Her intellectual and sentimental education is shaped by Daniel, a vital old man who befriends her as a child and teaches her how to see, deeply and subversively, art and literature. Elisabeth, the book’s female protagonist, grows from child to woman, a metamorphosis conveyed in a collage of memory and the book’s present time. Departures, transformations, thresholds: Autumn’s people move and metamorphose in the most dramatic ways we humans know: growing up and dying. The three stanzas of John Keats’s poem “To Autumn,” lend Autumn its three sections: summer’s departure, fall’s transformations, winter’s threshold.

At times, all these goodies threaten to tumble us into a literary junk shop, but Smith exerts a literary master’s superb confidence in her readers she trusts us to make of her glorious mess the novels she wants us to read. Ali Smith’s seasons are chockfull of other bookish treats and tricks: wordplay in a myriad of forms luscious, textured prose allusions galore shifting points of view characters who seem to jump right out of Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare and our own circles of friends and family. Autumn and Winter are no more neatly plotted than life itself like human life, they are constructed of stories. They were never tightly constructed in the first place. Her Autumn and Winter do indeed fall apart they unravel. They fall apart, always have, always will, it’s in their nature. It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. She doesn’t dump those most tired of themes-decay and death. The potential for readerly woe is plain: four novels forced into a form already replete with corny allegories and tired themes.Īli Smith begins her seasonal quartet of novels with Autumn, followed by, of course, Winter. It’s a care, a real care, when a writer whose work you love takes on a project like a seasonal quartet.

Autumn ali smith sparknotes