LITERARY FICTION
AUTUMN
by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton £16.99) ALI SMITH is a terrific writer, but this latest novel is not quite brilliant — even though its twinned stories of a young girl and a lost British pop artist feel powerfully connected to Smith’s 2014 Booker-shortlisted masterpiece How To Be Both.
As a child, Elisabeth spends many hours in the company of her eccentric neighbour Daniel; later, at art college, she stumbles upon the erotically charged paintings of Pauline Boty, the tragic female star of the British pop art movement whom, it turns out, Daniel also knew and possibly deeply loved.
And now Daniel is lying inert in a care home watched over almost daily by Elisabeth, while outside an unrecognisable new England reels in the aftermath of the EU referendum.
The novel is the first in a planned ‘seasons’ quartet, although the narrative itself plays havoc with time, telescoping back and forth across the decades in ways that underscore the impossibility of ever charting a coherent line through history, but which also prevent the novel’s many narrative strands from coming fully into focus.
Yet the theme of death and renewal charge through the story like an autumn storm.
Even in not-quite-vintage Smith there is an awful lot to lift the soul, not least her extraordinarily playful use of language — a life-giving force in itself.
ECHOLAND
by Per Petterson (Harvill Secker £14.99) WHEN Per Petterson’s mother read his second novel Echoland, she dismissed it as ‘childish’ (an incident that would appear in reworked form in his novel I Curse The River Of Time). Yet, thanks to his 2003 breakthrough book Out Stealing Horses, Petterson is currently one of Norway’s biggest literary stars.
Now, Echoland — first published in 1989 — has been translated into English and, while it’s clearly the work of a young man, his late mother’s criticism feels a little harsh.
Twelve-year-old Arvid is on holiday with his parents and grandparents in a small Danish seaside town. His grandmother is prone to unexplained crying bouts; his mother to rage.
And then there is Arvid’s uncle, whose death at sea many years ago still hangs as thick as dust motes in the air.
But Arvid just wants to ride his bike and, perhaps, catch another sight of the girl he saw kissing a man among the dunes. Not a great deal happens and the book is most interesting as an echoland for the themes of damage and the passing of time that reverberate throughout Petterson’s later novels.
Yet his eerily terse prose luxuriates in the hazy strangeness of the Danish landscape and is particularly brilliant at nailing adolescence as an inchoate, restless state in which life is felt much more fiercely than it is understood.
MULTIPLE CHOICE
by Alejandro Zambra (Granta £12.99) HERE’S a tantalising premise: a story told in the form of multiplechoice questions in which the reader is allowed to rearrange sentences, fill in missing gaps and decide whether a passage is ‘sad’ or ‘ironic’ etc.
Presented in exactly the same format as the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test that determines university entrance, it is also a mordantly funny and highly arresting commentary on the distorted reality of life in Chile under Pinochet.
With nods to that great Latin American experimentalist Borges, Zambra gives the reader a series of micro stories that by their very nature are open to interpretation.
Some consist of barely more than a couple of sentences; others offer more nuanced ruminations on the impossibility of getting a divorce, what it means to know a murderer, the morally corrupting consequences of living under corruption and so forth.
The test format is undeniably gimmicky but never as intrusive as you might think. And there is an apt brutality in having to navigate a narrative system in which rules are imposed, language can’t be trusted, facts are missing and where choice is pretty much a meaningless concept.