对话英国科斯塔文学奖和金匠奖得主阿莉·史密斯（下）

对话英国科斯塔文学奖和金匠奖得主阿莉·史密斯（下）

【作家简介】
Ali Smith 阿莉·史密斯
英国科斯塔文学奖、贝丽斯女性小说奖及金匠奖得主
英国文坛新秀阿莉·史密斯，1962年生于苏格兰的因弗内斯，现居住在剑桥。她是英国当代文坛重要及潜质作家之一，伍尔芙继承者，被认为是值得期待的未来诺奖得主。其作品多次获得英国金匠文学奖、《卫报》年度小说奖、科斯塔文学奖等文学奖项，并多次入围布克奖短名单。
她的小说具有浓厚的实验性质却又引人入胜，以充满巧合与意外的情节、多变的视角、开放的结构、丰富的声音和文字游戏、对传统性别建构的突破、细腻的情感以及厚重的主题而著称。

【本期核心内容】
在本期节目中，Ali Smith分享了她的第三和第四件物品：一件破陶器和一小枚硬币，并朗读了一段书中的内容。随后，Ali还与主持人交流了书与阅读之于人的关系。
 
以下内容为对话文稿。
EP2 对话英国科斯塔文学奖得主阿莉·史密斯（下）

Nihal Arthanayake (16:12):
Why do you have a piece of broken crockery? This is your object number three.
Ali Smith (16:18):
I'll tell you about that one. I found it on the beach at Cramond, which is a particularly literary beach because Muriel Spark mentions it in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It passes through her book lightly and very comically. And I was once, in a very bad way, because my mama just died. And I was on the beach at Cramond, on the shore. And found a tiny piece of blue and white crockery, which had been broken off, presumably a plate, a very long time ago, whose edges were so smooth, it was triangle, but it was a rounded angle. It was a smooth round triangle. And inside the smooth round, triangle of white with blue design were circles and triangles in a piece of broken plate. The loveliness of it again in the hand, and the way in which it had made its own shape of itself by weather. And yet was still on that shape and featured shapes on it. And had smoothed its own shape, but yet kept its sharpness. It's a lovely little broken thing.
Nihal Arthanayake (17:25):
Now your book, How to be both, Ali, as I mentioned earlier, has been made into a brand new audio book read by you. So new, in fact-
Ali Smith (17:33):
It's not read by me. It's not going to be read by me. We've discovered this studio that 've talking to you now, is too permeable. And that a home recording won't do for How to be both. So a wonderful reader will read it instead of me and I wish them luck.
Nihal Arthanayake (17:49):
Oh, okay.
Ali Smith (17:50):
And love. I wish them love, actually, because good on them. Looking forward to hearing it from them.
Nihal Arthanayake (17:55):
So I guess, following on from that now that we are not going to hear you reading from the audio book, are we going to hear you read from it now?
Ali Smith (18:05):
Do you want me to?
Nihal Arthanayake (18:06):
Just an extract that you could read for us now, if that's all right, Ali.
Ali Smith (18:09):
Why don't you choose a page at random?
Nihal Arthanayake (18:11):
Oh, wow. That's that's so good. Okay.
Ali Smith (18:15):
There are 372-
Nihal Arthanayake (18:18):
No, I know. I know exactly how many pages. I'm now looking for.
Ali Smith (18:22):
You say that with weariness.
Nihal Arthanayake (18:26):
No. I'm just... What a challenge. What a challenge. This has never happened in the history of the Penguin Podcast where the author has said to me, the silly chap with the microphone, "Why don't you pick a page and we'll go from there?" Because it is my age and it starts with a new sentence, 49.
Ali Smith (18:45):
Good for you. This is a great page. In my copy that I've got here of How to be both, it starts with the mediaeval part. You know the Had to be both is in two forms?
Nihal Arthanayake (18:55):
Okay. So my version of it, it doesn't start with... Mine starts with, though it is embarrassing and excruciating when someone won't play your game. George gets over herself.
Ali Smith (19:09):
You see, mine is the Francesco del Cossa part. It starts, the great Alberti, who published in the year in which my mother birthed me, the book for all picture makers and wrote in it the words, that the movements of a man, (as opposed to a boy or young woman) be ornato with more firmness understands the bareness and the pliability it takes to be both. The great Cennini, though, in his handbook on colours and picture making finds no worth and no beauty of proportion in girls or in women of any age, except in the matter of hands in themselves.
Ali Smith (19:41):
Since the delicate hands of girls and women, providing their young enough, are more patient, he says than those of a man from spending so much more time indoors, which makes them more suited to making the best blue. Myself, I went out of my way then to be expert at the painting at hands and be good at the grinding of blue and the using of blue, both. There were others like me, painters. I mean, who could do my particular, both. We knew each other when we saw each other. We exchanged this knowledge by glance and by silence, by moving on and going our own ways. And most, anyone else who saw through the art of what some would call our subterfuge and others are necessity, graced us with acceptance and an equally unspoken trust in the skill we must truly possess to be so beholden to be taking such a path.
Nihal Arthanayake (20:27):
That was a reading from How to be both by my guest Ali Smith. And my sources tell me that it will in fact be read by Katie long. There's a link in the programme notes of this very episode. Thank you so much Ali for doing that. Completely-
Ali Smith (20:43):
My pleasure.
 
