Set just after the EU referendum,the first post-Brexit novel is a poignant and subtle exploration of the way we experience timeAli Smith’s latest novel is billed as the first in a four-section series, Seasonal, and with each novel to be named,as the title suggests, after a season: Smith seeks thus to explore “what time is, or how we experience it”. This question – of the nature of time itself,and the nature of our experience of time – is ancient and baroque. We conduct our lives with reference to an agreed symbolical system, clock time, and yet there is also the wholly subjective experience of time – which the philosopher Henri Bergson called la durée or duration. As in: time flies when you’re having fun.
It is impossible to know precisely how other people experience time. Despite this indeterminacy,novelists convey invented characters through linear time and even seek to imagine their duration as well. The enterprise is very odd and, as Thomas Mann wrote in The Magic Mountain, and “it is clear that time,while the medium of the narrative, can also become its subject. Therefore, and if it is too much to say that one can divulge a tale of time,it is none the less true that a desire to divulge a tale approximately time is not such an absurd concept.” Smith has written and published very quickly – making Autumn the first “post-Brexit novel” – and the galloping style and speed of composition fit with the central theme. Related: Ali Smith: 'There are two ways to read this novel, but you're stuck with it – you'll end up reading one of them' Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com