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    Autumn
    Autumn
    Autumn
    Audiobook5 hours

    Autumn

    Written by Ali Smith

    Narrated by Melody Grove

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819. How about Autumn 2016? Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic, once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand-in-hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever. Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. It is the first installment of her Seasonal quartet-four stand-alone books, separate yet interconnected and cyclical (as the seasons are)-and it casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearean jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history making. Here's where we're living. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic. From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories, a story about aging and time and love and stories themselves.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateFeb 7, 2017
    ISBN9781501945618
    Autumn
    Author

    Ali Smith

    Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and Newham College, Cambridge. Her first book, Free Love and Other Stories (1995) won the Saltire First Book of the Year award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her novel Autumn was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker. She lives in Cambridge.

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    Reviews for Autumn

    4/5

    566 ratings27 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Something is wrong with the audio. Scips and starts. I tried downloading it and it was the same.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      The narrative was difficult to get into, even in recorded form, but with the eventual reward of beautiful and disturbing images further in. An unsettling but eventually tender and sympathetic mother - daughter relationship, and a terrifying glimpse of society fragmenting and brutally enforcing intolerance

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I very nearly bailed on this novel when I realized it was more of a stream-of-consciousness style. But I am so glad I stayed with it. Interesting how the real stories of a mostly forgotten 1960s female artist and also Brexit are integrated into the lives of fictional characters Elisabeth and her elderly friend Daniel. I‘ll definitely seek more of Ali Smith (a couple of her books— not this one— are on the "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" list).
    • 5/5
      Language. Words. Subtle metaphor. Images. Determination. Poetry. Playfulness. Contemporary contemplation and deft humor.
    • 2/5
      There are some beautiful passages, and I enjoy the relationship and developing stories of Daniel and Elisabeth, but overall, this was not a book I enjoyed. I listened to the audio and there were too many passages that were just litanies of things and thoughts. I felt as if Smith was just trying to be too clever and stream-of-consciousy, and it really didn't workI enjoyed her ongoing struggles to get her passport!
    • 5/5
      Elisabeth’s quirky and neglectful mother often leaves her young daughter to her own devices.Elisabeth becomes fast friends with her neighbor, the elderly Mr Gluck, and is introduced to a new world that opens her eyes to art, philosophy and conversation.As she grows up, she loses touch, but on a return visit home, she learns that Mr Gluck is now in a care home. He is no longer verbal, but Elisabeth visits him and revisits their friendship in a stream of consciousness of wonderful memories. At the same time she is still dealing with her unorthodox mother. There are many insights on aging – how the autumn of one’s life is green and golden and doesn’t look much different than summer. But as autumn progresses, winter approaches.This is the first published in a quartet of books named for the seasons.I had not read Ali Smith previously. I plan to go on with the quartet and also perhaps other of Ali’s Smith’s work. It’s always fun to find a new author.
    • 2/5
      I don’t know. Honestly, this was such a jumble of literary devices that didn’t always work together and I felt like I was struggling to get my bearings every now and then. I commend the effort, I guess, but Autumn doesn’t work for me. I don’t think it’s the reader’s job to make sense of a novel.It’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy parts. There were some bits I really wish had been expanded to the full novel. But the mix of prose was jarring. I read Winter as well and felt pretty much the same. I don’t think Ali Smith and I are a match.
    • 5/5
      This is an ambitious lyrical novel that examines Brexit and the impacts of nationalism upon a diverse and cosmopolitan populace. Once you adjust to the style, the book moves quickly and is compelling in its narration. I am eager to read the next novel in the sequence.
    • 4/5
      I loved so many of the references here and the thoughts and feelings it evoked. The relationship between Elisabeth and her mother was realistic and relative. However, so much of this book was descriptions of something on a television, too much. I found myself skipping through these lengthy descriptions. Not sure I'd read the other 3 in this unnecessary "quartet".
    • 4/5
      I really don't know what to say about this book. I just loved it. It was beautifully written and hard to put down.
    • 4/5
      Autumn by Ali Smith starts with the thoughts of a dying man. I almost gave it up then. I didn't think I could take a whole novel of that kind of stream of consciousness, but it goes on to an actual story about a very ill centenarian, the woman who was friends with him when she was a child, her judgmental mother, the pop artist Pauline Boty, Christine Keeler, and Brexit. It turned out to be a very good book.
    • 5/5
      Outstanding. This is modern literary fiction at its finest. Urgent, funny, current, literary, with the added bonus of using a large enough font to make reading super-comfortable. And how could I not love a novel where one of the main characters begins every conversation with, "What are you reading?"

