How to be both: A novel

When I started reading How to Be Both I was slightly apprehensive: was I about to read a very long poem? Why did the first pages have such a strange shape? Then it dawned upon me that its protagonist, painter Francesco del Cossa, had died centuries ago. The jaggedness of the first pages had to do with his ghost being transported to 21st century Cambridge. Getting used to his new situation as a ghost, Francesco regains his ability to talk fluently. Towards the end, when he is about to disappear again, his words become raggedly. almost poetic again. How to Be Both contains two stories: Francesco observing a young girl who has studied one of his paintings; the other the young girl, George, telling her story. I started reading about Francesco, only to discover later on that there are also versions of How to Be Both that start off with George. As it turned out my e-book contained both: after I had finished George’s story, it relooped. This time starting with George. I am glad I was given Francesco’s story first. As he became increasingly intrigued by the young girl and her strange behaviour (not counting the things he as a Renaissance painter would obviously find strange, such as taking pictures with her I-pad), I also found myself increasingly wondering who the girl was and what part she was going to play in How to Be Both? I am not sure whether I would have been just as intrigued if I had read about George first and next about the painter she is that preoccupied with. Truth of the matter is that it is all hypothetical: I was given Francesco first and I am pleased about it. Francesco talks about his life, his aim to become a famous painter and the people he knew. When he talks about painting it becomes quite apparent that he is totally dedicated to his art. We meet George after her mother has died; she remembers the time she visited Italy with her mother and brother and went to visit the beautiful fresco’s painted by a rather unknown painter, Francesco del Cossa. Their stories are intertwined in an intricate way. It is not just the fact that they kind of meet, its is also the fact that there are certain parallels in their lives and personalities. Francesco (or rather Francesca) speaks her opinionated mind through her paintings, George through questioning facts. Both their mothers fed this tendency by never letting them accept the way things are at the surface: both girls have to look for what is beneath the surface. How to Be Both is poetic, philosophical and challenges its reader. In return the reader is rewarded with a love story, albeit one structured and told in a significantly different way. I was deeply touched by George and her sorrow, I rooted for Francesco’s goal to become a famous painter. I was sad when I turned the last page. BooksandLiliane

A lovely, intelligent book, lyrically written but challenging in spots. It's really two books, one in the present, about a young English woman who loses her mother unexpectedly and has to deal with the loss, growing up, her alcoholic dad and annoying younger brother, and her confused affection for another young woman at her school. She remembers her mom's surprise trip to Italy to see a 15thC fresco and how they interacted, how she might have loved her mom more or been kinder to her, and how she felt upon seeing the fresco. The second book (SPOILER ALERT) is narrated by the ghost of the 15thC artist who painted the fresco, who sees the English family as they admire his work, and who shadows the young woman as she struggles to come to grips with her grief and her love. The artist struggles to recall his own life and upbringing and how he came to paint the fresco. At least three of the characters--the young woman, her mother, and the artist--struggle to grasp and accept their own sexuality, with mostly successful results. I am sure the book's title is at least in part a reference to sexual duality, as well as a meditation on the constant present. The first book is written in a fairly standard style, but without typical punctuation for direct quotation. The second book is far more experimental in style, with long, unpunctuated, disjointed, stream-of-consciousness thoughts by the artist.

I would not buy from this vendor again. The first and second CD were fine but the third one won’t play. Damage was not caused by me. Book is very good or at least the first two CDs were interesting. Trying to deal with Amazon customer service is beyond frustrating so this is my only venue to complain.

Ali Smith has produced the literary equivalent of that Escher print of a hand drawing the hand that is drawing it. In art terms, her novel would be a diptych: two panels of equal size, with different subjects, but intended to be seen side by side. In her case, two stories from different centuries that comment on each other, reflect each other, and (in that Escher twist) at times even write each other. The first half is in the voice of a 15th-century Italian painter returned to earth watching a teenager looking at one of the artist's works in a gallery. The artist follows the youth through the city, and observes what seem like the symptoms of obsession. In between, we hear snatches of the painter's own story, growing up as the child of a stonemason, training as an artist, and achieving artistic but ill-paid success painting frescoes for a palace in Ferrara. The second half is told in the third person, and is the modern story of the teenager in the gallery, whom we learn is called George. George's mother has recently died. But a month or two before she did, she took George to Ferrara to see the artist's painting. It transpires that little is known about the painter, other than approximations of birth and death, and one of the things that George's mother and George do is to make up a life to go with the name, a fiction that resonates with the autobiographical information we have learned in the first half, but does not entirely match it. The novel ends just as George begins the behavior the artist observed at the start of the novel. A hand drawing a hand…. No description of the novel can do as well as the short paragraph on the back cover, a reticent gem that nonetheless says almost everything that is important. Write at greater length and you come up against the fact that Smith keeps her ideas so close to her chest that it is almost impossible to describe the book without spoilers. For instance, I was able to identify the painter before the end of the first half (it helps to have once taught art history) -- but Smith holds back the name until the last few pages of the entire book, so I shall also. Looking back with my present knowledge, though, I see how skillful the author was in incorporating the known facts, together with a lot that might reasonably be surmised; she clearly knows her history. But a lot must be invented, and one of her inventions is a doozy that turns out to be the thematic pivot of the entire novel. Oh dear, I realize that I must have made this sound like some dry intellectual puzzle, but not so. For Smith has given her painter an exuberant individual voice, with its own fractured syntax, idiosyncratic punctuation, and even typography (the whole book is printed with ragged right margins). It begins and ends in a poem about a snail, spiraling its way across the page, and the 150 pages in between are a poem in prose. Here is a complete paragraph as an example: "It is a feeling thing, to be a painter of things : cause every thing, even an imagined or gone thing or creature or person has essence : paint a rose or a coin or a duck or a brick and you'll feel it as sure as if a coin had a mouth and told you what it was like to be a coin, as if a rose told you first-hand what petals are, their softness and wetness held in a pellicle of colour thinner and more feeling than an eyelid, as if a duck told you about the combined wet and underdry of its feathers, a brick about the rough kiss of its skin." I did not need to get far before I was convinced I was reading a six-or-seven-star masterpiece. Unfortunately, the second half did not consistently sustain it. Perhaps it was the lack of the first-person perspective. Perhaps Smith left herself with so many themes to pull together that she could not quite find her focus. Perhaps it is that we are seeing George at a particularly awkward stage, lost, grieving, and not a little bratty. Even verging on autistic. But that feeling does pass, and there are some marvelous passages in this half too. Let me offer one more paragraph, about those Ferrara frescoes which contain, among many other details, a picture of a man wringing the neck of a duck. The voice here, repetitious but truly thinking, is that of the sixteen-year-old: "It is like everything is in layers. Things happen right at the front of the pictures and at the same time they continue happening, both separately and connectedly, behind, and behind that, and again behind that, like you can see, in perspective, for miles. Then there are the separate details, like that man with the duck. The picture makes you look at both -- the close-up happenings and the bigger picture. Looking at the man with the duck is like seeing how everyday and how almost comic cruelty is. The cruelty happens in among everything else happening. It is an amazing way to show how ordinary cruelty really is." Not accidentally, this passage contains the word "both," one of many "boths" that recur throughout the book, most of which I cannot comment on without spoilers. But this "both," the coexistence of happiness and cruelty, and of the details within the bigger picture, certainly hits some of the themes that make this ambitious but deceptively casual novel a near-masterpiece.

