How to Be Both (2014)

by Ali Smith

Other authors: See the other authors section.

Members	Reviews	Popularity	Average rating	Conversations / Mentions
1,538	47	11,205	(3.77)	1 / 251
"SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 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"-- "The brilliant Booker-nominated novel from one of our finest authors: How to Be Both is a daring, inventive tale that intertwines the stories of a defiant Renaissance painter and a modern teenage girl. How can one be both--near and far, past and present, male and female? In Ali Smith's new novel, two extraordinary characters inhabit the spaces between categories. In one half of the book, we follow the story of Francescho del Cossa, a Renaissance painter in fifteenth-century Italy who assumes a duel identity, living as both a man and a woman. In the novel's other half, George, a contemporary English teenage girl, is in mourning after the death of her brilliant, rebellious mother. As she struggles to fill the void in her life, George finds her thoughts circling again and again around a whimsical trip she and her mother once made to Italy, to see a certain Renaissance fresco... These two stories call out to each other in surprising and deeply resonant ways to form a veritable literary double-take, bending the conventions of genre, storytelling, and our own preconceptions"--… (more)

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Showing 1-5 of 47 (next | show all)

Did not work at all for me. (

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lschiff | Sep 24, 2023 |

Not knowing much about it, How to be Both was a bit of a surprise. The first part of the book is fairly standard contemporary fiction: a young girl, George, is dealing with the death of her mother and confused about her emerging sexuality. Her reminiscences about her mother include a whirlwind trip to Ferrara, Italy, to admire a breathtaking palace fresco painted by a mysterious artist about whom very little is known, other than a written request for a raise from the commissioner of the work.

The first half of this novel describes George’s growing interest in this artist and more about her relationship with her mother, until she arrives at a point where she is sitting in a gallery observing people visiting one of the artist’s works, and experiences a major shock.

Smith then suddenly shifts the ground under the reader’s feet. Suddenly the book is not about George, but about the artist, who both exists in real time observing George (thinking that this must be Purgatory) and recounts details of life in Renaissance Ferrara and the creation of the fresco. As the second half proceeds we see growing similarities between George and the mysterious artist.

The theme of how to be both is played with. Smith tosses up a few candidates for “both", such as sexuality, being alive or dead, past and present, made and unmade. The book is about all of these questions and the potential for ambiguity that is present in them. (

)

gjky | Apr 9, 2023 |

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 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. (

)

Castlelass | Oct 30, 2022 |

I like the way Ali Smith plays with the novel form as a way to explore complex and emotional issues, and I very much enjoy what Smith does with time. Having the two sections readable in either order heightens the sense of history happening all at once, that past/present/future aren't as distinct as they often feel. There's also an almost matter-of-fact way of dealing with gender, and a real but not melodramatic handling of grief that I like. (

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ImperfectCJ | Aug 28, 2022 |

Unable to summon enough interest to finish this book. Maybe visual artists would like it. (

)

Martha_Thayer | Jan 13, 2022 |

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thingScore 75

...there is no doubt that Smith is dazzling in her daring. The sheer inventive power of her new novel pulls you through, gasping, to the final page.

added by charl08 | editThe Guardian, Elizabeth Day (Jul 9, 2014)

▾Other authors

» Add other authors (10 possible)

Author name	Role	Type of author	Work?	Status
Ali Smith	—	primary author	all editions	calculated
Banks, John	Narrator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Juul, Pia	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed

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Canonical title

How to Be Both

Original title

How to Be Both

Alternative titles

Original publication date

2014

People/Characters

Important places

Italy

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK

Important events

Renaissance

Related movies

Epigraph

Et ricordare suplicando a quella che io sonto francescho del cossa il quale a sollo fatto quili tri canpi verso lanticamara :
Francesco del Cossa

green spirit seeking life
where only drought and desolation sting;
spark that says that everything begins
where everything seems charcoal

— Eugenio Montale 'The eel'/ (trans. Jonathan Galassi)

J’ai rêvé Que sur un grand mur blanc je lisais mon testament

Sylvie Vartan

...although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living...

Hannah Arendt, 'Introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections'

Just like a character in a novel, he disappeared suddenly, without leaving the slightest trace behind.

Giorgio Bassani /Jamie McKendrick

Dedication

For Frances Arthur
and everyone who made her,

to keep in mind
Sheila Hamilton,
walking work of art,

and for Sarah Wood
artist.

First words

Consider this moral conundrum for a moment, George's mother says to George who is sitting in the front passenger seat.

Quotations

Last words

(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)

Disambiguation notice

Publisher's editors

Blurbers

Original language

English

Canonical DDC/MDS

Canonical LCC

▾References

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (2)

Francesco del Cossa

How to Be Both

▾Book descriptions

"SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 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"-- "The brilliant Booker-nominated novel from one of our finest authors: How to Be Both is a daring, inventive tale that intertwines the stories of a defiant Renaissance painter and a modern teenage girl. How can one be both--near and far, past and present, male and female? In Ali Smith's new novel, two extraordinary characters inhabit the spaces between categories. In one half of the book, we follow the story of Francescho del Cossa, a Renaissance painter in fifteenth-century Italy who assumes a duel identity, living as both a man and a woman. In the novel's other half, George, a contemporary English teenage girl, is in mourning after the death of her brilliant, rebellious mother. As she struggles to fill the void in her life, George finds her thoughts circling again and again around a whimsical trip she and her mother once made to Italy, to see a certain Renaissance fresco... These two stories call out to each other in surprising and deeply resonant ways to form a veritable literary double-take, bending the conventions of genre, storytelling, and our own preconceptions"--

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amazon Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive, and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else.

How to be both is a novel all about the versatility of art. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation among 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, structure gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real—and all life’s “givens” get a second chance.

Haiku summary