Autumn: SHORTLISTED for the Man Booker Prize 2017 - Couverture souple

Smith, Ali

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0241207010 ISBN 13 : 9780241207017

Editeur : Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 2016

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

“Beautiful, subtle. . . . Brimming with humanity and bending, despite everything, toward hope.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Shimmers with wit, melancholy, grief, joy, wisdom, small acts of love and, always, wonder at the seasons.” —The Boston Globe

“Ali Smith has a beautiful mind. [Autumn is] unbearably moving in its playful, strange, soulful assessment of what it means to be alive at a somber time.” —The New York Times

“Bliss from beginning to end. . . . However stormy the events and themes of Smith’s work, their presiding spirit is sunny, witty, and expansive.” —Laura Miller, Slate

“A wonder of deep and accommodating compassion.” —The Washington Post
 
“Gorgeously constructed. . . . Smith has a kind of irrepressible sense of joy.” —The Atlantic

“Knits together an astonishing array of seemingly disparate subjects. . . . Free spirits and the lifeforce of art—along with kindness, hope, and a readiness ‘to be above and beyond the foul even when we’re up to our eyes in it’—are, when you get down to it, what Smith champions in this stirring novel.” —NPR

“[A] masterwork on the post-Brexit world. . . . Impressionistic and deeply personal.” —New York

“Smith’s novel plays an intimate melody against a broader dissonance, probing the friendship between an art historian and an aging songwriter as they grapple with personal predicaments and a perilous world.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Delights in puns and lyric reveries. For a book about decline and disintegration, Autumn remains irrepressibly hopeful about life, something ‘you worked to catch, the intense happiness of an object slightly set apart from you.’” —The Wall Street Journal

“Autumn is a beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities; the ‘endless sad fragility’ of mortal lives.” —The Guardian (London)

“If Ali Smith’s four quartets in, and about, time do not endure to rank among the most original, consoling and inspiring of artistic responses to “this mad and bitter mess” of the present, then we will have plunged into an even bleaker midwinter than people often fear.” – Financial Times

“In Britain, Smith has won the Whitbread, the Goldsmiths, and the Costa prizes, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker three times. American readers ought to be better acquainted with her genius. . . . This ambitious four-novel sequence will end with summer and Smith in her element. If we are all very lucky, perhaps the world will catch up with her there, too.” —Slate

“Smith’s voice, so wise and joyful, is the perfect antidote to troubled times: raw and bitter in the face of injustice, yet always alive to hope, however slight – like the buddleia that blossomed in the wreckage of cities after the Second World War, calmly continuing its own natural cycle oblivious to human destruction.” – New Statesman

“Smith regales us with endless wordplay. . . . Autumn is the first installment of Smith's ‘Seasonal’ quartet. If this brilliantly inventive and ruminative book is representative of what is to come, then we should welcome Smith's winter chill whatever the season.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“I find reason for excitement when Ali Smith, with thirteen titles to her credit and numerous awards and honors, brings out a new work. . . . A cycle is unfolding: winter seems to lie ahead. . . . But in inverse proportion to defeat is the great pleasure of the reading. Smith’s prose is seductively simple, beguiling, its effects hard-won.” —Edward T. Wheeler, Commonweal

“Smith is brilliant on what the referendum has done to Britain. . . . I can think of few writers—Virginia Woolf is one, James Salter another—so able to propel a narrative through voice alone. . . . This is a novel that works by accretion, appearing light and playful, surface-dwelling, while all the time enacting profound changes on the reader’s heart.” —Alex Preston, Financial Times

“Hums with life. . . . [Smith] is indeed a writer in her prime. Autumn is clever and invigorating. The promise of three more books to come is something to be savored.” —The Washington Times 

“It is undoubtedly Smith at her best. . . . This book sets Smith’s complex creative character in stone: puckish yet elegant, angry but comforting. Long may she Remain that way.” —The Times (London)