I can't even write a review on this book because I didn't read any more than 10% of it. It was so hard for me to get into, the writing was all over the place and just didn't make sense. My book club picked this for our January meeting and 5 of the 10 of us thought the same thing...book was hard to get into and difficult to read. Save yourself the $11, I wish I could get refunded for this book as it was truly that bad.

The style of writing starts off charming and fresh but quickly becomes burdensome and overly loquacious. To me the book was a waste of time but I have friends who were enthralled by the story telling. I can see how the book can be admired and the duel nature of the story is inviting. My proclivities tend toward styles other than this but its draw to persons with differing literary preferences is not hard to understand.

If you begin with the 15th-century tale, “Eyes,” you will be greeted with a swirl of words that you eventually learn are apparently those of the ghost of the painter Franceso(a) della Cossa, who has painted a wall in an Italian town and wasn’t properly paid. The painter-spectre goes on in a stream of spookconsciousness, weaving the story of the wall painting with the observations of a contemporary teenaged girl, Georg(e)(ia), who is visiting the site of the painted wall with her mother and younger brother. What fun there is in this part (quite a bit, actually) stems from the shade’s attempts to make sense of modern electronics, as well as some gender bending (if that sort of thing still amuses you, go for it). And you’ll gain knowledge of life in early Renaissance Italy. All the while, you’ll learn how one paints a wall. The e-book version gives you the choice of starting there, or instead choosing the other tale, “Camera,” which is George’s. Shortly after their visit to the artwork, George’s mother died, and she’s trying to get over her grief. This story is told in the third-person and far more clearly (I doubt if you’ll have to do any flipping back here, as you may well want to do in the painter’s tale.) Anyhow, it’s really, really special, as it weaves back and forth in time as once-lively and witty Georgia gets through her grieving. As you go through it, you’ll recall some of the scenes and some of the comments made in “Eyes” by the painter. Interestingly, the two tales seem to reflect their eras: the Renaissance tale swirly, witty, larger than life. The modern tale dryer, flatter, ironic more than somewhat. They meld together nicely. Of the two tales, "Camera" is more successful. There's not a false note in it. Perhaps the author as a teen was as amazing as is her George. "Eyes," of course, is an imagined past, and lot of what's in it comes from research, not life. The artifice shows through more. (And how could it not? It's a tale told by a ghost, after all.) It is my understanding that half the copies of the physical books start with one story, half with the other. If you have purchased a copy that starts with “Camera,” however, I would definitely recommend that you start with “Eyes” anyhow. It really seems to make more sense that way. At least to me. Notes and asides: The Kindle version’s AI counts the story twice, because if you load “Eyes” first, then you get “Camera,” and then you get the whole thing in reverse order. And amazingly, each tale ends precisely at the true halfway point, which the AI thinks is the 25% point. When I noticed that, I thought for certain that if Georgia were reading this book that would no doubt amuse her.

I enjoyed this book... eventually. It was a close run thing as I almost gave up while reading the section I began with - Eyes. Time is fluid and while the prose is beautiful, I found the vague stream of consciousness narrative frustrating at times and found myself skimming this section. The second section (in my copy) is written in the same fashion but tells the story of a (more) contemporary teenage girl's struggle with the death of her mother and the effect on her father and brother, as well as her own grief. As I read this section the links to the first section began to make sense. After finishing the book, I then returned to the first section and re-read it. I'm glad I persevered with this book and am sure I will return to it again as it is the type of book that you will find more links and meaning each time it's read, however I did think the premise of starting at whichever section you felt like was a bit of a gimmick not really worthy of the book.