How to be both

by Ali Smith

Overview

SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2014 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD 

A Best Book of the Year: NPR, Financial Times

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else. A true original, she is a one-of-a-kind literary sensation. Her novels consistently attract serious acclaim and discussion—and have won her a dedicated readership who are drawn again and again to the warmth, humanity and humor of her voice.
 
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.

A NOTE TO THE READER:
Who says stories reach everybody in the same order?
This novel can be read in two ways and this book provides you with both.
In half of all printed editions of the novel the narrative EYES comes before CAMERA.
In the other half of printed editions the narrative CAMERA precedes EYES.
The narratives are exactly the same in both versions, just in a different order.
 
The books are intentionally printed in two different ways, so that readers can randomly have different experiences reading the same text. So, depending on which edition you happen to receive, the book will be: EYES, CAMERA, or CAMERA, EYES. Enjoy the adventure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307275257
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/13/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	110,554
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.74(d)

About the Author

Ali Smith is the author of many works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World, which was short-listed for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, and The Accidental, which won the Whitbread Award and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. Born in Inverness, Scotland, Smith lives in Cambridge, England.

Read an Excerpt

Consider this moral conundrum for a moment, George’s mother says to George who’s sitting in the front passenger seat.
 
Not says. Said. 
 
George’s mother is dead.
 
What moral conundrum? George says.
 
The passenger seat in the hire car is strange, being on the side the driver’s seat is on at home. This must be a bit like driving is, except without the actual, you know, driving.
 
Okay. You’re an artist, her mother says.
 
Am I? George says. Since when? And is that a moral conundrum? 
 
Ha ha, her mother says. Humour me. Imagine it. You’re an artist.
 
This conversation is happening last May, when George’s mother is still alive, obviously. She’s been dead since September. Now it’s January, to be more precise it’s just past midnight on New Year’s Eve, which means it has just become the year after the year in which George’s mother died.
 
George’s father is out. It is better than him being at home, standing maudlin in the kitchen or going round the house switching things off and on. Henry is asleep. She just went in and checked on him; he was dead to the world, though not as dead as the word dead literally means when it means, you know, dead.
 
This will be the first year her mother hasn’t been alive since the year her mother was born. That is so obvious that it is stupid even to think it and yet so terrible that you can’t not think it. Both at once.
 
Anyway George is spending the first minutes of the new year looking up the lyrics of an old song. Let’s Twist Again. Lyrics by Kal Mann. The words are pretty bad. Let’s twist again like we did last summer. Let’s twist again like we did last year. Then there’s a really bad rhyme, a rhyme that isn’t, properly speaking, even a rhyme.
 
Do you remember when
Things were really hummin’. 
 
Hummin’ doesn’t rhyme with summer, the line doesn’t end in a question mark, and is it meant to mean, literally, do you remember that time when things smelt really bad? 
 
Then Let’s twist again, twisting time is here. Or, as all the sites say, twistin’ time. 
 
At least they’ve used an apostrophe, the George from before her mother died says. 
 
I do not give a fuck about whether some site on the internet attends to grammatical correctness, the George from after says.
 
That before and after thing is about mourning, is what people keep saying. They keep talking about how grief has stages. There’s some dispute about how many stages of grief there are. There are three, or five, or some people say seven. 
 
It’s quite like the songwriter actually couldn’t be bothered to think of words. Maybe he was in one of the three, five or seven stages of mourning too. Stage nine (or twenty three or a hundred and twenty three or ad infinitum, because nothing will ever not be like this again): in this stage you will no longer be bothered with whether songwords mean anything. In fact you will hate almost all songs.
 
But George has to find a song to which you can do this specific dance.
 
It being so apparently contradictory and meaningless is no doubt a bonus. It will be precisely why the song sold so many copies and was such a big deal at the time. People like things not to be too meaningful.
 
Okay, I’m imagining, George in the passenger seat last May in Italy says at exactly the same time as George at home in England the following January stares at the meaninglessness of the words of an old song. Outside the car window Italy unfurls round and over them so hot and yellow it looks like it’s been sandblasted. In the back Henry snuffles lightly, his eyes closed, his mouth open. The band of the seatbelt is over his forehead because he is so small.
 
You’re an artist, her mother says, and you’re working on a project with a lot of other artists. And everybody on the project is getting the same amount, salary-wise. But you believe that what you’re doing is worth more than everyone on the project, including you, is getting paid. So you write a letter to the man who’s commissioned the work and you ask him to give you more money than everyone else is getting.
 
Am I worth more? George says. Am I better than the other artists?
 
Does that matter? her mother says. Is that what matters?
 
Is it me or is it the work that’s worth more? George says.
 
Good. Keep going, her mother says.
 
Is this real? George says. Is it hypothetical?
 
Does that matter? her mother says.

Editorial Reviews

In this era of extolling genre fiction and the joys of story, Smith’s latest novel makes a case for experimental, literary fiction. One half of this daring novel is the mostly conventional tale of a precocious teen struggling with the death of her arty, brilliant mother. George, née Georgia, is still living in a kind of stunned stupor. She sees a school counselor but is mostly helped by her first crush, the alluring H, who starts to pull her out of her shell. The other half of the novel is narrated by the disembodied voice of a fifteenth-century painter caught in the wave-laden air of twentieth-century Britain. As the spirit observes the contemporary world, with its “votive tablets” (iPhones), she casts back to her own life disguised as a boy in order to practice her art. Along the way, we learn of a teenager’s bratty ways with her smart but sometimes overbearing parents, the power politics of Renaissance Italy, the best places to procure blue pigment, and how everyone, everywhere, must come to terms with the passage of time and the grief of loss. And we learn how to be both: male and female, artist and businessperson, rememberer and forgiver, reader of tales and literary adventurer. Lucky us.” —Booklist (starred review)

“This adventurous, entertaining writer offers two distinctive takes on youth, art and death—and even two different editions of the book . . . Both 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.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Captivating . . . British author Smith (There but for The), 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 . . . Smith’s two-in-one novel is a provocative reevaluation of the form.” —Publishers Weekly (boxed, starred)
 
Early Praise from the UK for How to be both
 
“Extraordinary . . . Warm, funny, subtle, layered, intelligent . . . Brilliant.” —The Spectator
 
“Exuberant, rhapsodic . . . Dizzyingly good and so clever that it makes you want to dance.” —New Statesman
 
“Dazzling indeed . . . Smith has written a radical novel, one that becomes two novels, with discrete meanings . . . Those writers making doomy predictions about the death of the novel should read Smith’s re-imagined novel/s, and take note of the life it contains.” —The Independent
 
“[A] rich, strong and moving novel . . . Ingenious . . . A triumph.”  —Financial Times
 
“Immensely enjoyable . . . Inventive and playful, compassionate and sagacious . . . Explores the injustices of life but also its delights, including the pleasures of art and the redemptive power of love.” —The Express
 
“An heir to Virginia Woolf, Ali Smith subtly but surely reinvents the novel . . . How to be both brims with palpable joy, not only at language, literature and art’s transformative power but at the messy business of being human, of wanting to be more than one kind of person at once.” —The Telegraph

From the Publisher