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I think Spring might be my new favourite Ali Smith! Thank you so much @penguinukbooks for gifting me a copy, it absolutely made my MONTH and I was wholly enchanted by the third instalment of her seasonal quartet!
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This one follows the stories of Richard, a film director past his prime deep in mourning for a good friend of his, and Brit, an officer in an awful detention centre for refugees, whose lives collide when a miraculous young girl named Florence brings them together on a journey from London to Scotland. As usual, attempting to sum up Smith’s works with a synopsis does not just it justice, and the power of her prose is etched too deep for me to give it the acclaim it deserves. Her writing makes me feel breathless, especially those rhythmic chapters she likes to slot into this quartet.
The first chapter of the second part... holy fucking shit. Smith takes something many of us take for granted (social media) and 100% exposes it for what it is in one breathless chapter that legit had me in goosebumps - we KNOW how harmful Facebook can be and yet we continue to use it, and yet while reading this chapter I wanted to scrub my phone clean of it, being forced to confront the perfidious nature of the platform. ‘We want it to be inconvenient for you not to use it.’ Yep. And actually the first chapter, I just got it out and read it again while writing this review because it honestly gives me CHILLS. No one is more tuned into post-Brexit Britain than Ali Smith. She also incorporates a chapter with (unfortunately probably real-life) vile tweets sent to anonymous women, which I read on the train and my face was definitely a picture.
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I love how she uses her characters too - Brit on the surface isn’t a particularly reprehensible character, but as the story goes on you realise how much NOT acting in the face of injustice or just going along with what everyone else is doing is just as bad as doing something actively terrible. The state of UK detention centres is disgusting, and a heavy topic to handle but as usual Smith does it fluidly and elegantly, proving that sometimes simple and straightforward is the best way.
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For me this quartet is going to be (already is) a contemporary piece of British literary genius, and THE fiction books on Brexit that will hopefully be studied in the future!
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This one follows the stories of Richard, a film director past his prime deep in mourning for a good friend of his, and Brit, an officer in an awful detention centre for refugees, whose lives collide when a miraculous young girl named Florence brings them together on a journey from London to Scotland. As usual, attempting to sum up Smith’s works with a synopsis does not just it justice, and the power of her prose is etched too deep for me to give it the acclaim it deserves. Her writing makes me feel breathless, especially those rhythmic chapters she likes to slot into this quartet.
The first chapter of the second part... holy fucking shit. Smith takes something many of us take for granted (social media) and 100% exposes it for what it is in one breathless chapter that legit had me in goosebumps - we KNOW how harmful Facebook can be and yet we continue to use it, and yet while reading this chapter I wanted to scrub my phone clean of it, being forced to confront the perfidious nature of the platform. ‘We want it to be inconvenient for you not to use it.’ Yep. And actually the first chapter, I just got it out and read it again while writing this review because it honestly gives me CHILLS. No one is more tuned into post-Brexit Britain than Ali Smith. She also incorporates a chapter with (unfortunately probably real-life) vile tweets sent to anonymous women, which I read on the train and my face was definitely a picture.
.
I love how she uses her characters too - Brit on the surface isn’t a particularly reprehensible character, but as the story goes on you realise how much NOT acting in the face of injustice or just going along with what everyone else is doing is just as bad as doing something actively terrible. The state of UK detention centres is disgusting, and a heavy topic to handle but as usual Smith does it fluidly and elegantly, proving that sometimes simple and straightforward is the best way.
.
For me this quartet is going to be (already is) a contemporary piece of British literary genius, and THE fiction books on Brexit that will hopefully be studied in the future!