How to Be Both

I usually cringe when I hear the word "rich" about a book or a movie. But that's what this book is. It brings off the post-modern touch (which is lighter than many other post-modern touches) -- being really new and interesting stylistically without just falling into some kind of annoying self-indulgence.

For the basics, there are two stories (presented in opposite orders in different copies of the book) that give us a lot of fodder for making parallels. One follows a 15th century fresco painter and the other a mother and daughter in the present. The fresco painter is Francescho/Francescha, a cleverly subversive artist whose work survives to be seen by George/Georgia and her mother in the present. The obvious parallel between Francescha, show more who adopts a male identity in order to learn and practice her trade, and Georgia, called the masculine George, is almost too obvious to talk about.

But the parallels you can construct get better, and many of them have to do with subversion. Francescha is a subversive artist, whose fresco contains subtle acts of rebellion and individuality. Over time her name becomes forgotten although her work not only survives but becomes almost a popular tourist attraction (which exists in reality --you can find the fresco by Piero della Francesca online). George's mother is an anonymous author of "subverts" -- small messages hacked into websites to make serious things unserious and unserious things serious. Both produce subversive messages that undermine the order of things -- anomalies that disrupt the neat story we like to tell about how things are or about our lives. Francescha's life and work, like both George and her mother, have those anomalies at their core.

There's so much here to play with -- the presence of the past (the 15th century story) in the present (George's story), the presence of George's now dead mother in her present life, the sexual subversiveness in almost all of the main characters, the parallel between the fresco as the social medium of its time and the intrusion of subverts into the web, as the social medium of our time, . . . You can go on and on, and all of them are interesting to play with.

What I most like is that the book is rich enough to avoid having a "meaning". As George says to her Counselor at one point, "I'm so, so tired of what stories are meant to mean. . . " It's about finding meaning, more than about the meaning you find. I think that's the point -- there's no meaning to the story, but it's a great story for finding meaning.

I hope that makes sense. This is a book to have fun thinking about. I loved it for that. show less

This is another wonderfully light, clever and charming novel that tricks you into thinking it a lot less profound and serious than it really is. Smith seems to be rubbing away at the boundaries we use to define dualities like life/death, masculine/feminine, now/then, here/there, gay/straight, etc., and reminding us that what looks absolute in the physical world needn't be quite so well-defined in the way we perceive the world imaginatively.

The famous gimmick of the book, of course, was that the narrative came in two parts, one from the point of view of George, a modern teenage girl grieving for her dead mother, and the other from that of the long-dead and almost forgotten 15th century Bolognese painter, Francesco del Cossa. Half the show more copies (including the one I read) were printed with George first, the other half with Francesco first, and it was pure chance which you got. Fun, but an odd sort of experiment, because unless you buy multiple copies or read a review, you won't even know that it's going on...

It's a very visual book, referring frequently and in detail to images - not just Francesco's paintings, but also posters and photographs, including the iconic picture of the 60s French singers Françoise Hardy and Sylvie Vartan (by Jean-Marie Périer) that is on the front cover. For other images mentioned in the text, you're going to have to do some Googling, and I think that's also part of the experimental nature of the book (in the George narrative, Smith helpfully tells us some of the search keywords we need to use). But there's also a lot of linguistic play going on, and plenty of literary allusion too, including a number of indirect references to Giorgio Bassani's novels set in Ferrara and Bologna. Another famous son of Ferrara, the film director Michelangelo Antonioni, also gets a few mentions. Not a book that allows you to doze off!

