3.75
This is my first meeting with Smith, and I had a good time reading this opening of her Seasonal quartet. It was a rather experimental and complex novel with many different flavours, so here’s a terribly rambly review with my attempt at grappling its essence.

I found Smith’s writing style interesting, but in the beginning, it came across as somewhat pretentious and unsubtle. I remember thinking that the drifting between clarity and vagueness felt off-balance, and that certain wordplays and rhymes were superfluous and disruptive of the flow. However, I saw more and more individuality as the text continued. Although her style isn’t my all-time favorite, I definitely started hearing her voice.
 
The overall vibe I got from the book was a kafkaesque "Sophie’s World" at the border between a chilled reality and theatrical dreams (if that makes ANY sense at all…). At first I thought each chapter would be a separate story/moment since the first and second chapter were so different in tone, but I quickly found out that there was a common story at the foundation. Still, book was sort of like a chain of various moments from different viewpoints and historical time points. This structure was a bit confusing, but it felt like each moment contributed to a build-up of passion and uncertainty, mirroring a rich autumnal gradient heading into a winter of acknowledgement and stillness - «Daniel, as still as death in the bed. But still. He’s still here.» The end note was the hopeful belief that something persists even when everything seems to decay.

The inevitability of change is a core theme in the novel and works on various thematic levels. One message I interpreted is that although change is scary and ambiguous, it also carries hope, as not only loss is brought by seasonal change but also new opportunities. In correlation, there’s an undeniable element of time - passing, running out, separating, uniting - in the story. Again, this can be seen at both the individual level (e.g. friendship established between Elisabeth and Daniel across their generations) and at the societal level (e.g. old notions and fears getting renewed as a reaction to political shifts). This also ties into the autumnal/seasonal symbolism, and I wonder if the other installations in the Seasonal Quartet will hold a similar quality or if it’s mostly tied to autumn, being the most visible representation of change and time passed.

Ali Smith doesn’t shy away from getting political, and here dabbles into Brexit, immigration politicies, societal division, art as a medium of the social debate, feminism etc. Although many of the specific references went over my head, it was interesting to see the reflections between the individual characters and the society tied up to the novel’s central themes (as just discussed). I’ll probably give it a reread in the future to see if I can understand even more of it.
 
One of the things I liked the most about the book was the discussion about storytelling and the retention of imaginative, lawless thinking. Growing up, we are taught to think by the book and remember things as facts. However, this view is challenged in the book, pointing towards how made-up details of stories shouldn't automatically be considered "wrong" just because it doesn't correspond to the version you've learned previously. Rather, it can become a new story with equal value to the old one, as long as it is allowed to exist rather than neglected. Again, change doesn’t have to be a bad thing, and open-mindedness to variation and new influences is both healthy for the soul and likely to be beneficial in the long run. (In biological terms, why settle at the local peak in the fitness landscape if by exploration you’ll have the chance to find a much higher global peak?). I’m not a fan of the mindset that just because a solution has worked adequately for a long time we should continue in the same manner rather than experiment to try to improve it. In today’s world, we have to brace ourselves for the fact that there are many practices that inevitably have to change.
 
As forewarned, this became incredibly rambly, so let’s settle at a lighter note. Since I read this in late October (a month which has flown by as always), it’s only appropriate that I close off with this beautiful and pinpoint description of this time of the year:

«October’s a blink of the eye. The apples weighing down a tree a minute ago are gone and the tree’s leaves are yellow and thinning. A frost has snapped millions of trees all across the country into brightness. The ones that aren’t evergreen are a combination of beautiful and tawdry, red orange gold the leaves, then brown, and down.
The days are unexpectedly mild. It doesn’t feel that far from summer, not really, if it weren’t for the underbite of the day, the lacy creep of the dark and the damp at its edges, the plants calm in the folding themselves, the beads of the condensation of the webstrings hung between things.
On the warm days it feels wrong, so many leaves falling. But the nights are cool to cold.»