"Public Library and other stories" by Ali Smith (Penguin, 2016)

Between the stories are collected anecdotes about public libraries. Before the first story there's one entitled Library.

The first story, "Last", begins with "I had come to the conclusion". The narrator gets off a late train at the last station, sees the empty train put into a siding. But it's not empty - a lady in a wheelchair's been left there. The narrator wants to return and help, but there's a sign stopping trespassers, which makes the narrator wonder "why, anyway, did the word fine mean a payment for doing something illegal at the same time as it meant everything from okay to really grand?" The narrator wonders what she could say to the trapped lady - "I could tell her endlessly, boringly, about words and how they meant and why it mattered, and what had happened in my life to make them not matter." The woman is released by railway staff. On the last page we're told "The word last is a very versatile word. Amongst other more unexpected things - like the piece of metal shaped like a foot which a cobbler uses to make shoes - it can mean both finality and continuance, it can mean the last time, and something a lot more lasting than that. / To conclude once meant to enclose."

"The beholder" was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award. I'm not convinced. In "The Poet" things get strange -

There was the word gorgeous, and there was the word north, and there was a sound that went between the words that she liked. Could you wither a word? There was an orchard nobody went to. How could anything touch it? It was all blossom right now. There was the whole meadow full of flowers, wild ones, all the bright faces, out that window beyond this house only a couple of streets away. She sat low on the old nursing chair and the Fraser books sat on the shelf right next to her eye. Fraser. Olive. O LIVE. I LOVE. O VILE. EVIL O (p.63)

Plots can sometimes seem indulgent. "The human claim" begins with "I had been planning to write this story about the ashes of DH Lawrence". There's a page about Lawrence, then 5 pages about the narrator frustratedly phoning a bank because, opening a letter from the bank, the narrator realises she's been a victim of fraud. "I pressed the hang-up button on my phone and found I was in my front room./ What I mean is, even though I'd been there the whole time, I'd actually just spent the last half hour somewhere which made my own front room irrelevant" (p.83). Then 3 pages about follow-up letters and a previous pickpocket episode. Then 4 pages about DH Lawrence's ashes and works - "In one of his most famous, he watches a snake drink at a waterhole then throws a log at it to show it who's boss. The moment he does this he understands his own pettiness; he knows he's cheated himself" (p.87). Then she worries about her card again, looks on Google Earth for Lufthansa HQ (a plane ticket had been bought with her card). Wandering, she reaches Harmonsworth on StreetView, realises that old Penguin paperbacks (e.g. "Lady Chatterley's Lover") were issued from there. There's a page about writing the credit-card company a letter. The last page describes dreaming about what the fraudster might be getting up to. The ending is

Meanwhile, that snake that Lawrence threw the log at disappeared long long ago into its hole unhurt, went freely about its ways, left the poem behind it. Meanwhile, right now, the ashes of DH Lawrence could be anywhere. (p.95)

So because of distractions, the story's original inspiration (like Lawrence's snake) got away, but not before a work was made.

She likes using strange connections and what comedians describe as "callbacks". In "The ex-wife" coincidences abound. On p.100 there's "you'd say, I just need to know whether Wing was actually the original kitten of Charlie Chaplin. To know what? I'd say. In a letter to Charlie Chaplin". On p.116-7 we read that Virginia Woolf wrote about a plane that people watched above London. The ex-wife (Katherine Mansfield) was a film extra in WW1. The narrator works out that her films could have been melted down into resin to coat the wings of the very plane Woolf saw.

