Review by New York Times Review
By CHRISTOPHER BENFEY SOME BOOKS ARE easier to read than to describe. 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: "Ho this is a mighty twisting thing fast as a fish being pulled by its mouth on a hook if a fish could be fished through a 6-foot wall made of bricks." Momentarily disoriented (who is speaking so breathlessly, and about what exactly?), the reader is about to be pulled through two quite different stories - although they're presented in succession, both are numbered "one" and prefaced by enigmatic images - and invited to fit them together, by hook or by crook. The first section, introduced by a pair of eyes blooming from a flower stem, time-travels back to 15th-century Ferrara, in northern Italy. The narrator is revealed to be a garrulous ghost named Francescho, trapped in some sort of purgatory. Kindred revenants have haunted Smith's highly regarded novel "Hotel World" and her exhilarating hybrid of Gothic fiction and aesthetic theory, "Artful." An ambitious painter, Francescho was hired, centuries ago, to decorate a palace designed, like Kublai Khan's pleasure dome, to banish boredom. Francescho's picaresque adventures - romances with sympathetic prostitutes; a one-night stand with a wandering "infidel"; skirmishes with a tightfisted patron over payment - are incorporated within the dazzling frescos for the palace. Prostitutes become the three Graces; the Moor morphs into a guardian for Aries the ram. Smith has given a piquant twist to these rambunctious proceedings: The audacious (and presumably fictitious) painter turns out to be a woman disguised as a man, her chest tightly bound with linen, and trained by her bricklayer father to succeed in a man's world. 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.SA. surveillance. The setting is present-day Cambridge, England - where, we are reminded, in another allusion to the novel's two narrative strands, "DNA history had been made." A precocious teenage girl called George (for "Georgie Girl," though also suggesting those glass-ceiling-shattering Georges, Eliot and Sand) is trying to cope in the aftermath of her mother's senseless death, at 50, from an allergic reaction to a common antibiotic. George's mother, Carol Martineau (the name recalls the 19th-century women's rights activist Harriet Martineau), is an influential economist of pronounced leftist views. With complementary degrees in art history and women's studies, she is also an "Internet guerrilla," designing "subverts" (as opposed to adverts, or advertisements) that pop up on web pages to protest, say, the low number of women enrolled at the Slade School of Art. One of her "most retweeted Subverts" updates Auden: "Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen." Outed from anonymity three years before her death by persons unknown, Martineau suspects that the British intelligence services have been monitoring her - or, as one of George's friends jokes, "minotauring" her - for her subversive activities. A mysterious woman who calls herself Lisa Goliard, and introduces herself as a fellow artist, seems to be tailing her. Martineau, meanwhile, is pursuing her own interests in politically motivated art. She is so fiercely drawn to a reproduction of a fresco painting in an art magazine, depicting a gorgeous dark-skinned man in rags, that she yanks George and her younger brother, Henry, from school and takes them straight to Ferrara. There they spend a lot of time in the Palazzo Schifanoia (a name Martineau translates as "the palace of escaping from boredom"), where the painting is on display. It is at this point that the some -assembly-required aspects of "How to Be Both" come to the fore, as it dawns on the reader (at least on this reader) that the artist who made the picture of the disheveled hunk in rags is the same artist whose ghostly voice was heard in the opening section of the novel. After her mother's death, George takes up the quest as a sort of memorial tribute, aided by her classmate Helena Fisker, a half-Pakistani girl she is falling in love with. They discover that little is known about the artist, now revealed to be the (actual) early Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa. 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. The first section of the book, narrated in the artist's voice, may even be a fantasy worked up by George and Helena, since it's suspiciously packed with the argot of today: "cause" for "because" and the schoolgirl aside "Just saying." "Wouldn't it be better if we just imagine him talking like we do?" George asks Helena, as they assemble a class presentation on Cossa. If readers don't already feel a bit lost in narrative complexity, like so many minotaurs wandering in their own maze, there's yet another twist. Pantheon has issued two different versions of "How to Be Both," so some readers will begin the book with George's story and others will begin with Francescho's. My own advice, if your mystery threshold is low, is to start with George. That way, you'll learn a great deal about Francesco del Cossa before you're flung into his/her sometimes confusing memories. Readers might also keep an iPad open to photographs of Cossa's frescoes, and to his astonishing paintings of St. Vincent Ferrer in the National Gallery in London and St. Lucy in the National Gallery in