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opusfra 's review for:
How to Be Both
by Ali Smith
Wonderful stuff. I loved the tone and pace of the book, and the voices of George and Francescho are irrestistibly sad and wise. In an NY Times piece, one of the threads of the story was described as the 'slippery nature of time', which comes out beautifully as we follow the protagonists while their stories entwine and separate. Everything has duality in this book, be it gender, mortality, happiness, sexuality or whatever you like. Art is the overriding protagonist, the way we make instinctive, not literal associations between what we see and what we feel. We take in sections of a painting, then we race on to the next section, looking for the links, piecing the information together, and Ali Smith writes in the same way, referring to characters and events in an incomplete way, moving on to the next before we have fully digested what we have already read. The singers and songs, the artists and paintings, the film directors and movie stars are rarely named, merely described, because that is how we appreciate art - in vague refences, in connections, not specifically or exactly. Such skill.