Typically the narrator's mind drifts when there's nothing much else to do. In "Grass", the narrator, stuck in a traffic jam, drifts back in time to when she was stuck behind the counter of a quiet shop. In "The definite article" the narrator wanders through Regent's Park, sparking off a list of observations and a regurgitation of historical/literary research. Towards the end there's "One entire Park, compleat in unity of character. Endless stories, all crossing across each other, and mine tiny negligent, quick as a blink, where nothing much happened except this: I stepped out of myself and into the park, I stepped off the pavement and into a place where there's never a conclusion" (p.165)

There are lists (names of roses, for example) and concluding lyrical flourishes. There are interesting observations and phrases - "There was a man whistling, walking along holding a can of Skol ahead of himself. He was holding the can like a compass" (p.157). She likes using dreams - "All the people in the dream, I say, are strangers to me. I recognize them, but only from having dreamed about them before. And I'm looking out of the eyes of a different person in the dream every time I dream it" (p.193)

Her child characters all seem much the same whatever their age.

Other reviews

• Kate Kellaway
• Goodreads
• Francesca Wade (Each of Smith’s stories is a gem: fast-paced and incongruous, every situation made immediately intriguing by deft detail and sharply humorous dialogue.)
• Lucy Scholes
• Edmund White (Unhappy romances (between women) are frequently the so-called back story.)
• Sameer Rahim (Smith delights in making unexpected connections. This can make for an amusing and insightful reading experience, but sometimes feels slightly cobbled together.)
• Kirkus review (“The Ex-Wife,” probably the best of the collection)
• Allan Massie

"How to be both" by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton, 2014)

The book is in 2 parts, some copies having the parts in one order, some in the other. The 2 stories could have been interleaved, but they're short enough to be presented sequentially. In one story (set in 15th century Italy) a girl with artistic talent is brought up by her widower father. She pretends all her life to be male in order to get work. She likes girls. Her best friend's a rich boy. She studies art carefully, quoting the masters. She's good at it. She likes trompe l’oeil effects. She has to redo part of her best work for political reasons.

In the other story the mother of George, a 16 y.o. girl, has recently died in Addenbrooke's, Cambridge (the nearby DNA sculpture and cycle path are mentioned, providing an excuse to mention another neglected female, Rosalind Franklin). She has therapy sessions at school with Mrs Rock (yes, better than a hard place). She's verbally fluent, recalling saying this to her mother - "Blah ... You're pretending you're being cool about it now because online interventionism was once perceived for about three months several years ago to be cool ... but really you're just as paranoid as everybody else over forty ... all sackcloth and ashes and stuck in the past, hitting your chests with a scourge and ringing your little bells, unclean! Unclean! Disempowerment by information!" (p.228). She remembers going to Ferrara with her mother and younger brother Henry to see the frescos mentioned in the other part. The frescos had been hidden for centuries. The best of them were by an artist only known of because a letter had been discovered from the artist asking the patron for more money.

George is befriended by Helena Fisker (H), an artistic, rebellious schoolfriend with lesbian tendencies. Like George's mother, H mixes politics and art. Like many Smith characters, H plays "a kind of verbal ping-pong" (p.273). As a project they think about imagining what the fresco artist might do in the contemporary world. H has to leave the country but they stay in touch. George regularly, dutifully watches some online porn set in a yurt. At the end she tracks the woman who might have been monitoring her mother for the secret service. The woman befriended her mother who enjoyed the attention, describing her as "repressed and respectable and anarchic and rude and unexpected, she was trivial and wild both at once, like a bad girl from school" (p.305), which could describe a number of this author's beloved characters. George wonders about the connection between the 2 older women

Perhaps somewhere in all of this if you look there's a proof of love. This thought will make George furious. At the same time it will fill her with pride at her mother, right all along. Most of all she will wonder at her mother's sheer talent. The maze of the minotaur is one thing. The ability to maze the minotaur back is another thing altogether. Touché High five. Both. Consider for a moment this moral conundrum. Imagine it. You're an artist. Sitting on the wall opposite, George will get her phone out. She will take a picture. (p.371)

which sounds more like a big, summarising finish than the end of the other part does ("minotaur" has earlier been confused with "monitor"; the trail has been backtracked). There are coincidences between the 2 stories, both large and small scale - Henry is playing Injustice on the iPad; the fresco depicts Justice. The characters gets glimpses of the other world. Whenever there's a chance to dwell on the idea of "both" it's taken. Mainly it's to do with female/male, present/past.

