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    Artful
    Artful
    Artful
    Audiobook4 hours

    Artful

    Written by Ali Smith

    Narrated by Ali Smith

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    In 2012, Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne's College, Oxford. Those lectures, presented here, took the shape of discursive stories that refused to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form. Thus, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted-literally-by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds between storytelling and a meditation on art that encompasses love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith's heady powers as fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that art and life are never separate. Artful is a celebration of and meaningful contribution to literature's enduring worth in the world. There has never been a book quite like it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateMay 21, 2013
    ISBN9781622311842
    Author

    Ali Smith

    Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and Newham College, Cambridge. Her first book, Free Love and Other Stories (1995) won the Saltire First Book of the Year award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her novel Autumn was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker. She lives in Cambridge.

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    Reviews for Artful

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      It's not uncommon for a distinguished writer to be invited by a university to give a series of lectures setting out their views on literature, and it's not uncommon for the that writer to follow up by publishing the text of the lectures afterwards - that's how we get gems like Forster's Aspects of the novel and Q's On the art of reading. But it takes the genre-bending chutzpah of someone as clever and inventive as Ali Smith to decide to make a novel out of a course of lectures on European Comparative Literature (given at St Anne's College, Oxford, in 2012)...The idea of the book is that the narrator is making a kind of multi-media journey of discovery which parallels the process of grieving for a dead partner (I read the book starting out with the assumption that the "I" and "You" characters must both be women, and nothing happened to upset that notion, but I did realise after a bit that there was nothing explicit to confirm it either - it's not just genre that's being bent here). Guide on the journey is the unfinished draft text of a series of lectures the "You" character was working on, but the narrator is also striking out independently, rediscovering Oliver Twist and the musical Oliver!, chasing up references from the lectures on Google and YouTube, and so on. In the process, we range widely over European literature and visual art, but also strike out into cinema and all sorts of other unexpected directions. The "I" character is a tree-expert by trade, so Smith gets ample opportunity to play around with tree-metaphors too, something she always enjoys. The writers she picks up include many who mean a lot to me already - Sebald, Saramago, George Mackay Brown, Plath, Javier Marías, etc. - and a few I don't know so well, so it's an interesting journey, with lots of connections I hadn't thought about before. It being Smith, we also get a fun little excursion into a cultural backwater of the 1960s that most readers are unlikely to have ventured into before (I certainly hadn't). If you recognise the cover image then you're probably Greek and you'll know what's coming, if not, then let it surprise you in the last section of the book and don't hesitate to search YouTube with the keywords the narrator uses - it's enormous fun.
    • 5/5
      "All of it? I say.
      Lucky for you the ands are ampersands, you say.
      You are calling my bluff, of course. I call yours back. I take the book to the tattoo parlour down Mill Road and come home, after several sessions, with exactly this tattoo. I choose to have it done in deep blue, the colour of your eyes. It costs me a fortune. It hurts like irony.
      I see you again only when it's finished and my skin settled down.
      You're unreal, you say when you see it.
      You're the real unreal thing all right.
      Less than a month after this we move in together and mix our books up."

      I love this book.

      Artful is the product of four lectures Smith gave and combines a background story of coming to terms with death with a literary exploration of themes that deal with elements of grieving, time, fragmentation, etc.

      Of course, Smith delivers all of this in a discourse that is both full of wit and tenderness.

      I'm not sure whether I love this book because of the way that Smith delivers the lectures or the selections of poetry and books she includes. In any case, this is one of the books that I will read again and again.
    • 5/5
      A beguiling, erudite, genre-defying mixture of fiction and literary criticism. The literary criticism is ostensibly presented as the work of a dead woman, who haunts the grieving narrator, her partner, whose visual interests are contrasted with the literary interests of the critic. These strands gradually intertwine. A unique mixture, which would probably reveal more on re-reading.
    • 2/5
      As part of a Visiting Professorship at the University of Oxford in 2012, Ali Smith presented four lectures on aspects of fiction, specifically “On time,” “On form,” “On edge,” and “On offer and on reflection.” Presented here “pretty much as they were delivered”, the lectures must have garnered much comment and a few divided opinions, due for the most part not to the arguments presented or the views expounded but rather to the manner of their presentation. Smith envelopes her lectures in a superstructure of narrative, ostensibly exploring the grief of a spouse whose academic partner has died and left a series of incomplete lectures on aspects of fiction. Smith is an accomplished writer, so it is hardly surprising that her narrative superstructure is both compelling and charged with emotion. No doubt it made for wonderful theatre for those in attendance. But does it contribute in any way to her overall thesis? I suspect that opinions in Oxford must have divided on this point and that more than a few high table dinners must have been enlivened by the ensuing debate.For my own part, I don’t have a particular problem with Smith’s playfully artful technique. It surely serves some purpose in the mixology of forms as academic essay is blended and stirred with narrative drive. If that’s the kind of thing you like, then it works very well. Regrettably, it can also serve as a distraction from the more focused argumentative points being made in the non-narrative parts of the lectures. And there are many points here worth considering and reflecting upon. But I’m uncertain as to whether Smith herself is anxious about the points she is making. Is the narrative component a means of deflecting straightforward engagement? Is this why she places these ‘arguments’ in the voice of a dead companion? Is she disowning her theses even as she presents them?Perhaps. Perhaps there is more going on here than I’m willing on a single reading to discern. But I think clear and thoughtful argument is rather hard to come by. Indeed, even amongst those who don’t take on narrative blending techniques, the making plain of something that is subtle and possibly important is rarely achieved. So I rather regret techniques that make the already difficult task more opaque. And so I cannot recommend this collection of essays. An interesting read, but not a thoughtful consideration on aspects of fiction that adds to our understanding.
    • 5/5
      This is a very good fit for an artist who loves literature who is processing the loss of a loved one. It's fragmented narrative fits the confusion of months following loss. It is also presents a good framework for thinking about time, form, edges and reflection
    • 5/5
      Artful is the best book I have read this year, and I have read some great books. It's brilliant: inventive, funny, original and exhilarating. A fiction wrapped around lectures on literature, Artful had its genesis in a series of lectures Smith delivered. But note that her actual presentation didn't consist just of the lecture sections, but in fact, the whole story, including the fictional framework.If it sounds confusing, I suppose it might be, and Smith probably isn't for everyone. As I read Smith's most recent two books, I have imagined this is what Virginia Woolf's contemporaries must have felt reading her. If you like Woolf, and you like W.G. Sebald, read Ali Smith.