Smith is a trickster, an etymologist, a fantasist, a pun-freak, an ontologist, a transgenrenatrix, an ypomonist—O.K., now I'm just making up words. Smith might approve. A wordsmith to the very smithy of her soul, she is at once deeply playful and deeply serious. And her new book, in which she tugs at God's sleeve, ruminates on clowns, shoplifts used books, dabbles in Greek and palavers with the dead, is a stunner…these are like no lectures you've ever encountered. Part ghost story, part love story, part mystery, part ode, they weave a narrative that feels more urgent, more naked than academia commonly allows. This is good. Good because exciting; it hooks us. And good because in taking this approach, Smith goes a long way toward restoring the arid subject of comp lit to its more rightful state, something vital and raw.
Artful
Artful
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Overview
In 2012, Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne's College, Oxford. Those lectures, presented here, took the shape of discursive stories that refused to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form. Thus, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted-literally-by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds between storytelling and a meditation on art that encompasses love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith's heady powers as fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that art and life are never separate.
Artful is a celebration of and meaningful contribution to literature's enduring worth in the world. There has never been a book quite like it.
Editorial Reviews
…equal parts ghost story and academic treatise…clumsy but seductive…Ms. Smith has an agile and mischievous mind. Artful injects more pleasure into your head than some books that aren't clumsy at all…It's a book with unusual nooks and crannies, a book that pulses with minor-chord heartache…
09/30/2013
Ali Smith delivered a collection of lectures in 2012 on European literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, that are presented here through the first-person voice of a fictional woman confronted by the physical presence of her husband, despite his death. The lectures weave together different times, movements, and elements of the arts to consider not only what art is, but also the purposes it serves and the ways it moves people. With a Scottish accent that simultaneously reveals pain for the passing husband and celebrates life and art, Smith adds complexity and meaning to the book through her narration. Her shifts from soulful to smiling can occur over the course of just a few words, and she uses her tone and timing to the fullest effect in these moments. Her soft but inviting voice seduces listeners and keeps their attention throughout. A Penguin Press hardcover. (May)
This contemplative, electrifying, and transformative book comes in four sections, originally delivered as lectures on comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Readers, however, won’t find themselves on the other side of the lectern. Instead, Smith (There but for the), writing in the first person but not necessarily as Ali Smith, opens with grief: the I-persona has recently lost her longtime love and, still in the throes of despair a year later, turns to the papers and research left on her beloved’s desk, ostensibly for a series of talks on literature—the substance of which becomes much of Smith’s actual lectures. Through riveting reflections on the limitations and the limitlessness of stories, Smith considers four aspects of the endeavor of creation: on “time,” “form,” “edge,” and “offer and reflection.” Yet what Smith also provides is the I-persona’s own journey, through her anguish, through her responses to her beloved’s notes and ideas (which the reader also reads) and through some “real” life (visits with a therapist, some mentions of work, etc.). The results are redemptive for everyone, testifying with singular clarity and wit to the immutable necessity for art. (Jan. 28)
"A stimulating combination of literary criticism, essay, and fiction. Smith’s writing is ethereal... funny."
—The New Yorker
"These brief, acrobatic lectures... perform spectacular feats of criticism. Each is as playful as it is powerful, as buoyant as it is brilliant."
—NPR Books
"A wordsmith to the very smithy of her soul, [Smith] is at once deeply playful and deeply serious. And her new book, in which she tugs at God's sleeve, ruminates on clowns, shoplifts used books, dabbles in Greek and palavers with the dead, is a stunner."
—New York Times Book Review
"What a treat…. Artful is a love story full of everything - mind and body, past, present and future. The last lines of this wonderful book are spoken by the narrator: '(Who did I think I was talking to? You.)' Thank you, Ali Smith, from all of us."
—San Francisco Chronicle
"Smith dealt before with grief in relation to the passing of time in her 2001 novel, Hotel World. The clever structure on show in Artful allows her to expand on this theme and enables the reader to delve back in at random and be entranced all over again."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Ms. Smith has an agile and mischievous mind. I will keep this book on my shelves forever, I suspect, for one line alone, a play on the song 'Smile,' made famous by Nat King Cole. (Charlie Chaplin wrote the music.) 'Simile,' Ms. Smith writes, 'though your heart is breaking.' If that doesn't make you happy you may be, like the writer in this book, dead... It's speckled with elegant allusion... It's a book with unusual nooks and crannies, a book that pulses with minor-chord heartache... What matters in both life and literature, this book suggests, is to keep trying to connect."
