Tags
20 Books of Summer, 20 Books of Summer 2021, 4.5 stars, Ali Smith, books, first time read, LGBTQ+ author, literary fiction, own book, read in 2021, reading, review, Seasonal Quartet, Winter
Title: Winter
Author: Ali Smith
First published: 2017
Dates read: 08. 08. – 12. 08. 2021
Category: first time read, own book, literary fiction, quartet, LGBTQ+ author
Rating: 4.5/5
The book in five words or less: an exercise in association
My thoughts:
I usually start these reviews with a short summary of what the book I am reviewing is about. While that approach works fine for most books, it tends to fall short for Ali Smith’s novels. The seasonal quartet, I have learned from reading Winter and its prequel Autumn (which I still mean to review), are not heavy on plot and rather difficult to grasp in a short-ish summary.
Technically, Winter is about Sophie, an ageing businesswoman who lives alone in a house that is far too big for her, who struggles with memory issues and who may or may not be seeing things that aren’t quite there for other people. Winter is also about Arthur, Sophie’s adult son who tracks copyright infringements for a living but would really like to make it as a nature blogger, and about Lux, the girl Arthur engages to pretend to be his girlfriend Charlotte, with whom he has just broken up. And lastly, the novel is also about Iris, Sophie’s older, more rebellious sister, who spent her life in protest camps and communes, and who can be relied on to help even though she and Sophie haven’t spoken each other for years. These four very different and not always amiable characters are thrown together at Sophie’s house over Christmas, where past and present conflicts get aired out and, in some cases, resolved.
However, describing Winter merely in terms of plot and characters falls terribly short and does not do the novel – and Smith’s general style – justice. I think what draws me to Ali Smith’s books, including this one, is that they are far more than the things that happen in them and the characters those things happen to. They are full of references to art, political events of the past and present, philosophical reflections about love, life, and missed chances, and explorations of how all of these different subjects connect. In short, reading any installment of the seasonal quartet is an exercise in decoding, associating, reflecting in a way that is neither linear, nor teleological.
In the case of Winter, the themes Smith foregrounds are family relations, especially that between the two sisters and between Sophie, Arthur and his (real) father, political protest culture going back to the 1970s, the fallout of the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump, the experience of living as an immigrant in contemporary Britain, the challenge of writing truthfully, and the art of Barbara Hepworth, the British artist famous for her abstract, organic sculptures.
Overall, Winter isn’t the kind of book I fall in love with quickly and violently, but the kind that I enjoy reading because it makes me think and reflect and look up a lot of things I have never heard of before. I particularly love discovering new artists, and Smith is always a good one for that. Arguably, Winter’s predecessor Autumn has the more stringent story, but I think Winter dealt with themes I was interested in more: Art’s struggle with creative expression and his trouble writing meaningfully about landscape and nature, and Sophie’s descent into what is potentially dementia. I also liked the integration of Barbara Hepworth’s art into the story a little better than I did that of Pauline Boty in Autumn; it felt more seamless.
However, all of these are very subjective preferences, and in general I find it very difficult to recommend Winter because much of its appeal is of a very specific kind. If you like your literary fiction associative and all-encompassing, this is definitely a book to keep in mind. However, if you’re new to Ali Smith’s writing, Winter is probably not the best place to start – I’d at the very least read the seasonal quartet in order (starting with Autumn) because the books, though technically separate stories, do interconnect through themes and characters.
Read if you like: spoken word poetry, multimedia art installations, dream-like associative writing, the other installments of the seasonal quartet, the interlacing of subjects in Olivia Laing’s non-fiction