I read the 15th century part first. My problem is that there are tedious passages - e.g. about the missing ring (p.16). I needed a break from the familiar linguistic quirks of the familiar character. Just saying. MJ Nicholls on "Good Reads" says it better than I (though the halves were the other way round for him) -

the first section is quintessential Smith with its precocious teenage protagonist and her tireless obsession with words (these recurring characters are sentimental love-affairs with one’s formative time discovering language and its possibilities), while the second part is one of her riskiest experiments with style, voice, (mild) typography, wearing its Christine Brooke-Rose influence with pride, and for this reader . . . seems to fall facewards. ... the rambling narration of a 15thC painter that splices epithets about art and painting between various tortured plot strands, written in frustrating run-on sentences in a semi-Italian accent, is ballsy and indulgent. The meandering aspect of the second tale and its seemingly slapdash effect impeded my fun, despite the isolated moments of quotable and perfect thought-making that leap out from the sprightly pages (p.189-190)

A 15th century whore appears in a fragment that could have come from any Smith book - "First time? she said unbuttoning her front. I'll take care. I promise. Don't be scared. Let me. Of you." (p.78). The contemporary section isn't free of longeurs either. It takes a while for the mother's death to sink in -

• 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 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 in 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. (p.189-190)

• Her mother doesn't say Her mother said. Because if things really did happen simultaneously it'd be like reading a book but one in which all the lines of the text have been overprinted, like each page is actually two pages but with one superimposed on the other to make it unreadable. Because it's New Year, not May, and it's England not Italy (p.196)

• Every day before work George's mother, when she was alive (because she can't exactly do it now being, you know, dead) (p.207)

George's voice is being channeled through the narrator. Neither, alone, would use these words. I don't know whether the proportions of the mix are always right.

I've written parallel texts, and in Art and narration, etc I've used Art. I'm happy with Formalist prose. I feel I should like this book more than I do. My feelings might be to do with personal preferences re proportions. There's too much character-transcending wordplay for my liking and some plot coincidences seem too gratuitous (as if she's being paid for each link she can squeeze in).

Other reviews

• Patrick Flanery (Telegraph) (One might reasonably argue that Ali Smith is among Virginia Woolf’s most gifted inheritors. Attentive to Woolf’s admonition that “one must be woman-manly or man-womanly”, Smith’s writing is alive to the power of empathy as much as it is conscious of the importance of form.)
• Holly Williams (Independent) (Ali Smith’s writing often disrupts forms in a joyous, mind-expanding fashion, and in How to Be Both, she mischievously remodels the novel with both brazen ambition and sneaky subtly ... Even the humble wall may become totemic; references build up, brick-by-brick. Francescho is the child of a brickmaker; her art was largely on walls. George’s grief is a wall; she is a wall “against which other things impact without her permission”; she sits on a wall to stalk her mother’s spy/lover. But finally her walls, too, are broken down – by art, by love, by laughter. )
• Sophie Gilbert (Atlantic) (The book is also full of hints about walls as barriers and enablers: Francescho paints on walls, her father builds them, and George crafts them out of photographs she takes, with each image becoming a brick in the final construction. Perhaps, Smith seems to suggest, every circumstance or obstacle can be subverted and become its opposite at the same time.)
• Jan Dalley (Financial Times) (It is risky to base a novel around a work of art – it has been done very often, and there’s a kind of aesthetic piggy-backing that can feel like cheating. Not to mention the pervading whiff of “research”. For a writer, it can be perilous to have a super-perceptive adolescent as your primary narrator – that way cutesiness lies – yet Smith gives herself two of them. And the broken-backed structure of a novel in two halves, their timeframes separated by centuries, is again over-familiar, and courts the risk that readers will spend the second half of the book picking up on clever parallels, rather like a sixth-form English class. Undaunted, in her latest book Smith walks boldly into each of these danger areas, but skilfully makes the territory her own, skirting every pitfall and adding so much unexpected richness that we forgive the occasional stumble into the expected.)
• Ron Charles (Washington Post) (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)
• Lia Mills (Stinging Fly) (Smith’s stories often feature wild-card characters whose unexpected and usually inexplicable actions disrupt the previously stable but often stagnant, unhappy worlds of the other characters. ... A preoccupation with surveillance is familiar territory to Smith’s readers ... The links between 'Artful' and 'How to be both' are particularly strong: bereavement and a dusty ghost; discussions of art, time and form; a pastiche of quotes and cultural references; gender disruption; word play; the value of attention and close reading)

