This book is a like a fugue; with patterns to it popping up here and there and you don't notice how the themes work together until you've finished it and flick back.... I thought I would try to finish it this morning and then write something about it but I discover it's more complicated than I thought so I will have to read it again. And what could be better than that?
No, it's not so much a fugue as a crossword puzzle, where the across clues and the down clues are both part of the whole making something that interlocks. It's the interlocking that is fun.
I thought I liked the part with the modern girls best - I love Georgia - but then I started to love the Renaissance Italy part too : the monologue of a self-taught painter who is expert at being both male and female.
A taste:
"In the making of pictures and love -both - time itself changes its shape : the hours pass without being hours, they become their own opposite, they become timelessness, they become no time at all. "
A larger taste:
"cause nobody knows us : except our mothers, and they hardly do (and also tend disappointingly to die before they ought).
Or our fathers, whose failings while they're alive (and absences after they're dead) infuriate.
Or our siblings, who want us dead too cause what they know about us is that somehow we got away with not having to carry the bricks and stones like they did all those years.
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 engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark."
All that is so good!
and another bit:
"but in all honesty, when I looked at my own pictures they surprised even me with their knowledge : ....cause the life of painting and making is a matter of double knowledge so that your own hands will reveal a world to you to which your mind's eye, your conscious eye, is often blind."
What I didn't know until I finished it and explored online is that the painter is based on a real painter in that the paintings which are described are real, and gosh, they are gorgeous. I'm afraid Ali Smith may have started a flood of tourism to the place, Ferrara, which is described in the book. And while the girls in one story need to write something about the difference between empathy and sympathy, Ali Smith shows us the great writerly quality of empathy in her ability to look at the pictures and find/create a personality for the painter behind them - an extraordinary person, a person, in a way, rather like Ali Smith!! I guess that's what empathy does, it only can go as far as the imagination can go.
I hoped at one point that we were going to get a spy story, a story where a mysterious death is explained, but that didn't happen.
But here is art passing itself on: one artist inspiring another to imagine places, people, conversations, a way of life; in all its brightness, vigour, meannesses and horror. And when that inspiration has had its day, it goes underground, down into the earth.
But it hasn't quite gone.
The girl, Georgia, in How to be Both, does something profoundly weird, out of grief and a sense of loss. She patiently spends time in tracking down her mother's mysterious (but beautiful) friend, follows her to her house, and then sits outside her house day after day. This is very strange. I can see she does it out of a longing to be connected with her mother. And I can see that this is demented behaviour but I now realise that I have done almost exactly the same thing, in a way. Georgia seems OK. She goes to counselling but this seems to have very limited effect. Georgia is NOT letting go. She is thinking "I will hold on to my thoughts of my mother at all costs because my mother was my most precious thing." Whilst reading I didn't even notice that I have been just as crazy, given the situation.
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