I was particularly impressed by how convincing I found Smith's portrayal of George - it would be interesting to know whether a modern teenager would be equally convinced, of course! But the key thing obviously isn't that she's tuned into the way kids of the smartphone generation think, but rather that she's so in touch with what it felt like to be an adolescent herself that she can map that experience onto a contemporary setting without us ever noticing that there was any trickery involved. Obviously, with Francesco she doesn't have the same difficulties, since no-one has set a standard for how dead 15th-century painters should talk when they find themselves observing modern Britain (the only book I recall that uses a similar narrative trick is Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen, and Korean royals are not at all the same thing as Italian painters...). show less

This beautiful, swift book takes on themes of loss and grief, gender and identity, art and family and love and friendship. The two narrators have distinct voices, swirled together across time by emotion and fierce intellect. While the book deals with painful topics it retains a sense of wonder and hope; it is both generous and sardonic, like it's main characters.

This book contains two separate but related novellas. One involves a twenty-first century teenage girl named George whose mother has died unexpectedly. The other entails the life of a fifteenth century Italian fresco artist named Francesco del Cossa whose paintings had been viewed centuries later by George and her mother. In my version, George’s story came first followed by Francesco’s, but it can be read in either order.

This book explores duality. This idea is explored via gender, life and death, the present and the past, and the appearance versus the true nature of a person or object. For example, when George and her mother are in Italy, George says she is “appalled by history, its only redeeming feature being that it tends to show more be well and truly over.” Her mother then questions her, “Do things that happened not exist or stop existing, just because we can’t see them happening in front of us?”

Each main character recalls memories, tells them in a stream-of-consciousness style, and these form the narrative arc. Each novella stands alone but taken together also forms a whole novel – another take on duality. I enjoyed George’s story more since it is told in a more straight-forward manner and is easier to follow. Francesco’s story is fragmented and non-linear. This is likely intentional on the author’s part due to the fact that the painter is in a liminal state between life and death. The writing is playful, philosophical, and clever. show less

How to Be Both tells two intertwined stories: George, a teenage girl grieving the loss of her mother, and Francesco del Cossa, a 15th-century Italian painter. The novel explores the idea that there are always two sides to a story, to a person, to life itself.
Past and present exist simultaneously here, blurring into one another in a way that mirrors the book’s themes of duality and connection across time. The style feels never-ending and at times cluttered — though I suspect this is entirely deliberate, reflecting the layered, overlapping nature of memory and art.
For me, however, the form-breaking structure became a hindrance. Rather than feeling immersed, I felt distanced; instead of losing myself in the story, I found myself show more working at it. While I can admire the ambition and experimentation, the experience felt more like effort than enjoyment. show less

How delightful to be so surprised by the deftness of just about every aspect of a novel: the shape, the story, the themes, the dialogue, even the characters. The last, who, from the imperturbable Mrs. Rock, the school therapist to George's father (blossoming later in the book)--have an unusual degree of depth and form. Why even the elusive Lisa Goliard has a heft to her. The core of the book is formed in the first half by the imagined life of Franchesco del Cossa of the 15th century, a fresco painter, who, seemingly, has been summoned back to some sort of life and memory because of George, a 15ish year old in our present time who has recently lost her mother. Said mother once took her children, George and Henry, to Italy to see the del show more Cossa's frescos. Which brings me to the relationship between this girl and her mother which has about the liveliest and most (dare I say it) endearing mother-daughter interactions I've encountered in . . . well, maybe ever. There is one interchange that I have had, almost word for word with my own very lively and outspoken daughter. Her mother irritably reminds George that she is other things than just her mother, and George is having none of it. Many writers build stories, novels and poems around a painting or a painter and while I sometimes find this device cumbersome, in this case I was thrilled to be introduced to del Cossa who does strike me as unusual, lively and mysterious. Come to think of it unusual, lively and mysterious, yes, that just about describes to [How To Be Both]. ****1/2 show less

Took a bit of getting used to, but once I was in, I was hooked. I had a copy with George's narrative first, and I have to say I'm glad I did - I'm not sure I would have cottoned onto what was happening if I'd had the other variety. I particularly enjoyed the visual and audio elements: I found myself Googling images and songs throughout. Likewise, I found that I had to read some bits out loud a time or two, to capture the lyrical rhythms of Smith's writings.