"C'e Ma Non Si" by Ali Smith (Feltrinelli, 2012)

The English title was "There but for the". The Italian title's a contraction of "il trucco c'è ma non si vede" ("it must be a trick but I can't see it") which, though not a direct translation, suits the book well and deliberately has "ma" (but) as the 2nd word. This is just the start of the challenges that the translator had to face. There are puns too - by the author ("Anna K." (anarchy) is a character, and Jen-Eric are a couple) and by the characters, some of whom are into jokes. When there's no Italian analogue available for the wordplay, the translator uses footnotes.

The book's in 4 long sections, each entitled with a word from the title. Parenthesised sections can last for pages. Explanations often appear long after the events they explain. Coincidences and connections abound.

• In C'e we learn that a Miles, a guest at a party in Greenwich, London, has locked himself in the host's guest-room. In the jacket that he left downstairs the hosts find an e-mail address which they use to contact Anna Hardie, who's surprized that Miles has her address because they met about 30 years before as teenagers on a prize trip around Europe. She tries to tease Miles out.
• Ma records the aforementioned dinner party which goes on a long time. There are facts, anecdotes, and asides, some leading to cul-de-sacs. There are embarrassing silences. That's followed by Mark's wander in the park where variations of "Mark è seduta, ora, sulla panchina circolare, non lontano dall'entrata del parco" are repeated as he communicates with his dead mother.
• Non is from May Young's PoV. She's in a care home. Her thoughts drift. She's often unsure whether she's spoken some words or just thought them. The nurses think she's mute. When she finally speaks, the words come out wrong. Later we learn that she had yearly contact with Miles. At the end she escapes, driven to Greenwich.
• Si is from Brooke's PoV as she walk around Greenwich. She's an absurdly precocious 9 or 10 year-old who was at the party and was in section one. By now, Miles has become a celeb. She's visited him in his room. Since then he's disappeared.

It's tempting to try to find themes. E.g.

• The power of stories (it's useful to have some in store when going to dinner parties). The value of memory.
• Language. The value of rhyme (musicals; communications with Mark's mother Faye - a famous artist who killed herself; an aid to memory; emotional security - associated with childhood). Iambic pentameter. Wordplay is explained to a child.
• Communication - with the dead. Slipping notes under doors
• What truth/reality is - memory, verification, history, the media, and the value of metaphors

Sometimes the book might be commenting about itself -

• "Come sono adattabili gli esseri umani, senza neanche rendersene conto, scivolano ciecamente da uno stato all'altro. Una mattina è estate, quella dopo ti svegli ed è passato un anno; ora hai trent'anni, e un minuto dopo ne hai sessanta" (p.85). There's a lot of time-shifting in the book.
• "ma la cosa che più mi piace della parola ma, ora che ci penso, è che ti fa cambiare sempre strada, ti porta sempre in posti interessanti" (p.149)

The style is flexible and capacious. Equally, whole chunks of the book could go (about the console, for example, or the guillotine, or Gracie Fields; the dinner party's too long; is section 3 a self-standing novella?) and other sections are only partially justified by the same subject being mentioned elsewhere, or by being interesting little QI snippets. The 9-10 year old could have more realistically been a gap-year, naive 19 year old student. All the word-play could have gone. Though I can see where she's coming from; I've used some of these devices too.

