Artful
January 2013
Ali Smith / Hamish Hamilton
There is a double entendre at play within this title, for brimming with references to works of art, the book is both ‘art full’ as well as having been ‘artful[ly]’ constructed by Ali Smith. A series of four lectures delivered at Oxford University, it defies placement within any literary genre, for although it journeys through the portrayal and construction of love and mourning through the prism of literary and cultural analysis, it simultaneously masquerades as such, being fiction. Amongst the recent resurgence of memoirs in which writers turn to fiction or art for meaning, the lesson here is subverted, for its frame is art itself.
Like the Artful Dodger who bursts into the narrative, ‘a work of shifting possibility’, so is that which we a re conscious of reading. Smith is a trickster but one with a tender heart. Artful is a kind of grand joke full of pathos, intelligence and humanity and, unlike a lesser one of its kind, it leaves us with a sense of wonderment at its virtuosity. One might be tempted to shout ‘Brava!’ at its end.
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