Ali Smith is our oracleSpring is the third instalment in Ali Smith’s Seasonal quartet of novels, which examine the current state of Britain through the lives of everyday people. By writing as close to publication as possible, Smith transforms your news feed into something deeply humane and essential. To me, they are balm for the soul.A few things you might like to know about the series:• These books can be read in any order – but the publication sequence is probably best, keeping the seasons in

-Ah, you're reading the book with the Hockney tree image again. The branches have lots of new leaves, I see! -Yes, yes! YES! This is the third book in the series. I'm very excited. Can't turn the pages fast enough! -Slow down, no need to rush. No one's calling Time. No one's saying, Read up! Read up!-You're right, you're right. I need to be calm and savor every budding idea, every blossoming image.-That's it, nice and easy. It's only early April, after all. And you have so many other books on yo...

I'd like to apologize for giving "Spring" only 5 stars, because this rating still fails to reflect the book's genius. In the third installment of her seasonal quartet (after Autumn and Winter), Ali Smith writes about the human longing to be seen, to have a home in the world and in other people. Once again, the book shines with its exquisite ability to intertwine the personal and the political, to show art as life force as real as human relationships and the natural seasons, and all of that is co...

Autumn *****Winter *****Spring ****Summer *****This was darker in tone and more openly political than both Autumn and Winter. It's not an easy read, but it's an important one. Now, excuse me while I take some time to mend the pieces of my broken heart...

With Ali Smith's final volume "Summer" due this week - I hope (for those who want to read Summer without revisiting the first three) that this serves as a valuable resource:--------------------------------------------------------------------The third of Ali’s Smith’s seasonal quartet after Autumn and Winter. A book I started at the beginning of Spring in the UK and finished 24 hours later at the beginning of Autumn in Australia. Interestingly at one point, Richard remembers speaking in the past

Ali Smith, wordsmith.Ali Smith, poet of hope. Ali Smith, magician.Ali smith, the great connective. 'The air lifts. It’s the scent of commencement, initiation, threshold. The air lets you know quite ceremonially that something has changed. Primroses. Deep in the ivy throw wide the arms of their leaves. Colour slashes across the everyday. The deep blue of grape hyacinths, the bright yellows in wastelands catching the eyes of the people on trains. Birds visit the leafless trees, but not leafless li...

Autumn remains my favorite, Winter next. This one was a bit heavy-handed at times, the stepping out of story and into journalistic bits that are more like literary op-eds, naming the detention center worker Brit, some other things, but none could dampen my overall enthusiasm for the work. With Spring I continue to be in awe of what Ali Smith has accomplished with her seasonal quartet: the template, the breaks from it, the characters in each. In Spring for me it's Richard and Paddy, but not only....

I shall be glad though when Spring comes. Winter is a difficult time. A letter in 1922 from Katherine Mansfield to "L.M." (Lesley Moore, her nickname for Ida Baker, her companion and confidant) Spring is the brilliant 3rd instalment of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet and comes with the usual beautiful wrapper on the cover featuring a picture from David Hockney's The Arrival of Spring.Mess up my climate, I’ll fuck with your lives. Your lives are a nothing to me. I’ll yank daffodils out of the ground...

Ali Smith has set herself the task of writing these four seasonal novels quickly. To help achieve this she uses the same scaffolding in each of them. She begins with a play on the opening line of various Charles Dickens' works - the great British critic of social injustice. She ghosts in a Shakespeare play - someone/something all us Brits can all be proud of. In each book she offsets the present day with a distant decade of the 20th century. She incorporates into each book a sinister governmenta...

Damn! This was so good. I practically inhaled it. How do I even begin to write a review for this incredible novel... I am unworthy and unskilled.Ali Smith is a genius. A creative, very humane genius. I am absolutely blown away, yet again. This was magical, touching, surreal and so contemporary. As it was the case with the previous instalments of this quartet, Smith introduces the reader to another female artist, who has been forgotten. This time is the New Zealander writer Katherine Mansfield, w...