Other reviews

• Mario Fortunato
• Simone Rebora
• il vizio di leggere
• Nicholas Lezard Guardian) (This is a writer who has inhaled the masters of what was once called the avant garde in a way that writers from Britain rarely do ... In terms of technique, Smith is a master of what one reviewer has felicitously called "dropped stitches", deliberate gaps in the story, little scootings-off to the side, connections that don't quite connect and apparent non-connections that do. )
• Alex Clark (Guardian)
• Charles McGrath (New York Times) (quirky, intricately put together, sometimes overly clever but nevertheless airborne for some considerable stretches)
• Nina Sankovitch (Huffington Post)

"Artful" by Ali Smith (Penguin, 2012)

"Artful" as in Dickens' Dodger - some interesting points about "Oliver!" and "Oliver Twist" are made. The book comprises four sections - "On time", "On form", "On edge", "On offer and on reflection" - that are "Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form", according to the inside cover. In the acknowledgements (which are right-aligned) it says that "The lectures are published here pretty much as they were delivered". I don't think I'd have enjoyed those lectures. On the page I can cope better.

If an author has some theoretical ideas but doesn't want to develop them, one option is to give them to a character (maybe an eng-lit student who faced with a life-changing event - love, death - integrates theories with life). I like "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" by Roberto Calasso, though that's "creative non-fiction" I suppose. In The Anthologist Nicholson Baker makes some serious points. I've read some of Andre Gide's notebooks which are interesting too. The sections of explicit theoretical interest in Smith's book are diluted by fiction which doesn't always have much of a thematic connection to the theory. Ali Smith's perky couples often keep themselves to themselves, and this pair is no exception - no group-scenes, no families. Her stories can be meta-fictional. In this piece the drafts of the lectures are commented upon by the partner. I noted the following points

• "The story can be partial, can be a piece of something and still hold its own, still be whole. The novel, on the other hand, is bound to and helplessly interested in society and social hierarchy, social worlds; and society is always attached to, in debt to, made by and revealed by the trappings of its time" (p.29)
• "Here it's as if [Ciaran Carson's] found the essence of form itself - it can generate dimensionality out of nothing, out of repetition, out of fusion, even out of its own barrenness like Steven's jarring jar" (p.73)
• "Edge is the difference between one thing and another. It's the brink. It suggests keenness and it suggests sharpness. It can wound. it can cut. It's the blade - but it's the blunt part of the knife too./ It's the place where two sides of a solid thing come together. it means bitterness and it means irritability, edginess, and it means having the edge, having the advantage. it's something we can go right over .... Edges are magic too; there's a kind of forbidden magic on the borders of things, always a ceremony of crossing over" (p.126)
• "Empathy, in art, is art's part-exchange with us, its inclusivity, at once a kind-ness, a going beyond the self, and a pickpocketing of our responses, which is why giving and taking are bound up with the goods, with the gods" (p.171)

Other reviews

• Simon Savidge
• Julie Myerson (The Observer) (It's tempting of course to think that both women are embodiments of Smith herself. ... this wonderful, deeply original book.)
• Daniel Hahn (The Independent) (Smith's narrator looks through the papers of an ex-lover, who died leaving notes for four university lectures, never delivered. This bereaved narrator is visited by the lover's ghost, and in the presence of that ghost assembles these thoughts)
• Leah Hager Cohen (New York Times) (her new book, in which she tugs at God’s sleeve, ruminates on clowns, shoplifts used books, dabbles in Greek and palavers with the dead, is a stunner.)
• Philip Womack (Telegraph) (Her style is usually clear, but sometimes oblique)
• Dimitri Nasrallah (Toronto Star) (she conspicuously sidesteps examples of American literature, which has arguably offered the greatest risks since the modernists she revisits ... To revisit and refurbish the universality of the subjective self now, of all times, might appear maddeningly unproductive to some readers. To others, however, this redressing of modernist principles will be viewed as an exceptionally pertinent project for the contemporary novel to undertake, given that a century has now passed since these avant-garde ideals first revolutionized the form)
• Jenny Hendrix (Los Angeles review of books) (In retaining only the most blurred and genderless ghost of form, the book brings to life the pansexual erotics of the text the way Barthes envisioned it — omnivorousness as a form of generosity, of accepting (and excepting — because acceptance leads, for the giver, to loss) whatever it is offered)
• Emma Lee-Potter (Daily Express) (Smith offers profound insights into the way we view literature today ... The bereaved narrator gets sporadic visits from her lover’s ghost, for example, but instead of coming back as “a small star” or “a mystic vision” the ghost is ragged and smelly with an alarming tendency to nick random objects from their house. ... In less skilled hands this book could have been woefully self-indulgent but Smith is far too smart to let that happen.)
• Luna Dolezal (Stinging Fly)

