Oh this is a strange book! Strange, but wonderful. Four parts, each an essay about various aspects of literature, drawing from novels, short stories, and poetry by authors from around the world, and spanning centuries, while repeatedly coming back to Dickens' [b:Oliver Twist|18254|Oliver Twist|Charles Dickens|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327868529s/18254.jpg|3057979] as a central element. But not really the focus of the essays themselves, but instead as a recurring element in the fictional story that frames and interleaves with the essays, in which the author is mourning the death of her partner, who was studying literature in grad school, and who's notes and draft papers form the content of the essays. At first I wasn't certain how true that framing story was supposed to be, but it becomes clear from autobiographical bits in the story that the writer is not actually Ali Smith (at least, not the one whose name is on the book).

When I put this book on the shelves at home, I'm not even sure where it'll end up, with fiction or with essays. Perhaps I'll just buy a second copy! ( )

It's not uncommon for a distinguished writer to be invited by a university to give a series of lectures setting out their views on literature, and it's not uncommon for that writer to follow up by publishing the text of the lectures afterwards - that's how we get gems like Forster's Aspects of the novel and Q's On the art of reading. But it takes the genre-bending chutzpah of someone as clever and inventive as Ali Smith to decide to make a novel out of a course of lectures on European Comparative Literature (given at St Anne's College, Oxford, in 2012)...

The idea of the book is that the narrator is making a kind of multi-media journey of discovery which parallels the process of grieving for a dead partner (I read the book starting out with the assumption that the "I" and "You" characters must both be women, and nothing happened to upset that notion, but I did realise after a bit that there was nothing explicit to confirm it either - it's not just genre that's being bent here). Guide on the journey is the unfinished draft text of a series of lectures the "You" character was working on, but the narrator is also striking out independently, rediscovering Oliver Twist and the musical Oliver!, chasing up references from the lectures on Google and YouTube, and so on. In the process, we range widely over European literature and visual art, but also strike out into cinema and all sorts of other unexpected directions. The "I" character is a tree-expert by trade, so Smith gets ample opportunity to play around with tree-metaphors too, something she always enjoys. And keep an eye out for all the "Alice" references buried in the text - by no means all of them are pointing at Lewis Carroll.

The writers she picks up include many who mean a lot to me already - Sebald, Saramago, George Mackay Brown, Plath, Javier Marías, Stevie Smith, Auden, etc. - and a few I don't know so well, so it's an interesting journey, with lots of connections I hadn't thought about before. It being Smith, we also get a fun little excursion into a cultural backwater of the 1960s that most readers are unlikely to have ventured into before (I certainly hadn't). If you recognise the cover image then you're probably Greek and you'll know what's coming, if not, then let it surprise you in the last section of the book and don't hesitate to search YouTube with the keywords the narrator uses - it's enormous fun. ( )

Here I was interested in the artifice (what counts for Smith as "artful") and in her use of images.

A review is posted on the Writing with Images project. ( )

"All of it? I say.
Lucky for you the ands are ampersands, you say.
You are calling my bluff, of course. I call yours back. I take the book to the tattoo parlour down Mill Road and come home, after several sessions, with exactly this tattoo. I choose to have it done in deep blue, the colour of your eyes. It costs me a fortune. It hurts like irony.
I see you again only when it's finished and my skin settled down.
You're unreal, you say when you see it.
You're the real unreal thing all right.
Less than a month after this we move in together and mix our books up."

I love this book.

Artful is the product of four lectures Smith gave and combines a background story of coming to terms with death with a literary exploration of themes that deal with elements of grieving, time, fragmentation, etc.

Of course, Smith delivers all of this in a discourse that is both full of wit and tenderness.

I'm not sure whether I love this book because of the way that Smith delivers the lectures or the selections of poetry and books she includes. In any case, this is one of the books that I will read again and again. ( )

A beguiling, erudite, genre-defying mixture of fiction and literary criticism. The literary criticism is ostensibly presented as the work of a dead woman, who haunts the grieving narrator, her partner, whose visual interests are contrasted with the literary interests of the critic. These strands gradually intertwine. A unique mixture, which would probably reveal more on re-reading. ( )