The world and the truth of that world

British pop artist Pauline Boty recreates one of her works in her London studio in 1963. Michael Ward / Rex Features / Getty Images

There is a time in

the first installment of the seasonal quartet published by Scottish writer Ali Smith, in which Elisabeth's mother, an eleven-year-old girl, has to come to London and leaves her in charge of a neighbor, Mr Gluck, who must have little more than 80 and whom they have known for a while. "Hello," says the old man, "what are you reading?" The girl gives him the title of the book she has just finished. "And what did it make you think about?" And so, little by little, they become entangled in a conversation. Elisabeth understands that what the neighbor wants is for me to tell him what the book was about. "As you wish," accepts Mr. Gluck, who later proposes a game to him and gives him two possibilities. "A. Every image tells a story. Two. Every story tells an image ”. Elisabeth chooses the first option and Mr. Gluck, Daniel, describes a painting to her,a

.

Ali Smith's novel is largely the story of that relationship, that of the girl and the old man, and it is a love story and also a story of how we learn to look at the world, and it deals with that strange territory where they mix. the affections with the desire to understand what happens to us, and it is that the most important thing is to learn to live in what happens, and that perhaps in order to live we need to understand the world in some way.

Elisabeth is thirteen years old and this time she plays trifle with Daniel: one tells the first sentence of a story and the other must complete it. They are going to build one that talks about the war and she chooses to play a man with a gun and he a person disguised as a tree. The bullets are faster and more powerful and destroy all the costumes, the girl points out. Daniel: "Is that the kind of world you are going to invent?" She answers: “It is useless to invent a world when the real world already exists. There is only one world and the truth of that world ”. They disagree. David understands that "there is also an invented version of the truth that we tell ourselves about the world." "Do not. The

exists, Elisabeth said. The

are an invention ”. And he replied: "But that is not why they are less true."

What all the time beats behind

is the referendum in which the British were asked if they wanted to leave the European Union. That is the

and Elisabeth's mother explains to her daughter that she is tired of that world: “I am tired of the news. I'm tired of them turning things that aren't spectacular into spectacular and treating in such a simplistic way what is really awful. " The frightening thing could be that fence that has been erected in their town, or the attitude of some locals towards immigrants: “This is not Europe, they were yelling at them. Go back to Europe ”.

Ali Smith has an immense ability to explore various paths at the same time and

like his other novels, radically breaks conventional ways of narrating. The work and intense adventures of the British pop artist Pauline Boty in a world made for men is another branch of the novel, as is the

in which Christine Keeler was involved in that same world made for the men. And there's the

Boty made of the Keeler story. The way to tell. “It is possible to fall in love not with someone but with their gaze, said Daniel. How eyes that are not yours allow you to see where you are and who you are ”. Well that.