Having now read it twice, in both directions so to speak, I’ve decided — and I do not write this flippantly — that Ali Smith is a genius … Smith’s intent is that we should perceive both George’s and Francesco’s narratives as occurring simultaneously, even though we are not reading them simultaneously. George is unaware of Francesco’s spectral presence in her life; it is her mother’s passing that fuels her interest in this 15th-century artist. Francesco, however, finds herself in the odd predicament of having spiraled through some sort of gash in the fabric of time to awake disembodied yet bound to George, at first mistaking her gender … The novel abounds with walls — not only the wall decorated with Francesco’s frescoes — and Smith’s walls, although apparently solid, always have something layered within them or hidden beyond them, which, through curiosity, decay, accident, or earthquake, will eventually be revealed.
The two novellas make frequent references to each other, but how you interpret those references will depend on whether they’re looking forward or backward...As one character says, it’s a lesson in ‘how to tell a story, but tell it more than one way at once, and tell another underneath it up-rising through the skin of it’ … It’s a fascinating bricolage of history and speculation enriched with Francescho’s audacious patter, often comically incongruous with the Renaissance. Freely mixing genders and pigments, the young artist distinguishes herself early as a magician with paints — and she knows it … This sounds like a novel freighted with postmodern gimmicks, but Smith knows how to be both fantastically complex and incredibly touching. Just as Francescho’s story is laced with insights about the nature and power of painting, George’s story offers its own tender exploration of the baffling and clarifying power of grief.
The parallels between the two characters, and the possibility that Francescho is either some sort of guardian angel or a spirit who’s unconsciously been summoned, could seem contrived. But Smith’s deliberate obfuscation of what, exactly, is going on makes the novel feel less mawkish and more metaphysical. It’s like a mystery to be marveled at rather than solved. Her writing is crisp and elegant throughout, elevating Francescho’s anachronistic observances of 21st-century life from predictably comic to poetic … In How To Be Both, Smith manages the rare feat of conjuring up opaqueness and clarity. There are mysteries and unanswered questions, but also hints that parallels and connections abound, that everything in the world is related.
Ali Smith’s sly and shimmering double helix of a novel, How to Be Both, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, opens with a flourish, as a ribbon of words unfurls down the page... Momentarily disoriented (who is speaking so breathlessly, and about what exactly?), the reader is about to be pulled through two quite different stories … If this first section of How to Be Both has some of the cavalier brio of Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending Orlando, the second section, prefaced by a schematic image of a security camera, is more like a crime novella unfolding in our modern world of shifting digital identities and N.S.A. surveillance … The two parts of How to Be Both have overlapping themes: the subversive power of art; what Martineau refers to as ‘sexual and gender ambiguities’; the hold of the dead on the living; and, of course, the figure of Francescho him/herself.
How to Be Both has a lot more allure than its overall rigor suggests, thanks to the obvious pleasure Ms. Smith takes in creating her peculiar parallels and exploring the questions they raise. Strange as it may seem, the British teenager and the painter who must curry favor with wealthy fools if he wants work have quite a bit in common … The inspiration for this mélange of a book, sometimes so ingenious and sometimes just willfully odd, is Francescho del Cossa’s fresco at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy. Take one look at pictures of this work and you will want to race right off to see it, which is apparently what Ms. Smith did. But How to Be Both is not a book that grew out of a tourist attraction. It is a synthesis of questions long contemplated by an extraordinarily thoughtful author, who succeeds quite well in implanting those questions into well-drawn, memorable people.
Smith is after something bigger in this novel — the illusory nature of appearance itself. This emerges in the character of Georgia, often called George, the girl who looks like a boy, but even more in regard to Del Cossa, who we learn is a woman masquerading as a man. That this is not historical truth is irrelevant; How to Be Both is a novel, after all. Even more, Smith wants us to consider: How much do we know about anyone in either the present or the past? … In part, the point is gender, sexuality: Who are we, the image the world perceives or the essence we know ourselves to be? But even more, it's an existential issue, the realization that once enough time passes we all become figures of fiction, birth and death days long forgotten beneath the press of years.
Can a book be both linguistically playful and dead serious? Structurally innovative and reader-friendly? Mournful and joyful? Brainy and moving? Ali Smith's How To Be Both, which recently won the prestigious, all-Brit two-year-old Goldsmiths prize for being a truly novel novel, is all of the above — and then some … Like the frescoes it describes, How To Be Both can be approached from both sides; the order in which you read the sections subtly changes the emphasis. In truth, you can't fully have it both ways because, after reading the contemporary story first (as I did) there's no way to unread it so you experience the historical half with a blank narrative canvas (and vice versa). Still, there's pleasure aplenty in starting over once you've read to an end, guaranteed you'll notice different things.