      I don't know where Ms. Smith is going with this proposed quartet of novels, but I am already excited about reading the next one, and the next one, and the next one.
    • 4/5
      I have somewhat mixed feelings about this book. For starters, the prose is amazing although I expected nothing less after reading How To Be Both. This book has anything but a linear plot, and much of it rested upon things I knew nothing about such as the Scandal of '63. I can't help but feel that if I had known about this history or perhaps just knew a bit more about literature and art in general, I would have understood and appreciated the book much more. As it was, I adored the characters - some of whom practically leaped off the page - and the descriptions. The almost surrealist scenes of dealing with bureaucracy were fun, if of course a bit odd, still at a point where I wasn't sure what was going on in this novel. But the end becomes clearer. Keep reading and although you might get a little stuck on what exactly Smith is talking about, you will still get what she means.
    • 4/5
      Literary literature.
    • 4/5
      On the surface, this is the story of Elisabeth and her friendship with her elderly neighbour, Daniel Gluck. But there's a lot more going on here. Ali Smith has taken on the issue of Brexit and some of the anti-immigration feelings that fueled it. She also tells about misogyny in the art world, where a female artist who pioneered the pop art movement was largely ignored by history. Art and story-telling are strong themes in this book. And the basic story is moving and funny and so real. I like Ms. Smith's writing a lot. It has a lot of depth.
    • 1/5
      Look, I realize this is supposed to be an Arty Book and very deep and intellectual, but I found it boring and pretentious.

      Smith is playing with words here and larding the copy with Joycean puns, wordplay, and allusion as she shifts through time in a pointless tale sort of but not really about the friendship between a young woman and an older man; sort of but not really about Brexit; sort of but not really about op art and The Tempest and Brave New World and A Tale of Two Cities. Basically a waste of time.
    • 2/5
      Autumn opens with a lovely, lyrical, and memorable episode of magic realism restoring an old man to vitality.The chapter is just the right length.Unfortunately, the plot then devolves into a seriously BORING and unfunny post office passport chapter whichended with the book going into the donation box.As with Knausgaard's 4 Seasonal volumes, I won't be following the trips and wonder about all the praise.
    • 5/5
      Incredible.
    • 4/5
      I found this novel to be delightful. The author's playfulness with language is wonderful. It is a novel about time, creativity, individuality, gender, and love. Above all, it is about being female. I look forward to her next in this seasonal series.
    • 4/5
      A treat to read. Smith's delightful wordplay, her grasp of the everyday ridiculousnesses of life in today's crazy world, all of it. So looking forward to Winter, now!
    • 3/5
      Smith certainly doesn't wear her influences lightly. As in How To Be Both, part of this book reads like an art history lesson, this time focusing on Pauline Boty. Everything else is pretty enjoyable, if rather slight. I did laugh at the 'state of the Brexit nation' passages, which read like a newspaper parody of a Left-wing author. The central friendship is charming, but I'm surprised this book has been quite so feted.
    • 5/5
      I read this out of order - I read Winter first - and I confess that Winter is my *slight* favourite - but they are both brilliant.
      Autumn is a little more angry, Winter slightly more elegiac.
      They are both brilliant. read them!
    • 1/5
      Every now and then I read a book and find myself totally at odds with the prevailing zeitgeist. This book has won prizes and drawn almost universal critical acclaim, and the paperback edition is weighed down with several pages of excerpts from gushing reviews. I, however, found it totally impenetrable, written in a self-congratulatory prose style that left me feeling almost physically sick. I have read civil service HR manuals that I have found less tedious and more intellectually and emotionally refreshing.I would also question Penguin’s decision to present it without double-justified pages. To my perhaps jaundiced eye, the effect was not one of quirky charm; I merely felt that the typesetting was as slipshod as the writing.
    • 4/5
      A story that's told like a collage - in a post-Brexit Britain, it touches on the bleak results of the tacit political support for anti-immigration sentiment, and the grind of housing (un)affordability - but in the middle of this, Mr Gluck stands out as an original (and terribly nice man); and I loved watching the emergence of Elizabeth's mother.
    • 5/5
      Ali Smith packs a lot into this short novel. It's the story of a friendship between centenarian Daniel Gluck and 30-something Elisabeth Demand, an art history lecturer. Elisabeth has a special interest in a somewhat obscure pop artist, Pauline Boty. Smith alludes to current events in the form of the refugee crisis, and borrows language from literary giants like Dickens and Achebe (“It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again. That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always, will, it's in their nature.”) It's a gem of a book and well deserving of its spot on this year's Booker shortlist.This review is based on an electronic advanced readers copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley.
    • 4/5
      Elisabeth, a history of art teacher, visits her 101 year old former neighbour, Daniel, in his care home. Daniel, who is near to death, dreams about dying and Elisabeth remembers her friendship with Daniel (she was a child, he was already "old") and how he introduced her to art and imagination and ideas.I found parts of this, especially Elisabeth's trips to the post office and her dealings with her mother, very entertaining. The other sections, which were more or less stream of consciousness, were quite trying. (I'm a fan of dialogue.) There were things left unexplained; what were the parallel fences? Were they merely a symbol of the effects of the Brexit vote? Why did Elisabeth turn her back on Daniel for 10 years? Speaking of dialogue, the absence of speech marks made reading tricky in places. This is the first Ali Smith novel I have read and I'm on the fence about trying another.
    • 5/5
      This isn’t fiction, the man says. This is the Post Office.I liked How to Be Both and this novel picked up Smith's themes around time, relationships and really looking at art. With Elisabeth, a young art historian, we remember her childhood with Mr Gluck, the neighbour who introduced her to the work of Pauline Boty. She reads to him in the hospital bed and lives in a hostile post-Brexit-vote village. The dry humour is laced with anger at the intolerance and little Englander attitude.Recommended.