Take a photo of a barcode or cover
Told in a scattered way, the story left too much unresolved or undeveloped for me. I'm almost certainly missing some symbolic sleight of hand, the knowledge of which would improve my enjoyment of the book.
Sophia appears to be gripped by dementia or clinically depressed and the other characters operate as if with no knowledge of mental ill health. She is sufficiently intelligent to run a successful business and at once dangerously incompetent. It left me feeling I had accidentally skipped a chapter that explained this contradiction.
The story of sibling emnity is haltingly teased over the course of the novel, and I'm not sure I successfully followed it. This may well be down to my own halting reading of the book or my ignorance of Cymbeline which which I've neither seen nor read.
Our main protagonist is a (polite words fail me) tosser. He stumbles around in a cloud of self deceit and is incapable of glimpsing much beyond it. I guess we're meant to see him as a cipher for childhood trauma, himself a Hepworth statue with a hole where an important part of himself should be, but the construction of this beguiling metaphor isn't quite enough to make me care.
The writing is super - it's Ali Smith after all - but I'll have to read the darn thing again before I can say the same of the book as a whole.
Sophia appears to be gripped by dementia or clinically depressed and the other characters operate as if with no knowledge of mental ill health. She is sufficiently intelligent to run a successful business and at once dangerously incompetent. It left me feeling I had accidentally skipped a chapter that explained this contradiction.
The story of sibling emnity is haltingly teased over the course of the novel, and I'm not sure I successfully followed it. This may well be down to my own halting reading of the book or my ignorance of Cymbeline which which I've neither seen nor read.
Our main protagonist is a (polite words fail me) tosser. He stumbles around in a cloud of self deceit and is incapable of glimpsing much beyond it. I guess we're meant to see him as a cipher for childhood trauma, himself a Hepworth statue with a hole where an important part of himself should be, but the construction of this beguiling metaphor isn't quite enough to make me care.
The writing is super - it's Ali Smith after all - but I'll have to read the darn thing again before I can say the same of the book as a whole.