"Autumn" by Ali Smith

     This is the first novel in what the author, Ali Smith, intends as a four-part series, one for each season. The second--"Winter"--has just been published to considerable critical praise.
     One review calls Autumn "...a poignant and subtle exploration of the way we experience time," Another notes--"The chronology skips forward and backward and sideways, moving slowly and quickly...she conveys time almost as if it is happening all at once, like Picasso trying to record an image from every angle simultaneously." (Sarah Lyall in the New York Times' book review.)
     The novel is set in the period following the Brexit referendum in Britain--and one short chapter is devoted to chronicling the way people felt in the aftermath of the vote in favour of leaving the EU.
"All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country people felt they'd really lost. All across the country people felt they'd really won."
      At its heart, the story-line follows the relationship between the principal character--Elizabeth Demand--and her friend Daniel Gluck, who is 101 years old and dying in a care facility. The novel opens with a vivid dream that Gluck is having and then moves to Elizabeth making an application for a passport in an over-crowded Post Office. Elizabeth is a part-time lecturer in art history at a university and has written her doctoral thesis on the pop art of Pauline Boty, a British artist who had been largely forgotten after her early death, and her true and tragic end is woven into the novel.
The novel also takes us backwards with a series of flashbacks detailing Elizabeth's first encounter as a child with her elderly neighbor, Daniel Gluck, who has no other visitor besides Elizabeth as he lies dying in the hospice.
     I thoroughly recommend Autumn and I hope to get "Winter" from the library. In the meantime, I have down-loaded an earlier novel by Smith--"How to be Both"--and that will NOT be read on the treadmill...
      

Modes of Reading

     I have been very neglectful about keeping this blog up-to-date, and I find myself several books in arrears.

     I can dispose of two of them very quickly. As I mentioned before I heard David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, praise the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Childs. He characterized them as 'good beach reads,' if I recollect. I read one and thought it was pretty good for casual reading on my I-Pad when I was on the treadmill in our Exercise Room. (Most mornings--40 or 45 minutes at 3.5 mph with a 10 percent slope) But halfway through reading a third--'61 Hours'--after the second--'Personal'--I was fed up with the whole genre. I did not want to read any more fights where Jack kills his opponents with crashing blows to their throats, or detailed descriptions of a variety of weapons and their ammunition. And the prolixities of the plots were mind-numbing. So I had to look for something else for I-Pad reading. (I suddenly realized, a day after drafting this, that I had already gone over 'Personal' in an earlier post--my memory is not what it was)

And writing this on a Sunday, I see that a Jack Reacher novel is at the top of the NY Times Best Seller list....

     So what did the DC Library have that I could download to my I-Pad? Cruising through the e-book catalogue, there was "An Artist of the Floating World"--the first (?) novel by Kazuo Ishguro. I had never read it. I downloaded it, but it was too serious a piece of literature to read on the treadmill. So I read it at my leisure and was very impressed. He did, after all, win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

     But I still needed something for the treadmill. I heard an interview on the New York Times Book Review Podcast with an author called Tana French, and praiseworthy mention was made of her series of crime books involving the Dublin Police Murder Squad. I found that there was one available as an E-book in the library. It was "The Trespasser," and it had me compulsively turning the pages as Detective Garda Antoinette Conway investigated the murder (or was it manslaughter?) of a young woman, with other detectives running interference and her relationship with her partner/assistant getting out of kilter. The first person narrator's voice was particularly compelling, and her back story was interesting in providing context to her problems within the male-dominated murder squad.

     More recently, I was in the Library and I picked up a print copy of a second Tana French novel--'Broken Harbor.' And again, it was compulsive reading. I began to see, though, that there were certain similarities between the two novels. They are both long. Each is very concerned with the back-stories of the two (different) detectives who are the first person narrators. Each has problems with their assistants on the case. Each novel has one aspect of the story line that goes a little beyond credibility and is explored at great length And each has some other cop on the Murder Squad who seems to be trying to sabotage the investigation. But the writing is of a very high quality, and unlike the Jack Reacher books, I will definitely find and read the others in the series.

     So what for the treadmill? I down-loaded Agatha Christie's 'Death on the Nile'--not quite ideal, as one does need to keep a fairly close grip on who all the characters are and their relationships: and Hercule Poirot's explanation of how it all happened--the three murders--did require a degree of concentration that I do not usually apply when marching up my 10 percent grade. But it served its purpose, and now I need something new.