Perhaps the most radical thing about Smith's addition to the genre of ‘aleatory fiction’ — fiction that incorporates an element of chance into its composition — is its investment in traditional, linear storytelling...If Smith is trying to have it both ways here, providing many of the pleasures of a traditional novel while flattering the reader with an experimental gimmick, the trick is perfectly in keeping with the themes of duality that echo through the book … The trouble with the experiment at the heart of How to Be Both is that a novel isn't a fresco. Images can achieve a kind of simultaneity, or at least, like the duck-rabbit, alternation; but in language, word follows word, and the order of them matters. As much as I may want to, I can't read How to Be Both the other way around, at least not for the first time. I suspect that if I could, I'd be reading a better novel.
Here is a key to Smith’s spellbinding novel. Like the frescoes described here, George’s story functions like an 'underdrawing' to del Cossa’s story. By the end of del Cossa’s section, after he quits his work at the palace and flees to another city, he discovers that his fresco has mesmerized visitors...In George’s eyes, though, del Cossa’s fresco is loaded with meaning and beauty and personal significance. It was, after all, her mother’s final obsession, the last thing that seemed to fill her with life. Just as important is the connection del Cossa helps create between George and Helena … [Smith’s] inimitable writing sneaks into you with its deceptive readability, but it’s her radiating intelligence that stays with you. Her mind works wonders on a theme, able to find lovely and profound connections in seemingly anything.
The transitions are swift and the structure is fluid, telling a story and then changing the way we’ve just read it with phrases like: ‘But none of the above has happened. Not yet, anyway.’ Because of the novel’s shifting nature, we know George’s mother as both alive and dead … Because you will have to choose one, your experience of the novel will be different depending on which story you start with. But either way, the revelations and conclusions will be the same. How to Be Both indeed works both ways, demonstrating not only the power of art itself but also the mastery of Smith’s prose.
In How to Be Both Smith puts her rebellious theory to its most intense test yet. Told in two long stories, the book is a tale about time and gender. Brilliant and cheeky, but also profoundly mournful, it will one day join Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as a key text in understanding the fluidity of human life … George’s and Francesco’s tales mirror each other like two ice skaters slicing a perfect routine. Both begin with a member of the dead, speaking into the present. They are love stories, and they are tales of grief. They also pivot neatly around notions of watching and the watched.
Even though Smith is writing two very different stories from two different eras, she does a masterful job of weaving connecting threads between the two without the book feeling contrived. George's mother takes her on a tour of the Palazzo Schifanoia during a family vacation, and the painter is referenced many times throughout the girl's story. George's appearances in Francesco's story are less concrete. Smith takes the painter out of time and places her as a sort of viewer/apparition in the future … Later in the book, Francesco explains that art has the unique ability to free us, ‘... it unchains the eyes and the lives of those who see it and gives them a moment of freedom, from its world and from their world both.’ In the same way, Smith unchains her painter and allows her to transcend time, creating a unique conversation between past and present.
Let me start, although my edition didn't, with George, christened Georgia, who is real in a way that Francesco, however charmingly ebullient, isn't quite. In a book about how stories speak to us in different ways at different times, we see George in the year after her mother's death at the same time as we see the two as they used to be, the cheeky teenager working out her identity under — and often against — her remarkable mother's tutelage … The making of these frescoes is at the center of the other story. From the sketchy record, Smith re-imagines Francesco as a disguised girl, the stonemason's child becoming an artist in a rich Renaissance mishmash of sharp wit, low comedy, pathos and historical detail.
It’s here in the clever structure of her latest novel, a wonderfully slippery, postmodern examination of the perception, gender, loss and the lasting power of art. How to be both is split into two narratives — the present-day ‘Camera,’ from the viewpoint of a teenage girl in Cambridge, and ‘Eyes,’ narrated by a 15th century Italian artist … How to be both is [not] merely an exercise in literary trickery. Smith’s technique is bold and experimental, but what makes her work so rare and desirable is that it always contains a moving emotional core. Her novels may stretch stylistic boundaries, but they also compassionately, even tenderly, explore the universal perils of being human.
Smith, a playful, highly imaginative literary iconoclast, surpasses her previous efforts in this inventive double novel that deals with gender issues, moral questions, the mystery of death, the value of art, the mutability of time, and several other important topics. Two books coexist under the same title, each presenting largely the same material arranged differently and with different emphases; which narrative one reads first depends on chance, as different copies of the book have been printed with different opening chapters … The narratives are captivating, challenging, and often puzzling, as the prose varies among contemporary vernacular English, archaic 15th-century rhetoric interposed with fragments of poetry, and unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness narration.
Both [versions of the novel] are remarkable depictions of the treasures of memory and the rich perceptions and creativity of youth, of how we see what’s around us and within us. Comical, insightful and clever, Smith builds a thoughtful fun house with her many dualities and then risks being obvious in her structural mischief, but it adds perhaps the perfect frame to this marvelous diptych.
