She becomes obsessed with and stalks her mother’s unusual friend Lisa Goliard who claims to be an artist. Meanwhile she takes care of her younger brother, deals with her alcoholic father, and experiences another loss as her friend ‘H’ from school leaves the country. George struggles to resign herself to the death of her mother and constantly recalls memories of her. The contemporary story is told by George, a teenage girl whose mother, an online activist, has recently passed away. The two parts of the book are set in totally different times and places one in contemporary Cambridge and the other in Renaissance-era Ferrara, Italy. As Ali Smith herself says, “there are two ways to read this novel, but you’re stuck with it – you’ll end up reading one of them.” The irresistibly poetic language of the book will take you to the last page all in one breath, where you can’t help but wonder what it would be like to read the second story first.

Your decision changes the reading experience completely. You, as the reader, have the chance to decide which one out of the two main stories you want to read first. This is because the book was simultaneously published in two different versions and each version starts with a different story. When you go to a bookshop – either a real one surrounded with the magical smell of books or a vapid, online one – and find How to Be Both on a shelf, it is likely that you will actually see two different books starting with different stories. Can you think of a more experimental and complex way of constructing a narrative? If not, you haven’t yet met Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, a book that gives you the chance to decide on your reading experience. In other words, you are free to write your own story out of those 25 chapters. The first and last chapters of the story are indicated in the box, but you are free to read the remaining 25 chapters in any order you like. Johnson published The Unfortunates, a book that comes with 27 chapters in a box.

Fresco in the House of Venus in the Shell, Pompeii (CC0)

Ali smith how to be both review