‘’None of it touches me. It’s nothing but water and dust. You’re nothing but bonedust and water. Good. More useful to me in the end.I’m the child who’s been buried in leaves. The leaves rot down: here I am.’’ Four people meet in Scotland under peculiar circumstances. An elderly director who has lost his heart, a troubled young woman, an enigmatic librarian/canteen-keeper and an extraordinary 12-year-old girl searching for her mother. How can one person alter the lives of many? How can they sa

Another near masterpiece from Ali Smith's seasonal quartet - in some ways I think this one is the best yet. Once again, she weaves a number of strands in a way which can seem almost random, but the further you get into the quartet, the more the whole seems planned, and everything is there for a reason. I am not going to write a long detailed review - I recommend these, from Gumble's Yard and Paul. (Update 11 April - I also recommend these from Neil and Jonathan) . This time the foreground story

Ali Smith is in deep trouble. How in the world is she going to top this with the next instalment of her Season’s Quartet? This is easily the best novel I have read this year. For me it is almost a masterpiece. I adored Autumn and didn’t think that any of the next three could be as good. I thought Winter was tremendous, but still not as good as Autumn, and then Smith gives us Spring. This book covers the zeitgeist of a fragile England, Brexit, and immigration, and at times the reader feels trappe...

DNF at 36% Honestly? Despite so many friends 5-starring this and the earlier books in the quartet, it's just confirmation that Smith and I are not a match. I love her politics, and her set piece monologues on the 'politics of stupidity' and big data are spot on, if not as zeitgeisty now as when this book first came out. I also loved Paddy for the brief pages when she's there. But the rest... not really.It's like topics are just thrown in randomly: Katherine Mansfield, Rilke, clouds, postcards, b...

3.5 This is one of these reviews that is tough to write because at least among my associates here on Goodreads this book is universally adored. I fully expected to enjoy it as well. However, I don't know if it was my current reading mood or the feeling that the much vaunted timeliness of this novel combined in an unfortunate way with happenings in the real world ( can I blame Boris here ? ) but whatever the reasonings I found this a surprising chore to get through.And yet I know what Smith is a

For a reason I can’t disclose, I had to read Spring during winter. But, as I discovered, that wasn’t entirely inappropriate. Spring is suffused with winter, and much of it is set in autumn. Ali Smith’s Spring follows the path of her seasonal predecessors with the elements it contains: timeliness, of course; references to a Shakespeare play and a Dickens story; a real-life female artist—in this case, Tacita Dean; a precocious girl and/or a mysterious young woman. (With the latter quality, which i...

Here we go again, me trying to 'review' an Ali Smith book...I think this one, out of the three books written in this seasonal quartet is the one that has affected me most. It is the one, I feel, where Ali Smith has 'vented her spleen' the most, where she has expressed the anger and injustice that we all, as human beings should all be feeling, and expressing it in such a powerful way that I had to take a breather to wipe my tears and get a cup of tea to calm my emotions. (A good stiff whiskey mig...

Spring is my favourite season because it is renewal and full of promise. It might arrive with a bang or a whimper or a gentle warm embrace. This third of the seasons quartet examines the state of Britain in 2018 and it’s not a pretty picture. However, Ali Smith tries to give it a human face either via the past or the present and reminds us that after the bleak darkness of winter there is the hope of spring. There are two narratives which initially don’t seem to coincide. There’s Richard, an elde...

Autumn, then there’ll be winter. Then there’ll be spring, and so on.As Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet progresses, I find it increasingly hard to write anything that concentrates on only the book I have just read. In preparation for reading Spring, I re-read both Autumn and Winter and there are so many things going on that link the books in terms of both characters and themes that it now feels very much that you have to review the current status of the quartet as a whole, not just this third instal...

“Because looking is just the beginning of understanding, just the surface, the top layer of every concept” How striking this quote is, haphazardly found in the text, and applicable to this book itself! While reading this third part of Smith's seasonal cycle, I often lost track: Smith interweaves different storylines, mixed with, for example, Trumpian hate speech, apparently absurd dialogues, etc. But above all, her book is chock-full of extra- textual references, and if you miss some of them, it...