For some UK critics, Ali Smith (Inverness, 1964) is a future Nobel Prize in Literature. His work, now indisputable, opens up a different way of narrating. The balance between elaborate language and a very close voice at the same time is absolute.
A daughter of the working class, she grew up in Scotland to an Irish mother and English father; He studied literature in Aberdeen and prepared his doctorate in Cambridge, where he currently lives. Collaborator of Times Literary Supplementreceived, among other awards, the Scottish Book Award for the stories Free Love and Other Stories and in 2024 the University of Oxford awarded him the Bodley Medal for his contribution to literature. the novel Autumnfrom his tetralogy Seasonal Quartetwas nominated for the Man Booker Prize 2017. Joyce Carol Oates states that “her writing surprises with its intimacy and imagination, its acuity and precision.”
Ali Smith is always a meta-literary and audacious researcher of language. She plays with books within books, but is never completely bookish, because real life is always in sight, even when she enjoys the etymology of a word or mentions her favorite authors. Master of the short story, Public Library is a tribute to the importance of accessible libraries and also a complaint against his disappearance in the United Kingdom.
The book was published in Great Britain in 2015, coinciding with cuts by the British government, which closed more than 1,000 libraries. The volume contains 12 stories by Smith, not directly about libraries, loaded with intelligent literary references, and 12 short texts, in cursive, alternating, from Smith’s friends, telling real stories of love for libraries. The set is an original and lively testimony of how access to knowledge is essential to form a critical and free citizenry.
The first story is a personal experience of Ali Smith. Walking through Covent Garden with their editor they saw a building with the word “Library” written on its doors. They entered with curiosity to discover that it was a private club, with luxurious rooms, a rooftop bar and a massage room. The books were conspicuous by their absence.
These stories are a tribute to the importance of libraries and a complaint against their disappearance
In another text it is recalled that the Kensal Rise library, in the municipality of Brent, built by public subscription and Inaugurated by Mark Twain in 1900, it was closed in 2011 and sold by the city council to a real estate agency. Local opposition was so intense that now the development must have a library. Librarian Pat Hunter recalls the Public Library Act of 1850 and proclaims that “libraries are non-negotiable. “They are part of our heritage.”
The story titled “The Poet” rescues Olive Fraserthe writer who was born in 1909 in Aberdeen. “She is energetic and adventurous, an impetuous girl. “That girl lives in figures of speech.” The data that Smith offers with nuanced sensitivity make up a biography of the soul of the poet, who in 1956 descended into mental hell, with some stage of plenitude, until her death from cancer in 1977.
In each of Smith’s stories we are taken through unexpected twists and turns. In “The Human Vindication” the narrator thinks about writing a text about the adventures of DH Lawrence’s ashes. But, suddenly, in her email there appears a Visa expense of £1,597.67 that she has not made. This is a Lufthansa ticket that you have never purchased. The Kafkaesque account of the claim is intertwined with the mysterious journeys of DH Lawrence’s ashes. Literary references and intelligent humor in the unique writing of an essential English writer of today.