"Other Stories and other stories" by Ali Smith (Penguin, 2004)

First published in 1999, this book has stories each containing smaller stories. The narrative/imagery patterns can sometimes appear somewhat gimmicky, the characters leaving no mark in the big world, affecting one other person, if that. She uses "you" more than many other people do, often in the first sentence. Her scene shifts are sometimes never explained, or explained unconvincingly, or retrospectively. I came to identify the symbolism that would recur, distinguishing it from the incidental, "reality effect" detail. In the summaries below I'll try to pick out the pivotal imagery.

• "god's gift" begins "There are so many things that you don't know about me now". Who is "you" - the reader? The main character's back from a short holiday alone in Greece. A cat's been bringing her birds, dead or dying. "Whichever cat it is it is clearly deeply in love with me". She leaves a wounded bird on a sill. We read that "The first girl I ever fell in love with put a bird in my bed". In Greece a waiter (god's gift?) tried to pick her up. She went off with the female cook, was sick in her sink. Near the end of the story the "you" returns - "I'm dying, you said to me once, one time when you were feeling sick". Then we read that "I know every day, every hour is a gift". At the end she goes to check the fledgling. "I will look down, and it will be there. Or I will look down and it'll be gone.//It will be dead// It will have flown".
• "the hanging girl" begins "They're going to hang me". The girl's first person voice blends with that of a reality show compere. Then there's a 3rd person section. Pauline has an invisible friend who hangs herself. Mike, her partner, does what he can. There are detailed asides
  • He ... pictured himself instead, driving along the motorway under turn-off signs and signs flashing warnings about fog, driving fast along boring country lanes and slowing as he came into a village, past a sign about old people crossing, a sign about a hump-backed bridge, a narrowing of the road, a sharp bend, a sign saying keep your distance, p.29
  • Inside his mouth he could feel his tongue, rooted to him like a thick-stemmed plant. It was moving. It touched against the soft flesh of the walls of his mouth, p.32
  1st person and 3rd person sections alternate. Pauline lies down on lawns, in churches, gets her friend down from the lamppost she's hung herself from and invites her home. She's about 12 and hangs from various locations around the house. At the end, when Pauline jumps from her garage roof, hundreds of her imaginary friend's friends have turned up to watch.
• In "blank card" a women receives a bunch of flowers with a blank card. The intrigue leads to good sex with her partner. "I slipped my hand down inside your opened jeans, watching myself slipping my hand down inside your opened jeans" (p.44). At the end she orders flowers with a blank card for her partner. We're led to believe that she ordered herself the first bunch and that the partner might wrongly guess who sent the second bunch.
• In "more than one story" (which begins langourously with "It is a Wednesday, half day, early afternoon just after lunch") a man in a summer-house sees a girl sun-bathing topless. This reminds him that his bother was run over and killed at her age, and that he was seduced by a girl (Olive, from the Anchor) in a shed on a cold day. The PoV changes to the girl who recalls being seduced by Sharon Neil, who offered to give her driving lessons. At the end the man and the girl exchange pleasantries as they pass, the girl not hearing the man say "Hopefully be another sunny one tomorrow".
• "Virtual" - a girl visiting an aunt in hospital sees an anorexic girl opposite. She overfeeds her aunt's fish and wonders how she could tempt the girl to eat. The girl has a virtual Japanese pet because she can't bring her cat into hospital. At home the main character says "I thought about getting a cat. Then I thought about maybe getting some fish and a tank".
