BOOK REVIEW: Autumn

December 11, 2017

BOOK REVIEW: Autumn

For people who...

forgot: how much they loved to read and now find it difficult.

have been: in any sort of arts based academic studying

voted: Remain, or for that matter people who voted Leave, maybe more so.

Review...

I enjoyed this book so much that I did something I don't think I've done since Harry Potter. I looked up when the next book by that author was coming out and bought it that very same week. Add this to the list of surprising things an English degree will take away from you; paying attention to new releases AND buying them. Partly from lack of funds partly from only being able to read things that have been out long enough to have critical material on them.

Why did I like this so much? For a girl who loves a good quotable line, this book should not have been one of my favourites, it is the opposite of quotable. (see below for my Thoughts on this) It is simply enjoyable as a whole. This experience is helped by the fact that Ali Smith doesn't put her dialogue in quotation marks, it leaves the prose uninterrupted and makes it a peaceful read.

You know one thought I had while reading it was how great being someone who loves art and literature is, I get to read books like this. Autumn was one of those books I had to keep closing and holding to my chest as though to absorb it. I could have read it much faster, it took me just under a week, but I had to "keep stopping for fear of finishing too quickly".

It is hard to summarise what the novel is about, like a lot of books where the language is the best thing about it, it's not really about anything. There is no big climax, rather than one massive tsunami which the plot works towards, it's more like small waves crashing on a shore. Elisabeth is trying to research an artist, visits her mother, visits an elderly man, has flashbacks to their time together when she was growing up, he has flashbacks. And it's all set against a sea, sand and sky of post Brexit, or what I recognise as a Post Brexit world.

I realise I may have been too emotional in my review of this one, I have gushed about the experience of reading more than I have described the book. But to me this is why this book was important for me, it reminded me that a book is an experience. It was a great book for my post-degree journey back to reading for pleasure.

Favourite Quote...

(I managed to find one)

"Life? was what you worked to catch, the intense happiness of an object slightly set apart from you"

Thoughts...

Now to attempt to explain why this book was so hard to quote. I have come across books like this before, which, unhelpful as they are for my Instagram, are still enjoyable and provoke thought in way that won't fit into a small aesthetically pleasing square box.

Ironically I will be using quotes to explain why this book is not quotable. Alongside reading this I have been reading Virginia Woolf's On Fiction in which she makes observations about types of literature. And this in particular caught my attention as relating to my experience of reading Autumn.

"the prose remains casual and quiet enough so that to quote it is to do little or nothing to explain its effect. Often we have to go far back and read a chapter or more before we can come by the impression of beauty or intensity that possessed us"

This is why Autumn is not quotable, it is pages at a time which give us an "impression of beauty". To use another of my crazy metaphors it's like the text is a watercolour painting, you can't really see the brush strokes and it all blends together. What would the opposite be? Maybe a book with many quotable passages and epigrams would be like a pointillist painting. These quotable books still form a whole picture when you stand back but you can see what makes them up when you read it one brush stroke at a time.

In fact, I sometimes don't like a book which is full of nothing but quotes. I love F.Scott.Fitzgerald but I do sometimes read his novels and picture him coming up with a clever line and just smirking smugly to himself. And it can be distracting to have too many short clever comments.

"The mind is caught up by this fine passage of description, by that curious exactitude of phrase; but the rhythm and sweep of emotion which the story has started in us are denied satisfaction."

Autumn gives us this sweep and satisfaction without any distracting epigrams.

I would also like to briefly discuss the effect of not using speech marks for dialogue in this book. It is what makes the prose "casual and quiet enough". Rather than being interrupted by other people speaking, in my opinion it makes it seem as though everything is happening inside the narrator's head, it's less realised.

There are other effects as well as quietening the prose however.

Putting something in speech marks makes it seem less believable. Her mother calls "Back soon" but without speech marks. Back Soon. It reads like something that will happen, has already happened. If something is put into speech marks it becomes questionable, unknown, controlled by another character and not the narrator, it has the potential to be a lie.

As I read the novel I also realised how hard it was going to be to detach Elisabeth's thoughts and her speech as it is not always 100% clear if something was said out loud or as a personal aside. This serves to put us more inside her head and see everything from her point of view, as often we will retell a story and include what we were thinking "I didn't actually say that of course but I was thinking it". This is us telling the story from our point of view rather than as a report of what actually happened.

SO turns out I have got back into reading for pleasure but I can't get away from analysing the text.
Oh well, maybe I can have *sings Hannah Montana* The Best of Both Worlds!!