Author: Ali Smith
Title: How to Be Both
Year of publication: 2014
Page count: 376
Rating: ★★★★
This was my first Ali Smith book, and certainly not my last, because I am left exceptionally intrigued by her mind, even though her writing style was often a little too affected for my taste. How To Be Both was an incredibly creative, refreshing dual-narrative novel about the connecting and subversive power of art, where the reading experience is left up to chance, as different editions swap the order of the two stories around, influencing the way the reader perceives the story. The parallel narratives—Camera, about a British teenage girl, and Eyes, about a 15th-century Italian Renaissance painter—twist around each other like a vine, or a DNA double helix (incidentally discovered in Cambridge, where the contemporary story is set), as Smith borrows from the fresco technique to create a literary double-take.
“Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.”
I happened to read the first half while visiting my parents in Northern Italy, and serendipitously, my edition began with Eyes, the historical fiction narrative about Francesco del Cossa, a Renaissance painter from Ferrara, not too far from where I grew up. Not much is known about him, and Smith ran with his shadowy and enigmatic life… but since this could be the second story for half the readers, I won’t go more into how exactly she plays with duality within this story—suffice it to say that readers drawing parallels to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando wouldn’t be too far off. I found Eyes to be a challenging read, as Francesco’s disembodied spirit tells us lyrical and disjointed stream-of-consciousness stories and memories from his life, full of odd punctuation, and featuring several pages down which the words unfurl like a ribbon in freestyle poetry.
The other narrative strand, Camera, is more straight-forward and succinct, and follows George (short for Georgia—just one of the instances in the book where Smith plays with the duality and ambiguity of gender and sexuality), a precocious, quick-witted teenager in present-day Cambridge. She is trying to come to terms with her mother’s sudden death, and reminisces, among other things, about the time her mother pulled her and her brother out of school to travel to Italy for a look at del Cossa’s frescos. This story pulls the book together—or does it? It stands to reason that the second story, whichever one it happens to be, will feel like the more profound one, as the cumulative power of the whole book reaches its peak. I have no doubt that the two stories work in either order, but, once read, it’s impossible to know what it would be like to first encounter them in the alternate order, which is a bit of a shame, but also proves Smith’s clever point about the layering and simultaneity of experiences separated by nothing but time. If you’re willing to put in the work to find your way through the Minotaur’s maze Smith drops you into, How to Be Both is incredibly rewarding—a love-letter to the versatility of art, and a playful Hall of Mirrors in which past and future intertwine in the fleeting present.
“Cause nobody’s the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves.
– except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends.
Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineerings of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.”
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