• "okay so far" begins "We have come a long way". A couple are on a long train ride across the USA. They speculate on the circumstances of a little girl, seemingly alone. One of the couple, the narrator, recalls nearly falling from a car which her father was driving. The other tells about a caravan holiday with her parents. After talking to a couple whose daughter had died young, her parents bought her an expensive bucket and spade.
• "miracle survivors": a tramp who'd survived under a snowdrift becomes a minor celebrity, predicting the nurses' futures. The scene changes - on New Years Eve two girls break into a shop on a station platform.
• "the theme is power" begins "The thing is, I really need you with me in this story. But you're not home". We told about 2 girls on their way home to Scotland from Paris. They stop in London, are invited to a flat. They later believe it was a trap and that the bus they later catch was followed by the same people. 6 pages in we told "So that's the first part of the story", then "The other thing is, my father is here visiting. I forgot to tell you. He's why I began thinking about all this". After an anecdote we're told "I don't know if I've ever told you this story about my father before". The narrator told her father about a flasher. Her father caught him. Later we're told "I turn round. You're not there. I knew that. There's no one here, just me, and my father breathing next door". Near the end "You came home half an hour after I finished the dishes". At the end, in bed with "you" asleep beside her, she imagines pleasant versions of her memories, thinks about who to trust. "That's the story finished, that's all there is to it."
• "instructions for pictures of heaven" begins in the second person with a girl wondering about words and faces and what you can infer from them. Without warning the scene changes. Gayle (maybe the girl in the first scene) is helping an old woman, Margie, to clear her house. On the way home "In her head the old lady's face shifts and changes. Her house changes. The smell goes, the dirt goes, the town and time change, and Gayle is looking up at her grandmother, who is dead. But this is a long time before she died, and they are in the white-tiled bathroom in the new council house" - another scene change. Then we flip back. Then we have "1: Women at Work in Jam Factory, circa 1948", the first of 16 photo captions. Some captions have associated text about Margie. Finally, in a section entitled "Instructions for pictures of heaven" we're told how a photographer faked pictures, adding anonymous faces to portraits. I like how the final section affects the earlier parts
• "kasia's mother's mother's story" - a mother leaves her daughters in order to pray. She steals a cross from the church, hoping it will help. They are poor. In the past it seems that the mother had burnt the family's identification papers.
• "a story of love" accentuates the story-making theme of the collection. It begins "Tell me a story, I said". Several stories are told, e.g. - "Here goes. There was once a girl etc dog. She really really wanted a dog. But she never did get one. The end." and "There was once, I said, a story that was told by way of other stories. The end."

Other reviews

• Mark Brown (short review)

"the first person and other stories" by Ali Smith (Penguin, 2008)

The same (often gender-free) voice speaks in many of the stories. The roles of storytelling are displayed - telling tales; understanding self by identifying with a character in a narrative that may be self-created; learning by making and interpreting stories; listening to stories others make about you; making up stories that are told sequentially or one inside the other.

The narratives are presented as plays, musicals, films, books, stories and personae. The medium (CD, etc) and act of observing (the cinema, etc) matter. The characters don't define themselves by job, role, nationality, etc. Even their relationships are unstable. Instead, they embed themselves in the narratives, recontextualise themselves, re-interpret the stories.