Washington. Poor Lucy, martyred by having her eyes gouged out, is the source of those strange eye-flowers that open the Ferrara section. Smith has delved deeply into Cossa's shadowy life and enigmatic work. But she's less interested in astrological arcana, which scholars like Aby Warburg have identified as keys to the meaning of the fresco cycle in Ferrara, than in the wondrous immediacy of Cossa's human figures (think of a French book of hours twinned with Botticelli). She is particularly interested in the letter, much discussed by art historians, that Cossa wrote to the Duke of Ferrara complaining that he was being paid unfairly, by the square yard rather than for his skill. It has been suggested that Cossa painted part of his own face - his alert eyes and wavy hair - into a picture of the duke dispensing justice, as though to cast doubt, subversively, on whether justice had indeed been done in his case. If this is Cossa's face, it certainly does look androgynous. "Male or female? It can't be both," George tells her mother, who replies: "Who says? Why must it?" 'Art makes nothing happen,' one character writes, 'in a way that makes something happen.' CHRISTOPHER BENFEY teaches English at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author, among other books, of "Degas in New Orleans" and "A Summer of Hummingbirds."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 25, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* 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.--Weber, Lynn Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. 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. In one version, the androgynous adolescent character George (for Georgia) is mourning the sudden death of her mother following a family trip to Italy, where they viewed a painting by the obscure Renaissance artist Francesco del Cossa. The alternate volume begins with Francesco, recounting stories of the painter's youth and the ongoing creation of a fresco in a palazzo in Ferrara, a process described in vibrant detail. Francesco's secret is disclosed in both sections-teasingly in one, overtly in the other. 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. Clever puns and word games abound. George's mother accurately identifies the subtext when she says, "Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen." Smith's two-in-one novel is a provocative reevaluation of the form. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Smith's (Artful) new novel is made up of two parts-one section called CAMERA, from the point of view of George, a current-day teenager who has just lost her mother, and another section called EYES, from the point of view of a 15th-century artist who seems to have come back to George's time and location as a ghost. With her characteristically playful love of language, Smith has written a book that was designed to be produced in two versions, so the section that comes first depends on a listener's (or reader's) particular copy. What results is a challenging listen, as bits of each story reveal themselves from one section to the next, presuming the listener's intelligence and yielding a pleasure in the puzzle that elevates the book beyond passive entertainment. The theme of art as both charm and balm weaves through both sections and is masterfully balanced with lovingly drawn characters and dialog that rings true regardless of its setting. The choice of a male reader, John Banks, is interesting given the prevalence of female characters and works well given the themes of the book. VERDICT This work is inventive and thought provoking but best of all moving and beautiful as well. ["Smith presents two extraordinary books for the price of one": LJ 11/15/14 starred review of the Pantheon hc.]-Heather Malcolm, Bow, WA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This adventurous, entertaining writer offers two distinctive takes on youth, art and deathand even two different editions of the book.George, short for Georgia, is 16, whip-smart and seeking ways to honor her dead mother. She vows to dance the twist every day, as her mother did, and to wear something black for a year. She also inhabits a memory, a visit to Italy they made together to view a 15th-century mural her mother admired, and studies a painting by the same artist in London's National Gallery. There, she sees a woman her mother knew and tries to study her as well. In the book's other half, the ghost of the 15th-century artist pushes up through the earth to the present and finds himself in the museum behind George as she studies his painting and just before she spots the mystery woman. The painter's own memories travel through his youth and apprenticeship in a voice utterly different from and as delightful as George's. Hethough gender is bending here tooalso loses his mother when young and learns, like George, of the pain and joy of early friendship. He provides an intimate history for the mural in Italy and offers a very foreign take on George and modern times. The book is being published simultaneously in two editionsone begins with George's half, and the other begins with the painter's, which might be slightly more challenging for its diction and historical trappings. 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 (There But for The, 2011, etc.) 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
