Winner of the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, the Costa Award, and the Goldsmiths Prize
Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, is a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. 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.
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.
