ali smith's artful

I picked up Ali Smith's new book, Artful, this morning based on the Leah Hager Cohen's review of it in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review. My love for Ali Smith started when I was living in London, when I read Hotel World (the Sophie Calle photograph from Double Game on the cover lured me in initially) in one awe-struck sitting. Her newest sounds like a "stunner" indeed...

“Clever” and “inventive.” Are these the two readiest adjectives that spring to mind when describing the fiction of Ali Smith? Certainly they are common responses to her work. But as understandable as this may be, I hope to convince you that neither word is quite right. One damns her with faint praise, while the other misapprehends what she actually does.

Smith is a trickster, an etymologist, a fantasist, a pun-freak, an ontologist, a transgenrenatrix, an ypomonist — O.K., now I’m just making up words. Smith might approve. A wordsmith to the very smithy of her soul, she is at once deeply playful and deeply serious. And her new book, in which she tugs at God’s sleeve, ruminates on clowns, shoplifts used books, dabbles in Greek and palavers with the dead, is a stunner.

Read the rest of the review here.