Winter
Ratings15
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings15
Average rating4.1
Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire. In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonalcycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith's shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens- art, love, laughter. It's the season that teaches us survival. Here comes Winter.
Series
2 primary booksSeasonal is a 2-book series with 2 primary works first released in 2017 with contributions by Ali Smith.
Reviews with the most likes.
Last run on the series.
I regard Winter as a bit different from the others. It is still politically centred on about protests that happened in the past and now, referring to other current topics like pollution, littering, etc. What is shared in common between the four parts is that I can always find characters who dedicate themselves to work and act to change the shady bits of the world.
Yet, Winter, happens to be not so cold from what I perceive in the novel. The frozen bonds unraveled and manage to melt, being another festive season of the catch up of family members, being one of the centripetal forces that unite people, being one of the warm bonfire to light up the darkness and defense against the cold. From Art, his mother, his aunt and Lux's way of getting along, which I do have to give a round of applause to Lux, who, being a total stranger, is so willing to help build what was lost of the family and being the sheer force in solidarity when she literally could have refused from such an awkward and annoying case.
Speaking of art, Art and art, art in nature, considered by me as a nice shuffle of words. While Art himself might be in some sort of an existential crisis, or an identity crisis, in the sense which the blogs he had written, might not be real but would be the content reader wish to see and are able to relate. In the light of this, there is also shoutouts to Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Charles Chaplin, etc. Again, it makes winter less unapproachable and rather, with a pair of welcoming arms in the air silently shouting a “you're always welcome here” with warmth while the outside is suffused in dormancy.
I do like the blithe atmosphere during the conversations in the Cornwall cottage. Yes, it might be annoying to have your seniors debating against each other just for the sake of being antagonistic while you are trying to think some things through, or finding the household with immense dread in itself simply because you find that irreparable generational gap slowly becoming an abyss that you cannot find any way to get across, ending up with a rendition of the circumstance that it is simply the lack of common interests which induce that abyss.
Winter, cold, fearful, dark, prolonged night, lessened day, petrified by winter tales, terrified by horror and the never ending darkness, depression, melancholy, isolation, loneliness... As with every review I have done about the quartet, ending it with the final season of the year is considering a bliss to myself. Again, a few more words, a few more sentences, a few more questions.
Take yourself out for a walk in winter and despite that clarity of bleakness, of everything covered in white, too sharpening to have your eyes on them for long, try to infiltrate yourself with some warmth-not from the nature perhaps, but with our species who do share the same amount of heat as we all do.
Winter, the end, the symbolic farewell to a year. “That's what winter is: an exercise remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you.” To die, so we can be more alive, so we do know what means life.
Refreshing to read a novel that feels so energetically modern. The timeless problems of family, relationship, and loneliness, are woven poetically and inseparably into the fabric of modernity and of the lives we find ourselves living now, in the age of Google and Trump.
Enjoyed the reading experience, and it was an experience. I did find myself lost a couple of times to what was going on, however I loved her writing style and the tone of the book. It was a perfect read for Christmas.
