Spring
A Novel
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
“This is the most political book thus far in this earthy and humane series. Its heart is worn far out on its sleeve. It beats arrhythmically somewhere down near the knuckles. . . . Smith’s vision isn’t fundamentally pessimistic, however. There’s too much squirming life in her fiction, slashes of cleansing light for those who seek it.” —New York Times
“Her best book yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and the present with a chorus of voices.” —The Guardian
From the Man Booker-shortlisted author of Autumn and Winter, as well as the Baileys Prize-winning How to Be Both, comes the next installment in the remarkable, once-in-a-generation masterpiece, the Seasonal Quartet
What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times?
Spring. The great connective.
With an eye to the migrancy of story over time, and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown Smith opens the door.
The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story?
Hope springs eternal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like its two predecessors in Smith's acclaimed Seasonal Quartet (Autumn and Winter), this dynamic novel captures the many turmoils of life in the contemporary U.K. through ecstatic language and indirect narrative collisions. The first third, set mostly on a Scottish train platform, concerns Richard Lease, an over-the-hill TV and film director mourning his recently deceased collaborator, Paddy. Rife with nuanced reflections on the nature of art and mourning, Richard's ruminative section is the book's most immediate and engaging. After Richard lowers himself into the path of an oncoming train, readers meet his would-be rescuer, Brit, a security guard at a migrant detention facility. Brit has been lured into an impromptu journey by Florence, a pseudo-messianic young girl seemingly capable of inspiring empathy in even the darkest of hearts. The three mismatched characters are soon traveling together, on their way to an old battlefield where the violences of yesteryear and the present day will converge. As was the case with Autumn and Winter, the novel's setting is its foremost strength and increasingly enervating flaw, leading to writing that alternately astounds and exasperates. About three-quarters of the way through the third quarter of this series, the book's most memorable character, Richard, provides a relevant description of the whole enterprise, a response for every season: "Gimmicky, but impressive all the same.")
