Born in 1962 in Inverness, Scotland, Ali Smith is a novelist, playwright, and journalist, living and working in Cambridge. She has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize four times and has multiple honors. Summer, her most recent publication, is one of a seasonal quartet: all four books were released within five years and can be read independently. Summer is the final book in this series.
The narrative begins with the story of a family in Brighton, the Greenlaws, a mother who lives with her daughter Sacha and her son Robert. The plot develops establishing crosses between contemporary and past issues, such as the life of the filmmaker and artist Lorenza Mazzetti, or events that occurred in the detention camp on the Isle of Man during World War II. In parallel, characters appear who reflect on current moments: Brexit, refugee immigrant camps, global warming or the pandemic. In this way, unforeseen events weave a web of realities. Throughout the reading, an atmosphere of confusion unfolds, in which the linear structure of time is left behind, to give way to elliptical situations that seem to get closer to each other, as if the different stories were about to come together. In Summer the complete painting is not delivered. Some characters come from other books in the quartet, so the reader faces the reading without too many certainties. Summer is a novel that requires a complicit reader to complete an overlapping of vast and fragmented stories.
Ali Smith’s intention is to speak from the present moment and to do so convincingly. For her, the political is in the contingent; in fact, her determination to publish the four novels in quick succession was intended to address the actuality in which her narratives take place. Summer is the temporary intersection of the past with possible imagined futures. For the author, the political means being attentive, hoping to see into the darkness: “I have the vision that, in a modern sense, being a hero is shining a bright light on things that need to be seen.” In the novel, the heroes are those who faced the daily struggles of 2020: “Healthcare workers and daily jobs such as home delivery people, postmen, people who work in factories and supermarkets, are the ones who have our lives in their hands.” They are mostly isolated characters, who have the possibility of relating to each other through affinities and chance encounters. For example, the letter that Sacha Greenlaw writes to a refugee giving him words of encouragement in tune with the feeling of the coming summer. Or how she asks his brother Robert, a fan of violent video games and porn, why he is also interested in Einstein and his theories about light. There is a notion of affinity in the relationships established by the characters. And it is that for Smith the novel develops from them, from their intimate thoughts and their solitary looks, in which great and catastrophic events seem to occur independently of her actions.
Smith’s style refers, among other things, to the vast literature of Shakespeare (refers to Winter’s Tale) and biblical quotes (“Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light”). Verano is a collage of starting points, as if the stories were heard from different sources, from canonical literature to close, everyday voices. It portrays a world where the unexpected unfolds before the reader, in a framework that embraces something greater than ourselves. Smith refers us to the figure of the poet enunciated by Agamben, that is, to the one who is capable of visualizing the evils of his time by portraying the everyday in the immensity of historical times. The author assumes that the way to capture the reader’s attention is through fragmentation, discarding any attempt at linear construction in favor of a superimposed and simultaneous perception of time.
Summer it’s a collage of starting points, as if the stories were heard from different sources, from canonical literature to close and everyday voices. It portrays a world where the unexpected unfolds before the reader, in a framework that embraces something greater than ourselves. (…) The author assumes that the way to capture the reader’s attention is through fragmentation, discarding any attempt at linear construction in favor of a superimposed and simultaneous perception of time.
Similar to oral narration, Smith pays attention to the local to frame it in a broader plane and intersection with the historical – the relationship with Shakespeare, Einstein or the Second World War. Smith is attentive to the reader and to her perceptions, offering a vision without a fixed meaning, where the images of the “here and now” from the newspapers, from the radio, from conversations on the street or in the neighborhood resound. In this sense, the author reconsiders the nostalgic character of that narrator that Walter Benjamin once defined as a creator of collective memories instead of a solitary novelist (as Benjamin wrote in his essay on Nikolai Leskov, the storyteller is the one who creates a oral narration from his experiences and those of others, and turns it into that of those who listen to him, in order to create a collective memory.This figure has been lost, he affirms, with the appearance of modern times and its dependence of the book, and with the rise of the news).
Ali Smith relates the facts in a way that allows the reader to easily jump in and out, without needing to take the full picture, but rather following his own approximations. Smith’s intention is to speak to the individual who embraces his reading: “I have always believed that books are not written by writers, but by all who have read them. It is the already existing writing that engenders literature. The rapid transit between verbal conjunctions and her free use of language reveal the author’s intention, as they reinforce improvisation and the mobilizing notion in reading.
In Summer, the swift birds are a metaphor for when summer comes and goes. It is a fleeting moment, the uncertain promise of a coming heat. Summer reflects that illusion of its long days of bright light, while reminding us that the cycle of the seasons is the same for everyone. Summer refers to the beauty of art in its fragility; to moldy oatmeal sculptures from the Isle of Man and childhood memories in Lorenza Mazzetti films. It is the lonely life of a refugee in the detention camp and, at the same time, it is the need to relate to others. It is the letter that Sacha sends to the refugee and it is the arrival of his reply. It is what forcefully unites the two Greenlaw brothers, after Robert persuaded his sister to wield a glass object without noticing it, adhering to her skin with glue:
It wasn’t just glass, Robert said. It was much more than a glass object.
What was it, then? said Charlotte.
It was time, said Robert.
Time, she said. Is that the gift we have to offer to others?
No matter what the unforeseen throws at us—Brexit, covid, Australian bushfires, refugee camps—; for Smith time never leaves us. It is light and darkness; it is the glass object; “It’s smooth and rough, and if you try to disassociate yourself from time, time will laugh at you and tear your skin off.” We depend on time, without more, and Smith’s stories enclose the circularity of the seasons in which the characters live, while his stories intersect with other literary times.
In Verano we can speculate about how the events of 2020 represented in 10 years will be read or when they distance themselves from the context in which they arose. The naturalness of the voices that Ali Smith exposes immersed in his contingency will probably continue to preserve the sensation of now. His ramblings and his Joycean style push us into limbo; we listen to the sentences like a murmur, like broken parts of a story, as the long summer days come and go, and we face their possibility. Smith’s hope when referring to our century is in the search for trust in others, in perceiving that the novel can still collect, just like oral tradition, the freshness of our times and generate some sense of belonging. Undoubtedly, the open narratives in the form of a chorus with which the writer creates a collage of voices help to break down our deep-rooted beliefs, thus allowing our intuition to feed new perceptions about the pleasure and renewal of reading.
Summer, Ali Smith, Nordic, 2021, 338 pages, $22,000.
2023-08-24 07:04:57
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