How To be Both
Ali Smith
[Hamish Hamilton]
Deservedly shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, Ali Smith’s How to Be Both is a novel in two parts, one focusing on Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa and the other on George, a 16-year old girl mourning the loss of her mother. Both bear the heading ‘Part One’. Thus, it is up to us to decide which to read first, a small empowering gift from Smith to her readers; the ability to significantly alter our experience of the novel.
While the fresh, witty language in George’s part offers more immediate pleasures, the sections work best in tandem, and Smith goes to great pains to stress the corollaries between them. Early in the book, George is troubled by a young girl she sees in a pornographic video and vows to watch the video every day ‘to remind herself not to forget the thing that had happened to this girl’. In parallel, we see Francesco’s bearing witness to the brothel girls’ humanity by rendering de-sexualised drawings of them. These acts of witness are granted extraordinary force in the novel. ‘Perhaps,’ George muses as she contemplates a painting, ‘every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.’ But who is witnessing whom? According to Smith, it’s all a matter of perspective. We see George admiring Francesco’s frescoes – could the painter’s story be a fictional creation of George’s? But we also see Francesco observing George’s life from purgatory. Perhaps, in fact, it is Francesco’s act of imagination that brings George into being. Like Escher’s Drawings Hands, the book refuses to resolve the question of which is the creator and which the creation. Instead, the book’s title gestures beyond either/or George/Francesco, towards both. It is precisely Smith’s insistence on this complexity that makes How to Be Both such a powerful read.
Words: Eliza Ariadna Kalfa
