Winter by Ali Smith

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I was disappointed in this book. Ali Smith is an award-winning literary star but this book failed to shine. The stream of consciousness storytelling fell flat and the style of the writing was too weird to enjoy. Maybe this book was too offbeat, too cerebral, too clever even. This book is about the dysfunctional family, anger, and with odd characters that just didn’t gel for me. The floating head of a child was very disturbing and set me off from the start. The story structure is quirky with lots of flashbacks and memories if you like backstory threads. I found the story to veer in scattered directions and jumps in time. Some of the prose was beautifully done, okay, this lady can write--I get it--but what is the story here? Furthermore, I didn’t like that the dialogue had no quotation marks. This is a modern trend now and used by intellectually elite authors, supposedly artful, clean, and elegant. I think it comes off pretentious and vague and burdens the reader. The characters don’t speak, only the writer does. We can’t ‘hear’ the characters talking because the lines stiffen into the narrative voice and exposition. In one scene we have dialogue with the attribution of the speakers in parenthesis about 20 times, identifying volleys between the aunt and the mother: [I cannot be near her f*****g chaos a minute longer. (His mother talking to the wall) … (His aunt speaking to the ceiling) … (His aunt) … (His mother) …(His aunt.)…(His mother)…]. Came off choppy and distracting like watching a movie with the mute button on. In the end I was dissatisfied with the story as a whole. I do recognize that for some readers who are in the Ali Smith fan club, they might love this kind of blurred jabberwocky. Not for me.



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