![]() ![]() She is a great formalist (as I write that, I can imagine her, with her Inverness accent, rebuking somebody with that phrase) and the way themes and tropes reappear from novel to novel feels highly deliberate. Nothing is ever accidental in an Ali Smith novel. This earlier novel contains both a Scotswoman and a moderately successful English writer, a woman the same age as Smith with a Scottish mother. Both that novel and There but for the contain characters who are Scotswomen of her own age. As I read How to be both recently I decided that they are, at some level, autobiographical. Those other novels are bound to keep coming up. I mention these because it makes the reading of The accidental very different from the first time, when I’d never read anything of hers before. Before that I read Artful, and before that I read There but for the. ![]() This time, I’m reading it having just finished Ali Smith’s most recent novel, How to be both. I first read this novel shortly after it was published in 2005, before I started to write these journals, so I’ve forgotten almost everything about it. ![]()
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