“Already acknowledged as one of the most inventive novelists writing in Britain today, with her new novel, Autumn, Ali Smith also proves herself to be one of the country’s foremost chroniclers, her finger firmly on the social and political pulse.” —The Independent (London)

“Proving Smith’s ambition and scope, Autumn is the first in a four-part series (the other titles will be Spring, Winter and Summer). . . . If the first instalment is anything to go by, the series is destined to become a canon classic. . . . That Smith has done so with such impressive sleight of hand, and with such expediency, is incredible.” —The Irish Independent

“An ambitious, multi-layered creation. . . . Smith is convincing as both a 12-year-old girl proud of her new rollerblades and a man living in a care home. . . . The story is rooted in autumn, and Smith writes lyrically about the changing seasons. . . . An energising and uplifting story.” —Evening Standard

“Smith writes in a liltingly singsong prose that fizzes with exuberant punning and wordplay. . . . Compellingly contemporary. . . . [An] appeal to conscience and common humanity—intergenerational, interracial, international—in these deeply worrying times.” —The Irish Times

“Uplifting. . . . A beautiful meditation. . . . Given this is the first of a quintet of season-based novels that explore time, Winter can’t come soon enough. Smith is at the very peak of her powers.” —The National (Arts & Life)

“[A] vision of post-Brexit England. . . . Ekphrasis permeates the novel Autumn, which itself seeks to capture in words the fading, abstract beauty of that ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,’ as Romantic poet John Keats wrote in his ode To Autumn. . . . [Smith’s] novel is marked with quiet, brave notes of hope.” —The Straits Times

“In bringing together the present and the seasons, Smith brings to contemporary politics the timeless injunction of art: to stop and look. . . . Autumn shows that the contemporary novel can be both timeless and timely. This may simply be what good novels always have done, but Smith reminds us how to do it, even now.” —Public Books

“An elegiac musing on transience and time. . . . [Smith] leaves readers with a symbol of hope.” —The Culture Trip

“Offers a piercing view of an unsettled England in the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit vote. . . . Much of this novel’s pleasure flows from Smith’s supple prose. She indulges in word play with an almost Joycean zest.” —BookPage

“Stunning. . . . A triumphant story of a May-December friendship within a divided Britain.” —Shelf Awareness

“[A] splendid free-form novel—the first in a seasonally themed tetralogy. . . . Eschewing traditional structure and punctuation, the novel charts a wild course through uncertain terrain, an approach that excites and surprises in equal turn. . . . Smith, always one to take risks, sees all of them pay off yet again.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“At the heart of Man Booker Prize nominee Smith’s new novel is the charming friendship between a lonely girl and a kind older man who offers her a world of culture. This novel of big ideas and small pleasures is enthusiastically recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“A girl's friendship with an older neighbor stands at the center of this multifaceted meditation on aging, art, love, and affection. . . . Smith has a gift for drawing a reader into whatever world she creates. . . . [Autumn is] compelling in its emotional and historical freight, its humor, and keen sense of creativity and loss.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Extrait :

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again. That’s the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it’s in their nature. So an old old man washes up on a shore. He looks like a punctured football with its stitching split, the leather kind that people kicked a hundred years ago. The sea’s been rough. It has taken the shirt off his back; naked as the day I was born are the words in the head he moves on its neck, but it hurts to. So try not to move the head. What’s this in his mouth, grit? it’s sand, it’s under his tongue, he can feel it, he can hear it grinding when his teeth move against each other, singing its sand-song: I’m ground so small, but in the end I’m all, I’m softer if I’m underneath you when you fall, in sun I glitter, wind heaps me over litter, put a message in a bottle, throw the bottle in the sea, the bottle’s made of me, I’m the hardest grain to harvest
 
to harvest
 
the words for the song trickle away. He is tired. The sand in his mouth and his eyes is the last of the grains in the neck of the sandglass.
 
