Smith is conducting a remarkable experiment: responding to current events in something like real time, and creating works of fiction that are also kaleidoscopic investigations of British art and identity. The losses compensated.” If darkness is a constant in history, so is renewal. Arthur, a character in Winter, at one point cites the story of Cymbeline, “the one about poison, mess, bitterness, then the balance coming back. Somehow, though, there’s comfort as well as despair in the patterns of humanity. In both 2017’s Autumn and this year’s Winter, Arthurian legend foreshadows Shakespeare, which predicts the horrors of World War II, whose traumas portend the anti-immigrant sentiment that led to Brexit.
Nothing is more cyclical in Ali Smith’s half-finished quartet of seasonal novels than history, condemned to repeat itself over and over.
0 kommentar(er)
