She spins a fine story, but it feels shoehorned in, and ultimately unnecessary. Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Smith has apparently tried to solve this problem in part by incorporating historical side plots that resonate with the present in both Autumn and Winter here, it’s the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, where activists began protesting the site of a cruise-missile base in the early 1980s. It’s a challenge to write a novel about a particular political moment-it threatens to become irrelevant. “They are all happening far away, elsewhere.” “None of these things is happening here,” Sophia explains. them, this book looks at the us and asks why we feel so little for them. Blood- soaked men running to hospitals or away from burning hospitals carrying blood-covered children.” Like many news watchers, Sophia has become inured to images like these. Antidotes to Brexit, COVID-19, and Other Afflictions in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. Other ghosts haunt distant landscapes: “Refugees in the sea. Winter pays frequent homage to A Christmas Carol, and Sophia is visited by her own ghost: a vision of a child’s head that follows her.

They spend their Christmas together in Cornwall, where the majority of voters supported Brexit-despite the fact that the impoverished county has received more than $1.3 billion in E.U. Ashamed of his recent breakup, Art pays a young, foreign woman known as Lux to impersonate his girlfriend during a visit to his mother Sophia.

The characters here are the kind who find the winter holidays challenging, not comforting. It is not necessary to read Smith’s Autumn before her Winter while the two books share a philosophical style and a playfulness with words, they don’t concern the same cast. But while Knausgaard engages in his signature blend of broad observations and navel-gazing, Smith glares-at times sympathetically, at times unforgivingly-at a wasteland of a world where Brexit is possible. This month, Winter arrives in each series. Sometime in the past few years, the Cambridge, England– based novelist Ali Smith and the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard had the same idea: to write a quartet of novels called Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer.

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