Daniel Gluck, your luck’s run out at last.
 
He prises open one stuck eye. But –
 
Daniel sits up on the sand and the stones
 
– is this it? really? this? is death?
 
He shades his eyes. Very bright.
 
Sunlit. Terribly cold, though.
 
He is on a sandy stony strand, the wind distinctly harsh, the sun out, yes, but no heat off it. Naked, too. No wonder he’s cold. He looks down and sees that his body’s still the old body, the ruined knees.
 
He’d imagined death would distil a person, strip the rotting rot away till everything was light as a cloud.
 
Seems the self you get left with on the shore, in the end, is the self that you were when you went.
 
If I’d known, Daniel thinks, I’d have made sure to go at twenty, twenty five.
 
Only the good.
 
Or perhaps (he thinks, one hand shielding his face so if anyone can see him no one will be offended by him picking out what’s in the lining of his nose, or giving it a look to see what it is – it’s sand, beautiful the detail, the different array of colours of even the pulverized world, then he rubs it away off his fingertips) this is my self distilled. If so then death’s a sorry disappointment.
 
Thank you for having me, death. Please excuse me, must get back to it, life.
 
He stands up. It doesn’t hurt, not so much, to.
 
Now then.
 
Home. Which way?
 
He turns a half circle. Sea, shoreline, sand, stones. Tall grass, dunes. Flatland behind the dunes. Trees past the flatland, a line of woods, all the way back round to the sea again.
 
The sea is strange and calm.
 
Then it strikes him how unusually good his eyes are today.
 
I mean, I can see not just those woods, I can see not just that tree, I can see not just that leaf on that tree. I can see the stem connecting that leaf to that tree.
 
He can focus on the loaded seedhead at the end of any piece of grass on those dunes over there pretty much as if he were using a camera zoom. And did he just look down at his own hand and see not just his hand, in focus, and not just a scuff of sand on the side of his hand, but several separate grains of sand so clearly delineated that he can see their edges, and (hand goes to his forehead) no glasses ?
 
Well.
 
He rubs sand off his legs and arms and chest then off his hands. He watches the flight of the grains of it as it dusts away from him in the air. He reaches down, fills his hand with sand. Look at that. So many.
 
Chorus:
 
How many worlds can you hold in a hand.
 
In a handful of sand.
 
(Repeat.)
 
He opens his fingers. The sand drifts down.
 
Now that he’s up on his feet he is hungry. Can you be hungry and dead? Course you can, all those hungry ghosts eating people’s hearts and minds. He turns the full circle back to the sea. He hasn’t been on a boat for more than fifty years, and that wasn’t really a boat, it was a terrible novelty bar, party place on the river. He sits down on the sand and stones again but the bones are hurting in his, he doesn’t want to use impolite language, there’s a girl there further up the shore, are hurting like, he doesn’t want to use impolite –
 
A girl?
 
Yes, with a ring of girls round her, all doing a wavy ancient Greek looking dance. The girls are quite close. They’re coming closer.
 
This won’t do. The nakedness.
 
Then he looks down again with his new eyes at where his old body was a moment ago and he knows he is dead, he must be dead, he is surely dead, because his body looks different from the last time he looked down at it, it looks better, it looks rather good as bodies go. It looks very familiar, very like his own body but back when it was young.
 
A girl is nearby. Girls. Sweet deep panic and shame flood through him.
 
He makes a dash for the long grass dunes (he can run, really run!), he puts his head round the side of a grass tuft to check nobody can see him, nobody coming, and up and off (again! not even breathless) across the flatland towards those woods.
 
There will be cover in the woods.
 
There will maybe be something too with which to cover himself up. But pure joy! He’d forgotten what it feels like, to feel. To feel even just the thought of one’s own bared self near someone else’s beauty.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Hamish Hamilton Ltd
• Date d'édition: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0241207010
• ISBN 13: 9780241207017
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 272