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"One of the marvelous things about this book is its reconciliation of the serious — both in the form of this crumbling, smelly guest and in its ardent advocacy of art — and light. Smith, whose love of words and skill at wordplay has already been made apparent in her stories and novels, performs dodge after dodge after dodge… What Smith has done with Artful is to invent a new form apart from form, to build a kind of Frankenstein’s monster inside the act of art."
—The Los Angeles Review of Books
"Artful is full of crossings and parallels. It is thought in 3-D. It is artful, which the book itself observes is the name given to the Oliver Twist character of the Dodger: the one who animates the story, who brings life to it."
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Contemplative, electrifying, and transformative....Through riveting reflections on the limitations and the limitlessness of stories, Smith considers four aspects of the endeavor of creation: on 'time, 'form,' 'edge,' and 'offer and reflection.' The results are redemptive for everyone, testifying with singular clarity and wit to the immutable necessity for art."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[An] extraordinary journey... Smith's storytelling facility and critical eye are evident in the fact that this ongoing conversation about time, memory, loss, longing, love, art and nature stirs the mind and heart all the more because it takes place between the imagination and reality. A soulful intellectual inquiry and reflection on life and art, artfully done."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Smith daringly splits herself into two captivating voices... This scintillating conversation showcases Smith’s own gifts as a creative writer. But it also reminds readers of how great literature—of Shakespeare, Lawrence, Hopkins, Ovid, Plath, Rilke, and Flaubert—requires them to reorient their line of vision. Nothing—Smith shows her reader—forces such reorientation more than violating conventional boundaries, often in dangerous ways. These most unlecture-like of lectures deliver the thrill of perilous border crossings."
—Booklist
"Smart, allusive, informal, playful, audacious. (It's true. I think I am in love with Ali Smith.) Artful is a gift from Ali Smith to her reader. It's a book no one else could have written, or would have. Smith has a critic's eye, but fills her book with the novelist's art, and the novelist's heart."
—Independent on Sunday
"Glittering inventiveness. Not just a ghost story, but also a love letter. As emotionally freighted as a piece of storytelling, as intellectually rigorous as an academic's essay."
—Independent
"Smith's exuberance and cleverness delight. This is a sparky, inspiring, charm-laden little book that makes you want to read more and differently."
—The Week
"A wonderful achievement. Smith is so readable, likable, witty, and difficult to put down, that it makes you wonder why more people don't make use of her. She could make David Cameron interesting. Artful is a uniquely accessible work of criticism at the same time as it's a haunting fictional portrayal of grief, lost love and the power of art. Smith possesses rare levels of genius. She deserves to be read and discussed by every single person who has an interest in literature today."
—Bookmunch
One of the marvelous things about this book is its reconciliation of the serious—both in the form of this crumbling, smelly guest and in its ardent advocacy of art—and light. Smith, whose love of words and skill at wordplay has already been made apparent in her stories and novels, performs dodge after dodge after dodge. . . . What Smith has done with Artful is to invent a new form apart from form, to build a kind of Frankenstein’s monster inside the act of art.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
One of the marvelous things about this book is its reconciliation of the serious—both in the form of this crumbling, smelly guest and in its ardent advocacy of art—and light. Smith, whose love of words and skill at wordplay has already been made apparent in her stories and novels, performs dodge after dodge after dodge. . . . What Smith has done with Artful is to invent a new form apart from form, to build a kind of Frankenstein’s monster inside the act of art.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
Smith dealt before with grief in relation to the passing of time in her 2001 novel, "Hotel World." The clever structure on show in "Artful" allows her to expand on this theme and enables the reader to delve back in at random and be entranced all over again.
What a treat…. Artful is a love story full of everything - mind and body, past, present and future. The last lines of this wonderful book are spoken by the narrator: "(Who did I think I was talking to? You.)" Thank you, Ali Smith, from all of us.
