Book Group - How to be Both by Ali Smith

I wrote about this before because I enjoyed it....

Earlier Post on How to Be Both

When the book group Selected it for this month's read I was sure it would be a popular book - but the turnout was poor, which means that few people were interested in discussing it, and those who had turned out were the old people, plus myself and Karen. It was so disappointing that the level of discussion was so  low;  the group voicing a lack of comprehension, moaning about the layout of some of the writing ... "It's rubbish! No punctuation!" and also that I felt it was completely useless to explain to the old people why the book is so good.

 In fact, I did agree that some of the experimental writing didn't work very well, but once Ali Smith got into her stride as the painter Francescho, she voiced what  the paintings meant to her. They meant vitality, unexpectedness, subversion, as well as a personality well-grounded in the skills of his art and politics of his time. Ali Smith looked and saw a sensibility not entirely male, so she makes him a woman/man, a woman passing as a man. The Book Group chorused: what does she mean "How to be Both"? and I answered, "Both a man and a woman, both living and dead". Because both protagonists are gender-bending perfectly happily, and the painter, through the beauty of the images he has left on the walls of art galleries, of the palace in Ferrara, can come back to us, sensed by the antennae of another artist. So Ali Smith conjures him in all his colour, liveliness, sensitivity to living things like birds and horses, understanding of sexuality and sexuality itself! She makes him/her sexy (although dull people like me wonder: "and will she get pregnant after this random encounter?") with usually women but sometimes men. So she makes him live again because that's what happens anytime a sensitive eye looks at his pictures: the artist is understood and lives again.

In the National Gallery - this painting contains many surprising details.