"Autumn" by Ali Smith

Elisabeth Demand sits by the bedside of dying Daniel Gluck, her centenarian neighbour, reading to him and reflecting on her friendship with him. It is the months after the Brexit referendum, someone is putting electrified fences up to enclose common land, and Elisabeth is battling her way to the front of the queue in the downsized Post Office to renew her passport only to be confronted with questions about her identity. Her own identity has been stolen. This is a collage of episodes. Elisabeth did her dissertation on Britain's only female Pop Artist, the now-forgotten Pauline Boty, who painted a lost portrait of Christine Keeler and had an uncredited part in Alfie. An advertisement for a supermarket uses music written by her friend Daniel, music which is now trending on social media; Gluck also wrote lyrics for a song a Barbra (Streisand?) sung in concert but never recorded. Elisabeth's mum appears on an episode of a TV show in which amateurs comb junk shops looking for treasures. It is as if our lives are made from disposable ephemera and who we are is made of glimpses.

Another fascinating and thought-provoking work from one of Britain's most original contemporary writers. The novelist as collage painter?

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017.

Other works by this brilliant and repeatedly original author that I have read and reviewed in this blog include:

• The Accidental: a holidaying family is gatecrashed by a young woman
• There but for the: a set of stories linked by a man who, at a dinner party, locks himself into one of the upstairs rooms of his host and refuses to come out
• How to Be Both which has two halves which can be read in either order (and some copies of the book are printed one way and some the other): one half has a teenage girl trying to cope with the death of her mother; the other half is the exuberant reflections of a renaissance artist who was a woman pretending to be a man.
• Artful which is both a ghost story and a meditation on art
• Winter, another collage type work which weaves the story of a Christmas Carol with Cymbeline and the Nativity and reflects on Britain following the Brexit referendum.

Selected quotes:

• "Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?"
• "Don't just sit there like an unstrung puppet."
• "Crying came out of her like weather."
• "Like entering what you think is going to be history and finding endless sad fragility."
• "The symphony of the sold and the discarded. The symphony of all the lives that had these things in them once. The symphony of worth and worthlessness."
• "I like nakedness. I mean who doesn't to be honest? I'm a person. I'm an intelligent nakedness."

January 2019

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God