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Autumn / Ali Smith.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Smith, Ali, Seasonal quartet ; 1.Publisher: London : Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2016Copyright date: ©2016Description: 263 pages ; 23 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780241207000 (hardback)
Subject(s): Genre/Form: Summary: Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy and the colour-hit of Pop Art - via a bit of very contemporary skulduggery and skull-diggery - Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture, and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means. Autumn is the first installment in Ali Smith's novel quartet Seasonal: four standalone books, separate yet interconnected and cyclical (as the seasons are), exploring what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take and in our ways with narrative. From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.
List(s) this item appears in: Book Chat Fiction notes: Click to open in new window
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Fiction Davis (Central) Library Fiction Collection Fiction Collection SMIT 1 Available T00614702
Fiction Davis (Central) Library Fiction Collection Fiction Collection SMIT 2 Available T00615221
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"The first of four novels in a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories. Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy and the colour-hit of Pop Art - via a bit of very contemporary skulduggery and skull-diggery - Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture, and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means. Autumn is part of the quartet Seasonal - four stand-alone novels, separate yet interconnected and cyclical (as the seasons are), exploring what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take and in our ways with narrative."

Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy and the colour-hit of Pop Art - via a bit of very contemporary skulduggery and skull-diggery - Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture, and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means. Autumn is the first installment in Ali Smith's novel quartet Seasonal: four standalone books, separate yet interconnected and cyclical (as the seasons are), exploring what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take and in our ways with narrative. From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.

Kōtui multi-version record.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again. That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature. So an old old man washes up on a shore. He looks like a punctured football with its stitching split, the leather kind that people kicked a hundred years ago. The  sea's been rough. It has taken the shirt off his back; naked as the day I was born are the words in the head he moves on its neck, but it hurts to. So try not to move the head. What's this in his mouth, grit? it's sand, it's under his tongue, he can feel it, he can hear it grinding when his teeth move against each other, singing its sand-song: I'm ground so small, but in the end I'm all, I'm softer if I'm underneath you when you fall, in sun I glitter, wind heaps me over litter, put a message in a bottle, throw the bottle in the sea, the bottle's made of me, I'm the hardest grain to harvest to harvest the words for the song trickle away. He is tired. The sand in his mouth and his eyes is the last of the grains in the neck of the sandglass.      Daniel Gluck, your luck's run out at last.      He prises open one stuck eye. But -      Daniel sits up on the sand and the stones      - is this it? really? this? is death?      He shades his eyes. Very bright.      Sunlit. Terribly cold, though.      He is on a sandy stony strand, the wind distinctly harsh, the sun out, yes, but no heat off it. Naked, too. No wonder he's cold. He looks down and sees that his body's still the old body, the ruined knees.      He'd imagined death would distil a person, strip the rotting rot away till everything was light as a cloud.      Seems the self you get left with on the shore, in the end, is the self that you were when you went.      If I'd known, Daniel thinks, I'd have made sure to go at twenty, twenty five.      Only the good.      Or perhaps (he thinks, one hand shielding his face so if anyone can see him no one will be offended by him picking out what's in the lining of his nose, or giving it a look to see what it is - it's sand, beautiful the detail, the different array of colours of even the pulverized world, then he rubs it away off his fingertips) this is my self distilled. If so then death's a sorry disappointment.      Thank you for having me, death. Please excuse me, must get back to it, life.      He stands up. It doesn't hurt, not so much, to. Now then.      Home. Which way?      He turns a half circle. Sea, shoreline, sand, stones. Tall grass, dunes. Flatland behind the dunes. Trees past the flatland, a line of woods, all the way back round to the sea again.      The sea is strange and calm.                         Excerpted from Autumn by Ali Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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