, and brings with it exams and good-byes and rose distributions at ceremonies and your grades on a piece of paper in an envelope and people moving away to continue life somewhere else.)
In that way time is not chronological. While reading this book i printed my first articles for psychology courses I am taking this autumn, and read about Emotion-Focused Therapy. The idea is that our brain records emotional responses in certain situations or experiences and that by doing so, the next time you find yourself in a similar experience/situation there is a short-cut which leads to the same emotional response. Another helpful function of the brain (how else would we learn anything or have any predictability?) which can be problematic if what you experience is negative. Emotion is in a way similar to the seasons in the Ali Smith Universe of Non-Linear Time Where a Thing is more than one Thing at the time.
An autumn includes all the previous autumns experienced.
An emotional response includes all the previous situations which led to it.
that being said, Autumn felt very much like a book about leaves falling off, rotting and never returning. An old man is drying up in a care home, fences are built. It is called the Brexit novel and a large portion of it is about division, saying goodbye, letting things go, loosing both humans and narrative. Maybe the autumn is now more an end than a beginning.
Mainly I think it is a book about humanity. (the question is - are we arriving at the end of humanity?) What we want is truth and communication and interpersonal relations. We want to be welcomed and listened to and seen. This is what storytelling symbolizes in Autumn. But it is not what we are getting. we are turning the world into a place where borders decide who is allowed to do what, tiny electronic documents determine who we are as persons (passports being the metaphor in Autumn), and talking is no longer about communication.
It is a bleak picture of the future, but such a vibrant book. It is full of life. Orange!
I have finished it now, and can not wait for lectures, mittens and christmas present shopping.
Ahhh!!
Only two pages into Autumn and just half-way in August, and it already gave me a massive heart-ache. Each autumn it is the same thing. When the book shops set out signs in their windows advertising "huge sale on back-packs and note books! Are you ready for the school year??" and the air freshens and the attitudes of people in the streets change slightly, from lazy calm relaxed summer strolling, into walking with a purpose, looking into stores not to pass time but to buy something specific, like a marker or a new bread knife or a pack of socks. This is multiplied by me living in a student city, where anywhere you look there are students packing and unpacking cars with their stuff into or out of shared apartments, students walking by carrying lamp shades and drying racks, students in small groups with their necks bent back as they pass the university buildings. I start looking for Norwegian apples in the grocery stores - anytime now. The flower beds in town are blooming. About six o'clock in the afternoon you need a jacket or sweater to keep warm. This happens every autumn.
this leads to the anticipation of a new year
The feeling of leaving something behind and also beginning on something new (one can not exist without the other)
the beginning of a school year
Nostalgia and hopefulness at the same time.
The idea Ali Smith has is that each season is a reliving of all the other experiences of that season, and that each season also holds within it the other seasons (F.eks. it seems like there are actually more flowers in bloom in the beginning of autumn than in the spring/summer. And the autumn is the symbol of something coming to an end, with leaves falling off branches and rotting in slimy, beautiful piles on pavements and clinging to shoe soles. But it is also a beginning of a new year (students) and the anticipation of learning something new, (who have my friends become over the summer holiday and what will the friendship bring now), the unpacking of new note-books and calculators and turning the backpack upside down out of the window to shake out all the pencil shavings from last semester. And in spring the flowers are opening and the streets dry up and everything grows out of hard tiny buds into bright, yellow-green waxy material. But spring is also the end of the year, and brings with it exams and good-byes and rose distributions at ceremonies and your grades on a piece of paper in an envelope and people moving away to continue life somewhere else.)
In that way time is not chronological. While reading this book i printed my first articles for psychology courses I am taking this autumn, and read about Emotion-Focused Therapy. The idea is that our brain records emotional responses in certain situations or experiences and that by doing so, the next time you find yourself in a similar experience/situation there is a short-cut which leads to the same emotional response. Another helpful function of the brain (how else would we learn anything or have any predictability?) which can be problematic if what you experience is negative. Emotion is in a way similar to the seasons in the Ali Smith Universe of Non-Linear Time Where a Thing is more than one Thing at the time.
An autumn includes all the previous autumns experienced.
An emotional response includes all the previous situations which led to it.
that being said, Autumn felt very much like a book about leaves falling off, rotting and never returning. An old man is drying up in a care home, fences are built. It is called the Brexit novel and a large portion of it is about division, saying goodbye, letting things go, loosing both humans and narrative. Maybe the autumn is now more an end than a beginning.
Mainly I think it is a book about humanity. (the question is - are we arriving at the end of humanity?) What we want is truth and communication and interpersonal relations. We want to be welcomed and listened to and seen. This is what storytelling symbolizes in Autumn. But it is not what we are getting. we are turning the world into a place where borders decide who is allowed to do what, tiny electronic documents determine who we are as persons (passports being the metaphor in Autumn), and talking is no longer about communication.
It is a bleak picture of the future, but such a vibrant book. It is full of life. Orange!
I have finished it now, and can not wait for lectures, mittens and christmas present shopping.