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Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real—and all life's givens get given a second chance.
Man Booker Prize Finalist
Winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize
Winner of the Costa Best Novel Award
Winner of the Saltire Literary Book of the Year Award
A Best Book of the Year: NPR, Financial Times
Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. How to be Both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s.Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.
This book has a dual structure and can be read in two ways. There are two stories in the book and they can be read in either order.
Excerpt
How to be Both
Consider this moral conundrum for a moment, George's mother says to George who's sitting in the front passenger seat.
Not says. Said.
George's mother is dead.
What moral conundrum? George says.
The passenger seat in the hire car is strange, being on the side the driver's seat is on at home. This must be a bit like driving is, except without the actual, you know, driving.
Okay. You're an artist, her mother says.
Am I? George says. Since when? And is that a moral conundrum?
Ha ha, her mother says. Humour me. Imagine it. You're an artist.
This conversation is happening last May, when George's mother is still alive, obviously. She's been dead since September. Now it's January, to be more precise it's just past midnight on New Year's Eve, which means it has just become the year after the year in which George's mother died.
George's father is out. It is better than him being at home, standing maudlin in the ...
Costa Book Awards
2014
Women's Prize for Fiction
2015
Whichever way you read it, How to Be Both is a wide-eyed look at the world’s magic. It is breathless with both joy and sorrow, with the miracle of being alive and the grief of someone you love being taken suddenly from the living. “So always risk your skin, and never fear losing it,” Francesco del Cosa’s mother tells her. Indeed, Ali Smith has risked her skin with her bold reimagining of the novel. And indeed, we are the better for it...continued
Full Review
(1029 words)
(Reviewed by Naomi Benaron).
Early Fresco Painting
Ali Smith's How to Be Both was inspired by a book she found about frescoes. Fresco, meaning "fresh" in Italian, is the technique of painting in water-based pigment on wet plaster so that the plaster, paint and wall fuse into a single entity. The earliest known examples date from c. 1500 BCE, on the island of Crete, the center of Minoan civilization. One of the more stunning fresco paintings is of a Flying Bull at the Palace of Knossos, which was the seat of Minoan culture. The painting shows a bull in mid leap with a man at his horns, another leaping over his back, and a third behind the bull's kicking feet. The work, with its sweeping curves and detailed and accurate muscularity of both men and bull, exhibits a sense...
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