autumn

Author's Name: To Smith

It's 2016 in Britain, which has just left the European Union. Everyone is in shock, and the entire nation, according to the author, is experiencing a strange pain. Daniel Clack, a 101-year-old former singer, is bedridden in the hospital, dreaming constantly. He is visited regularly by a 32-year-old woman, Elizabeth Demand, who was his neighbor in her youth. Her mother was unhappy with her relationship with the neighbor, believing him to be gay, but Elizabeth developed a strong friendship with him, and was moved by their conversations about art and painting. As a result, Elizabeth is now a junior art student at University College London, and her thesis is on the long-dead 1960s Pop-Art artist Pauline Boty, a 1970s feminist icon, who was Daniel's lover. The novel shifts between Daniel and his long dreams as he approaches the brink of death, and the moments when Elizabeth gathers memories of the roots of her friendship with him. "Autumn" is a novel of time as ideas that are not sequential and evolving, but rather juxtaposed. Thus, Smith not only jumps forward and backward in her timeline, but also sideways, examining the relationship between things: the living and the dead, the present and the past, and art and life. She writes time as it happens with what happens in it, like Picasso, who, in some of his paintings, attempted to capture all the perspectives of the subject in a single shot. Therefore, in most of Smith's novels, it is difficult to capture time (in the order of its chaos that the author conveys to us) to reach a complete understanding of what is happening and a clear connection between her themes. Dubbed the most prominent contemporary British novelist, Smith presents us with the first part of her seasonal novel, "Autumn," followed by "Winter," "Spring," and "Summer." This novel was named after the fact that it was the first novel published after Britain's separation from the European Union, known as Brexit, and the first novel to address the impact of the separation on the lives of the British.