Yeah, we must be in the midst of (All that cold.)
I think the hovering voice is effective at getting to the emotional core of Richard. Or as Christopher put it, our own self/reflection.
We can learn to feel through Richard during his interactions with Paddy, but these short bursts where he questions himself is very effective at getting to his core, slowing us down, a way of using lyric briefly as oppose to long winded narration.
I really like this point of inherent unreliability when it comes to any first-person speaker!!
I got the impression that the seasons are almost disassociated from the plot and that Smith is telling us that earth will continue its cycle despite our (inter)personal troubles. Very early on in the novel it says “the plants shift beneath you regardless” and to me that means that every expectation we have of spring (e.g birth or rebirth) is an illusion and the seasons are unaffected by them
i’m so glad you liked it noah! the other ones are great too, tho not narratively connected to this one. but stylistically as innovative, just in different ways
smith sure is good at a trenchant little one liner
i agree tho that the way we interact w screens tend to be different (and much more internal) than the way we interact with people
The anecdotes around his daughter, the film, Paddy are so personal and engaging that I get hypnotized into reading “I” in place of “he.” I did a double take this afternoon and had to remember that is was written using third person pronouns. I think the use of primary documents like e-mails further confuses us into feeling like we are hearing directly from Richard. All that to say that I don’t know what I think!
i’m curious how ppl interpreted the many interjections throughout richard’s opening chapter undercutting its own narrative. stuff like: “Scrap all the stuff above about him being a director you’ve heard of or not. He’s just a man at a station.” (page 12) and “Look at him, storying his own absence. Storying his own dust. Stop it. He’s a man leaning on a pillar in a station. That’s all” (page 14). at first, to me it sounds like ali smith is editing her work in real time, working with how the story should get told, what detail is important to tell a story, should richard’s story be a story, etc.
after finishing the first section and returning to these moments early on, i can also see an interpretation where these are the thoughts of a manic richard, disassociating after losing his closest friend and the person in his life who literally wrote his stories. now that paddy is gone, what is the point of story (to richard).
any other interpretations?
richard says at one point
the seasons are meaningless. / no—worse than meaningless. 110
in any case smith has blended our sense of perspective very expertly
& the very thin body of text on the page can sometimes read like the scrolling of a phone…
Definitely agree with the manic/anxious/question-yourself type of thoughts we can all experience. Which obviously makes it feel like Richard is the speaker but just looked back to see it was written in third person. OOf. Been too long since I’ve done this haha. Interesting though that @wartmanm seems to have had a similar experience!
Yeah! I agree with the idea that the world spins madly on regardless of our own lives - Even though they might be so colossal from our limited perspective. That brings me back to the Tacita Dean mountain rage Richard sees at the gallery. It is so large and towering that the sky beyond it is literally black. There are all these swirling events that are alluded to in the book (e.g. migrant crisis, climate change etc.), however Richard just sees/feels that wall/mountain.
i think no quotation marks introduces more ambiguity, or at least trains the reader to make more inferences, to have a keener eye. the book teaches you how best to read it
Out of personal curiosity, did the folks here from the UK make any meaning of Paddy’s numerous conversations regarding The Troubles (Maguires, Michael Collins, etc…)?
for what it’s worth, i see this book (& the rest of the seasons quartet so far, but especially this one) to be in conversation with joyce.
joyce says history is a nightmare from which i’m trying to awake… smith seems to say story is a nightmare. i’m thinking especially of
“There’s no story. He’s had it with story. He is removing himself from story, more specifically from story concerning: Kathrine Mansfield, Rainer Maria Rilke, a homeless woman he saw yesterday morning on a pavement outside the British Library, and over and above all of these, the death of his friend.” 11
Yes I agree! I felt like the paragraphs relating to spring interject at important times in the plot, jolting the reader to refocus, almost as reminder that all of your opinions are irrelevant to the force of nature. Spring isn’t isn’t here to bring new beginings to an individudual. It’s just here.
Brilliant insight. You’re completely correct, you smartiepants. I wonder if this reads any differently on a Kindle/reader app.
w/r/t aging, my immediate association with spring is birth/youth. Our two primary characters are both quite old, and it’s worth noting that our younger characters like the twins and Richard’s daughter are not referred to by name. Even after one of the twins is named (Dermot), he is still referred to as the Twin. I’m anticipating some young characters coming about in the next chapters.
i love that quote so much and thought about it a lot as i tended to assign meanings to events in the book. “the light shifts across your divides, round the people with passports, the people with money, the people with nothing, past shed and canals and cathedrals, your airports, your graveyards, whatever you bury, whatever you dig up…” (page 8). it’s almost bleak in how little everything we choose do matters to the seasons, the planet (not talking about the effect our choices have on them, that is a whole different discussion). what we decide is important is exactly that: what we decide.
this is making me think about the connection between April the book the April the movie now… the book is what actually happens (i.e. the two authors never meet in person) and the movie is the dramatization of those events (they have an exciting affair on a swinging gondola). While the former may be more poetic & profound in its lack of excitement, the latter is what we collectively & commercially want - to assign meaning to the meaningless. is this making sense??
also her parody of the contemplative sleepy legacy of modernism & her parody of that certain type of mainstream movie kind of mirrors in miniature what joyce is doing in ulysses, parodying the whole of western literature . i’m looking for exactly where in this speech but she says that’s her fav episode of ulysses somewhere here