A wordsmith to the very smithy of her soul, [Smith] is at once deeply playful and deeply serious. And her new book, in which she tugs at God's sleeve, ruminates on clowns, shoplifts used books, dabbles in Greek and palavers with the dead, is a stunner.
These brief, acrobatic lectures…perform spectacular feats of criticism. Each is as playful as it is powerful, as buoyant as it is brilliant.
Ms. Smith has an agile and mischievous mind. I will keep this book on my shelves forever, I suspect, for one line alone, a play on the song “Smile,” made famous by Nat King Cole. (Charlie Chaplin wrote the music.) “Simile,” Ms. Smith writes, “though your heart is breaking.” If that doesn't make you happy you may be, like the writer in this book, dead... It's speckled with elegant allusion... It's a book with unusual nooks and crannies, a book that pulses with minor-chord heartache... What matters in both life and literature, this book suggests, is to keep trying to connect.
11/01/2013
Toward the beginning of the first of the four lectures that make up Smith's new book, she quotes Matthew Reynolds on Sappho, saying, "The longing in the fragments was doubled by a longing felt by readers for the fragments themselves to be made whole," adding, "It is the act of making it up, from the combination of what we've got and what we haven't, that makes the human, makes the art…." Fitting then, that Smith's book is made up of four unfinished literary lectures. Everyone from Michelangelo to Beyoncé is referenced, as our narrator wanders through days and thoughts in a dense collage of words, haunted by the lover who is gone. There is grief here but also a joyful spirit at work in the form of wordplay and appreciation for the transformative power of art. Smith reads the audio version, and while American readers may at first be challenged by her quick speech and Scottish accent, there is a moving intimacy to her narration. VERDICT Readers of serious literature and poetry will find this a rich, worthy listen.—Heather Malcolm, Bow, WA
Originally presented as a series of four lectures, ARTFUL is an intriguing combination of fact and fiction about grief, art, literature, and philosophy. Author Ali Smith's narration is practiced, with well- thought-out timing and emphasis. Throughout the novel, she presents much to ponder, covering such disparate subjects as OLIVER TWIST, ghosts, popular music, and poetry. The unnamed protagonist finds the commonalities among these seemingly random thoughts, coming full circle as she grieves over the death of her lover. Despite Smith's comfort and skill in the recording studio, listeners will be frustrated by the audio medium. This novel invites pauses for reflection and rereading for savoring the prose. Smith's performance is well worth hearing but is better if preceded by reading ARTFUL in print. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Acclaimed Scottish novelist Smith (There but for the, 2011, etc.) considers the places where art and life intersect, sometimes collide and meld. The guide on this extraordinary journey is a woman who, after "twelvemonth and a day" of mourning, sees her dead lover before her. She offers the apparition tea and begins to ask questions, but the responses are garbled and confused. Smith's storytelling facility and critical eye are evident in the fact that this ongoing conversation--adapted from a series of lectures at St. Anne's College, Oxford--about time, memory, loss, longing, love, art and nature stirs the mind and heart all the more because it takes place between the imagination and reality. In the essay "On time," Smith reminds us of Shakespeare's "Devouring Time, Time's pencil, Time's fell and injurious hand, Time's scythe, Time's fickle glass." Even books, she writes, are "tangible pieces of time in our hands…they travel with us, they accompany us from our pasts into our futures…." In each of the essays, the woman continues her struggle with grief and letting go. Her lost lover returns again and again in an alarming state of increasing decay, and she regrets the failings of her imagination to call up an odorless, less-ragged form. Smith seamlessly connects the narrator's smart, funny, regret-infused observations to an expansive discussion of aesthetics, metaphor, the tension between form and fluidity, what it means to be on the edge in life and art, the power of Oliver Twist (in all its forms) and Alfred Hitchcock movies, and the acts of giving and taking. On this quest, the author goes into the "margins that burn with the energy of edit" to shed light on the human spirit through art. But does the grieving woman ever let go of her lover's spirit and move on? It's all beautifully revealed. A soulful intellectual inquiry and reflection on life and art, artfully done.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940171734213 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HighBridge Company |
| Publication date: | 05/21/2013 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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