Autumn
by Ali smith
Scotland's Nobel laureate-inwaiting", Ali
Smith is a novelist, playwright, an academician and a
journalist. Smith was born in Inverness on 24 August
1962 . She studied a joint degree in English language
and literature at the University of Aberdeen. From 1985
to 1990 she attended Newham College,
Cambridge
studying for a PhD in American and Irish modernism.
During her time at Cambridge, she began writing plays .
In 1995 she published her first book, Free Love and
Other Stories, a collection of 12 short stories.
Ali Smith’s 2016
Autumn
is the first in a four-
part series. The novel centers on the unconventional
friendship between Elisabeth and Daniel Gluck who
meet in 1993. In the present,
Daniel Gluck is over a
hundred years old; confined to a bed in an assisted care
facility. After this surrealist blending of old and new,
Smith drops us back into the dreary present . We are
now introduced to the grown up Elisabeth – a junior
lecturer in the history of art – as she battles the
bureaucratic forces at work in the Post Office.
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There is a huge age difference between Elisabeth
and Daniel,
sixty-nine years to be precise, yet they are
friends from when she was a young girl (fatherless) and
he is a next-door neighbor. She likes the art and music
she finds in his house and they share a common love for
storytelling, telling each other odd stories. Daniel is now
a hundred and one, living in a care home and clearly
dying. Elisabeth seems to be the only person who visits
him.
There are two key women whom Smith uses to
make her point on strong women . The first is Pauline
Boty, the only female British Pop Art painter, who sadly
died at the age of twenty-eight.
Boty was apparently a
very attractive woman, nicknamed the
Wimbledon
Bardot
. She had a minor career as an actress, to help pay
the bills, but always thought of herself as a first and
foremost a painter, despite her father’s disapproval
.When Elizabeth expresses his desire to carry out her
dissertation on Boty her tutor refuses to do so by calling
Boty's work derivative. The
other feminist icon Smith
uses is Christine Keeler, famous for her involvement in
the Profumo Affair, a notorious spy scandal, involving
prostitutes.
In the uneasy present of Smith’s novel, the EU
referendum has just occurred and
Britain is full of “people
saying stuff to each
other and none of it actually becoming dialogue”. It’s
been hailed by the Guardian as the first ‘post Brexit
novel’ possessing a somewhat brutal undertone in
relation to the world which exists beyond the fictional
page. The political fragmentation of the United Kingdom
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is explored through the fragmentation of time, and the
construction and deconstruction of binaries. The division
between old and young in the referendum is contrasted
with the friendship of the protagonist
Elisabeth and her
old friend Daniel. There is comedy such as Elisabeth’s
struggle to renew her passport, but even the funny
moments interrogate the idea of Englishness post-Brexit.
The contrast between nature and reality is also
something that is painted perfectly. There are so many
moments of stillness, where the wind is evoked in the
silences created through full stops and sentence breaks.
Autumn can be read as
a study of remembering and
forgetting. The relationship between the two main
characters – Daniel Gluck and his young neighbor
Elisabeth Demand – is pieced together through
fragments of their memories and of those they have
known and loved. Such memories acquire value through
the contexts in which they are framed and the narrative
structures which underscore them. the novel refutes
chronology in its reconstruction of the human capacity to
both
remember and forget, leaping between apparently
disassociated events.
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