Spring

"Winter has Epiphany. Spring's gifts are different.Month of dead deities coming back to life.In the french revolutionary calendar, along with the last days of March, it becomes Germinal, the month of return to the source, to the seed, to the germ of things, which is maybe why Zola gave the novel he wrote about hopeless hope this revolutionary title.April the anarchic, the final month, of spring the great connective.Pass any flowering bush or tree and you can't not hear it, the buzz of the engine, the new life already at work in it, time's factory.".Another great book by Ali Smith.Another book that's very hard to review!Spring is the third book in the seasonal quartet. The writing often reminds me of an old slide projector, with each photographic slide having a unique memory, but still interconnected with each other. Ali Smith directs us towards the future by talking about Now, and by remembering past. We often get a flavour of "history repeats itself," leading to the important question, what are we going to do about it?The characters never over power the story. They act as catalysts nudging us towards the bigger picture. After reading her books, I always feel like something has shifted inside me, that I am not the same person as I was before.Probably, a change of season!.I really can't explain the book to you, but I want you to experience it for yourself. You don't need to read Autumn or Winter before Spring, but they do help to get acquainted with her style of writing. However, I found Spring to be quite easier than the previous two!

Spring comes and fills the environs with lush greenery, the plants with blooms, the earth with a rejuvenating vigour. In the hands of Ali Smith, the season of Spring speaks with a penetrating force, daring you to challenge its authority. This might of nature, its ability to destroy as easily as it enlivens, becomes searingly relevant in contemporary times when the entirety of human race has come to a stand still in the face of a deadly pandemic. But Smith’s foresight is not limited to the stature she ascribes to nature. It extends to her portrayal of social media, right-wing politics, and abusive trolls. But it’s not despair she wishes to evoke but truth. And when truth emerges, so does hope.In the spirit of quintessential Smith, we meet a few characters briefly. There’s a film director who’s mourning the death of a beloved friend. There’s a woman who works at an Immigrant Removal Centre, immune to the sordidness of her work. There’s a 12-year-old girl with almost magical abilities. There’s a coffee vendor who never has any coffee. Their lives flit across the pages, never letting us arrive at a story completely. In such moments, Smith seems to be asking the reader to let go of our fixation with certainties, with answers, and to embrace ambiguities with an open mind. Hasn’t our fear of what we don’t fully comprehend wreaked enough havoc for us to know better.Time and again, writers and readers have turned to literature in dire circumstances, to fathom a reality that has stopped making sense. I view Smith’s Seasonal Quartet as an attempt to address the vitriol, xenophobia, and exclusivity that has become the zeitgeist of our times. As such, Spring moves this idea forward with Smith wielding the power of her pen to (re)construct a world drawing inwards.It would be a mistake to approach this book with expectations of a character or a plot driven narrative. Because it’s neither. And once you relinquish the conventions of what you have always known and expected, that’s when Spring will implode within you— a riot of colours and concepts.

Bought the book thinking there will be some relation with spring season or description of spring season. But disappointed

As in the other volumes of her Seasons Quartet, Ali Smith delivers a narrative that is ingenious and thought-provoking. She cleverly meshes individual fates with political and cultural trends that trouble her and other people who want to live in a fairer, and more caring and civilised world. Regrettably, at times the polemics are over the top, and to be honest I skipped the pages of shrill diatribe against populism, brexit and the control of personal data. There are other weaknesses: the satire on dumbed down TV drama is too obvious. The section on HO detention centres is relentlessly grim, while the train journey northwards with the magical/messianic Florence is simply tedious. The thing about Smith is that in addition to being a talented and interesting writer, she has become a patron saint of the UK’s embattled progressivists, and this blinds many critics to her flaws (see for example Justine Jordan’s hyperbolic Guardian review). Spring, like its predecessors in the Quartet, is a good novel rather than a great one, and at times it’s not even particularly good. 3.5

This is not an easy read, I found it hard to follow what was happening - what was real, and what imaginary. While sympathising with the plight of immigrants in detention, I found the tone of the writing too polemical. The 'stream of consciousness' passages for me were virtually unreadable. I read this for a book group, and several other members had read it twice, and found the second reading more rewarding - but I couldn't be bothered!

I feel like the only person who has found Ali Smith's seasonal quartet consistently underwhelming. I understand what she's trying to do, and sometimes the writing can be interesting and thoughtful - she's at her best when she blends fiction with writing about other writers, and bits on Rilke and Mansfield (sometimes) added to the narrative nicely. I felt the characters were zeitgeisty and often fell flat. It feels like Smith is trying too hard to make a political point that she neglects to write a novel...not for me but I know many love Smith's novels so clearly there's something there!

I am totally addicted to this series. I cannot heap enough praise on it. I love identifying all the threads and details and themes that lock the books together. I feel like a detective. This is perhaps the darkest read of the three, so far. The main story being about refugees and detention centres in the UK, which makes for hard reading at times, particularly when you know that Smith will have done her research and the details are real details even if the story itself is fiction. Having said that, there is always hope and there are still moments of great humour and lightness of touch that lift the book. I don't really have the words to describe how brilliant this series is and how it speaks to me on so many levels. Love it.

Spring is the third novel in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, and it is the story of migration, place, and grief. Once again, Smith blends contemporary politics, intertwined stories, and cultural references into a novel that feels fresh and imaginative, but also biting and clever. There is a focus on immigration—with a lot of clever punning and also harsh realities of detention centres—and also on the divisions in Britain, as seen across the other novels as well. There’s also quite a theme of afterlives, not quite the rebirth of spring but of the ways people live on and even speak after death.Possibly the most engrossing of the quartet so far, Spring feels very typically Ali Smith whilst also capturing something about spring and something about contemporary British, migration, and otherness.