![]() ![]() ![]() Summer, we are informed in Summer, comes from ‘the Old English sumor, from the proto-indo-european root sam, meaning both one and together’. Winter, a character reflects in Winter, is about ‘remembering how to still yourself and then how to come pliantly back to life’. The implication is that at some point fortune’s wheel must turn, that a period of darkness must eventually give way to a period of light and flourishing. ![]() ![]() Yet in the very act of aligning a creative embrace of happenstance with the cycle of the seasons there is an article of faith. The publishing schedule didn’t quite work out: Spring was late. The quartet was conceived as an exercise in writing to the moment: a sequence of novels written and published at the rate of one a year, set in part at the time of their composition, responding to events as they unfolded in the wake of the bitterly fought Brexit referendum of 2016. Ali Smith’s decision to begin her seasonal quartet in the mellow fruitfulness of Autumn and end in glorious Summer now seems like heroic optimism. ![]()
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