Ali Smith is simply brilliant. For me, Winter was more difficult to get into, but I ended up liking it more than Autumn.

Winter describes a Christmas gathering of a (typically) dysfunctional family. The family is made up of Sophie, her polar-opposite sister Iris, Sophie's son Art and Lux - a stranger Art paid to pretend to be his ex-girlfriend Charlotte.

Despite it being angry and very political, Winter had a certain air of lightness about it. I especially liked Lux, an outsider who brings chaos but also illuminates.

On the language front, Smith doesn't disappoint; her literary allusions and puns are plentiful. Nothing is accidental in her books.
She also has an unmatched sense of humour in contemporary literature. Reading her in translation would be a literary sin.

"I said, Art is seeing things. And your aunt said, that's a great description of what art is. "

The subtle reference to Autumn was beautiful. That was the turning point when I just fell in love with this book.

“That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.”

In 2020, this rings especially relevant. ( )

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/winter-by-ali-smith/

A short but great book, about a mother and son who don’t really like each other; the mother’s sister, who doesn’t get on with her at all; and the young Croatian woman who agrees at the last moment to pretend to be the son’s girlfriend at the family Christmas gathering, the real girlfriend having dumped him and hijacked his social media accounts. There’s a lot here about family dynamics, contemporary politics, environmentalism and the Greenham Common campaigners; there’s also a bit of a riff on A Christmas Carol, not so much a rewriting of it as a reflection. I found it all pretty powerful. Recommended, perhaps especially as a Christmas present (though for people who won’t worry that there is a hidden message in your giving it to them). ( )

I think it's hard to approach "why did I like this book so much". So if I start at the obvious "why would I *dis*like it, even if I didn't, overall" instead. The two viewpoint characters are both disagreeable politically - at least in my opinion and clearly the author's too. I think this is a difficult needle to thread for an author: how to create characters that you disagree with without them being obviously wrong. And I think as in Autumn the places where it breaks down are those where Smith directly addresses Brexit. Which is understandable, because even 5 and a half years from the vote, living with the consequences, having been involved in the "conversation", I still struggle to find the motivations comprehensible because from my personal perspective even those articulated by people are evil, facile and/or just objectively obviously wrong. Luckily these are only little bits.

So then there's also the obvious thing that Sophia and Art aren't super pleasant people. Sophia is given a lot of background that makes her sympathetic but Art... he barely gets a backstory that explains how he is how he is. He just behaves in ways that are inconsiderate and callous with no introspection and - spoiler, I guess - by the end of the book it's not clear that he's changed much. Like part of me was reading in the hope he'd finally realise and then the PoV focuses on him getting an erection because a younger (lesbian!) woman is sleeping near him for cash. It's sad and pathetic. The extent to which it's clear he instrumentalises a vulnerable woman and treats her intelligence and insight mainly as something For Him is painful.

But... he's not evil. Most of what he does is just... banal. He has a relatively easy job doing something that's a net negative to the world but on the scale of things it's only a small thing and no worse than the average job. He's trying to write a blog on nature that he thinks is really important while ignoring politics and keeps slipping on updating it, makes up "personal" stories that didn't happen, is engaging with a small audience. We all make a decision about how much we engage with politics even when we know it's really important. We all have hobbies. Being a bad writer isn't a bad thing. It's good to express yourself. He fails to engage with the emotions of his politically aware ex-girlfriend but that's not that surprising, for a man. Lots of men like to pretend their reactions to things are "rational" in a way that denies the feelings of women. I mean, bad? Yeah. Not unusual though.

So then... you come to how he treats Lux. Lux appears in the story mostly for what she does for Sophia and Art. She says enough about herself that we get some insight into how she feels and what she cares about. She mentions casually a history as a child of refugees from the Yugoslav wars, who left them because she couldn't deal with the weight of trauma. She's insightful and caring. And yet we never get a chance to see from her point of view. It's hard to avoid thinking about manic pixie dream girl type stuff, at least when you get shown stuff from Art's perspective. And there's a sense too a little bit here of betrayal by the author - she's casually used as part of Being Relevant To Brexit when she points out that due to Brexit she's not even sure how long she'll be allowed to stay in with a Croatian passport.

Although ok - isn't that kind of, also a point, like an important one? In that she basically becomes a sort of, temporary carer for Sophia which is a reflection of actual labour issues in the UK. And of course we're only seeing it through the eyes of two quite selfish and inconsiderate people who instrumentalise her so of course we don't get the perspective even the author one. And of course they only see her for what she can give them but without even bothering to try and address the material issues that mean she can't give them more and then moping about it... honestly like I complain a little bit and then I realise it's all weaved in more expertly than I'd thought at first.

And I think the thing is... the way Lux gets treated is uncomfortably familiar. It's very, very easy to slip into thinking that things suck for you but if only this one person would fix it for you. Then you'd be ok. Looking for solutions outside yourself to problems that are your own. Thinking of other people only as ways to make you better, the main character. Art does come across as a dick, but a mundane one. The sort of person it's easy to slide into being. And of course, by the end he's only a little bit changed - he's willing to try a little harder in some ways and thinking about changing his job but he's still reliant on the work of his ex-gf for self realisation. He's looking for Lux but only when it's too late, and seemingly without having a thought about what her life is like. Even his quest for a particular Shakespeare folio is him unable to look for beauty that comes from his own understanding like his unreal nature blog. For now we see through a glass, darkly.

Sophia is in a way an easier character. Her contempt for her sister's politics and activism is given some complex background that makes her basically sympathetic. We also avoid any in depth look into her business life, we just see her afterwards, which means you don't need to think of any of her shadier actions there. Instead, she's mostly characterised negatively by inaction.
( )

I don't think I enjoyed this as much as "Autumn", perhaps the themes feel a bit more pointed, perhaps the layers seem more densely layered yet less dense within themselves. Still, I always enjoy Smith's writing, her clever intertextual references, and her tone of voice. And the broader aims of this quartet are admirable. Looking forward to seeing the sun again in Spring. ( )

Winter, the second in Ali Smith's seasons quintet, centers on Art, who has a side gig writing a blog about nature, a blog he just makes up. When his girlfriend dumps him, he hires a girl he meets at a bus stop to stand in for his girlfriend during his trip to his mother's house for Christmas. But a stand in girlfriend is not the greatest secret in the house over the holidays. Art's mother isn't doing well, and her estranged sister is called in to help. What follows is an uncomfortable, but necessary encounter between mother and son, between sisters, and Art learning a little about himself. The only stable person in the house is a homeless foreign girl trying to stay under the radar until the Brexit question is settled.

As I read this novel, I felt that it was missing the thing that made Autumn such a good book. The relationship between Daniel and Elisabeth had been so extraordinary that following that with a book about difficult people struggling was a hard sell. But then, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I looked up to see that it was a few hours and half a book later -- the lack of deeply sympathetic characters didn't hamper Smith's ability to deliver a compelling story. I'm looking forward to continuing with this series of books. ( )