"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...