• "true short story" - a story containing another story which contains quotes about what the short story is.
• "present" - 3 in a pub. One leaves to sit in her car, imagines a story involving the 3 of them.
• "the third person" begins "All short stories long". Stories flow into each other.
• "fidelio and bess" describes a story, a performance of a story. How do the characters interact with the story? Do they identify with the story's characters? Do they re-interpret the story? "Culture's fixed, you say .... Fidelio's all about revision, I say"
• "the history of history" - a mother and daughter don't get on. The daughter talks to her friend about mad mothers. "I'm nothing like you", the daughter says to the mother.
• "no exit" - A performance - at a cinema this time. Then "I know a story about that fire exit down there". One story inside another - how do the stories map onto each other?
• "the second person" - people making stories about each other, misrepresenting.
• In "Writ" a mother wants to give advice to a daughter. Both are having crushes. At the end there's someone outside. "I love you, he shouts, or she shouts, hard to tell which ... You hear that we both say at once."
• "astute fiery luxurious" is a story told within a story, the frame as substantial as the contents. Again we're invited to find correlatives.
• "the first person" (the final story) begins "This, though, is a new you and a new me". Later, "You're not the first person to spin me a yarn".

Other reviews

• Tania Hershman (Short Review)

"the accidental" by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton, 2005)

Streams of consciousness and stories within stories - dreams, daydreams, flashbacks, pop-videos. Here's a sample

After the creak she can hear the silence in the rest of the house. They are all asleep. Nobody knows she is awake. Nobody is any the wiser. Any the wiser sounds like a character from ancient history. Astrid in the year 1003 BC (Before Celebrity) goes to the woods where Any the Wiser, who is really royalty and a king but who has unexpectedly chosen to be a Nobody and to live the simple life, lives in a hut, no, a cave (p.12)

She dips into various minds, some more focussed than others. As with "The Waves" one comes to identify the voices. Is the following the same voice as the previous extract?

It is unbelievably bright. He hunches his shoulders. Any minute now it will darken. That noise is just a wind in leaves, the noise of birds. The birds are like a nightmare. They are making the same noises, again, then again, then again. The leaves are hissing. Birds are pointless. (p.48)

One character writes lives up in the form of interviews. The genre takes its revenge, describing her. Then there's a section of sonnets and poems. How's it all going to end?

Heaven on earth. Alhambra. It's a top-of-the-range but still-affordable five-door seven-seater people-carrier with a 2.8 litre engine that can go from 0-62 in 9.9 seconds. It's a palace in the sun It's a delelict old cinema packed with inflammable filmstock. Got a light? See? Careful. I'm everything you ever dreamed.

An interesting read.

"Free love and other stories" by Ali Smith (Virago, 1995)

Don't be deterred by the first 2 stories, things improve - she takes language with her when she soars. For the most common character type a moment of respite from stress triggers a flight response - a trip to the toilet ends up with hitching a ride to Brighton; a cycle ride leads to a visit to a prostitute. When previously unadmitted thoughts have a chance to be made manifest, they blossom, though not in ways that makes return impossible - the narrator's partner/family aren't confronted. The straying characters are lucky in who they meet: thoughtful lorry drivers, old ladies in supermarkets, interested waitresses - no wierdos.

In "The unthinkable happens to people every day" a man goes off the rails only to be saved by a chance meeting with a little girl. In her world he's a star, associated with a popular TV program. Again, the internals of the change (in this case a recovery) aren't shown.

Most of the couples are imminently breaking up. The collapse will be sudden because it's already happened internally. Like cartoon characters running on thin air beyond the edge of the cliff, it's just a matter of time before realisation sinks in. But sometimes the shock is unforseen, unprepared for. In "Cold iron" a character searches for fragments of a suddenly shattered past, trying to make meaning from lists and souvenirs.

The lyricism comes mostly from how the phrases are sequenced, how sentences tumble into succeeding one, rather than the words themselves. Here's the start of "Cold Iron" which is an exception.

What can I tell you? The sea and the snow and the wind. Earth and then grass and then snow settling on the grass. Snow choking the narrow gravel paths, nestling into the neck and filling the stone eyes of a praying angel, silently mittening the leafless branches of trees,

There's a lot of realism, though books and words begin to pollute the world in "Text for the day" and "The World with love", and there are more dreams than I'm used to nowadays.