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A Novel (Seasonal Quartet)
by Ali Smith
Book Reviewed by:Smith's shapeshifting novel casts a warm, wise, merry and uncompromising eye over a post-truth era in a story rooted in history and memory and with a taproot deep in the evergreens, art and love.
WINTER. Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. And now Art's mother is seeing things.
Come to think of it, Art's seeing things himself.
When four people, strangers and family, converge on a fifteen-bedroom house in Cornwall for Christmas, will there be enough room for everyone?
Winter. It makes things visible. In Ali Smith's Winter, life-force matches up to the toughest of the seasons.
Excerpt
Winter
On a late summer day in 1981 two young women are standing outside a typical ironmonger's on the high street of a southern English town. There is a sign above the door in the shape of a door key, on it the words KEYS CUT. There'll be a high smell of creosote, oil, paraffin, lawn treatment stuff. There'll be brushheads with handles, brushheads without handles, handles by themselves, for sale. What else? Rakes, spades, forks, a garden roller, a wall of stepladders, a tin bath full of bags of compost. Calor gas bottles, saucepans, frying pans, mopheads, charcoal, folding stools made of wood, a plastic bucket of plungers, stacked packs of sandpaper, sacks of sand in a wheelbarrow, metal doormats, axes, hammers, a camping stove or two, hessian carpet mats, stuff for curtains, stuff for curtain rails, stuff for screwing curtain rails to walls and pelmets, pliers, screwdrivers, bulbs, lamps, pails, pegs, laundry baskets. Saws, of all sizes. EVERYTHING FOR THE HOME...
Winter is not equivalent to the sum of its plot points. Smith uses her characters and their actions to subtly dig at issues both political and personal. Though these are weighty topics, Smith uses her small-frame story to handle them in a manageable and more realistic way. I wouldn't be able to do justice to Winter, or any Ali Smith book, for that matter, without discussing the glorious writing style. Her love for words and literature seeps through the pages of everything she writes...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Meara Conner).
An integral part of Ali Smith's Winter are the frequent allusions and references made to other excellent works of literature. Though it would be nearly impossible to catalog them all, here are a few.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Dickens' famous work is referenced from the very outset of Winter in the opening line: "God was dead; to begin with," which is a play on the opening line of A Christmas Carol: "Marley was dead; to begin with." In fact, an entire list could likely be made consisting only of Smith's references to Dickens' novel. If you've read A Christmas Carol before, reading Winter will certainly make you want to revisit it, and if you haven't, I highly recommend picking it up regardless, if only to catch all of Smith's...
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If you liked Winter, try these:
by Jenny Offill
Published 2021
From the author of the nationwide bestseller Dept. of Speculation--one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year--a shimmering tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis.
by Margaret Drabble
Published 2018
A magnificently mordant reckoning with mortality by the great British novelist.
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