How To Be Both: A Novel
by Ali Smith
Buy on AmazonThis is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths, and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.
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"There are two published editions of this odd, bifurcated novel. Depending on which copy you end up with, you’ll either start with the story of the artist Francesco del Cossa, a Renaissance Italian fresco painter, or that of George, short for Georgia, a ‘60s teenager who recently lost her mother. Either way you will have the delightful experience of reading something truly innovative. The stories illuminate each other differently based on the order in which you encounter them. And the writing isn’t outpaced by the inventiveness of the structure — it’s vivid and tender and funny. And what a feat! — a book so tightly constructed that it contains not just two narratives that themselves explore duality, but two wholly different encounters with the book itself."
NPR Books We Love — 2014 · apps.npr.org