Nihal Arthanayake (20:43):
Off the bat. Your final object is a small coin. Object number four.
Ali Smith (20:49):
This is an interesting thing about the fake and the real. Years and years and years ago, an acquaintance of mine, I didn't know her very well, gave me a little brown coin about the size of... it's bigger than a penny and smaller than a two pence piece. And it says on it, 1716 on one side. And on the other side it says only believe. And it says only believe. Only B leave. As in, the only top, the B in the middle and the L-I-E-V-E at the bottom in writing. Which looks like it could have come from the 1700's.
Ali Smith (21:27):
Or it might not have come from the 1700's at all and it might be a fake. Now, I don't know what this coin is. She told me it was a catechism coin, which had been picked up in Queensferry. And sure enough, there are letters on the coin that say TQF. And then give the date, 17 something. And the other side says only believe. So I have this coin and it's a beautiful thing. It's got words on it. It's got letters which could or could not mean something that I think I know. And it's got a date on it. And it's very precious to me. And it's one of the things that if the house were burning down, I would take with me.
Nihal Arthanayake (22:03):
Are you by nature a hoarder?
Ali Smith (22:06):
No. In fact, the opposite. I would like to get rid of her. As it were.
Nihal Arthanayake (22:13):
As you were a new terminology that we...
Ali Smith (22:16):
Had to get rid of her.
Nihal Arthanayake (22:18):
Okay.
Ali Smith (22:18):
Where can I get rid of this?
Nihal Arthanayake (22:21):
Okay. Right. Okay. But one thing you must surely be surrounded by, and find it difficult to sell presumably or give away are books.
Ali Smith (22:31):
Oh yeah. It is difficult. It's funny, because there's a time in my life when I thought I would never give away books. And now I'm in my late fifties and I've given away quite a lot of books. As we go towards the other end of our lives, we know that there's only so much time left. And how many of those books will we ever... I don't know if people listening will know that astonishing, Vargus poem about thinking of a library and knowing that the books in it have had the page opened once and may never be opened again in your lifetime, by you. It's such an image for a metaphor for a real thing to say about standing in your own library, looking at the books thinking, okay, so what would I take with me if I were moving to one room somewhere and could only have eight of these writers, who would I take? What if I could only take six?
Ali Smith (23:23):
And the funny thing is, that those books that we revisit and revisit and revisit over our lives, change with us. And I have found, it can be quite different when we go back to them. So books themselves change over time. And we, in our relationship with them, our dialogue or argument with them, we shift with them and they shift with us too. So it would not be a hardship to come down to a very small library with wonderful writers in it, with whom you could always dialogue.
 
Nihal Arthanayake (23:52):
You were talking about six books. I'm only going to give you one as your library. Very sadly. And I hope this never happens, starts to heat up with flames all around, and you can grab one book, which would be the book that you would grab, Ali?
Ali Smith (24:08):
Is this like desert island, just when you can take Shakespeare anyway, and then choose another book?
Nihal Arthanayake (24:12):
There's no way you're taking the Shakespeare, no.
Ali Smith (24:14):
Do you know what? I think I'll probably just take the book I'm reading at the time if I'm enjoying it, because I know that wherever I'm going to go, I will be fighting for libraries. So that if I don't have library access to the books I would like to read, then I will be causing a great fury and knocking on doors of people all the time saying, "Where's my library? Where's the library for everybody? Where's all the books? Why don't I have access to?"
Nihal Arthanayake (24:43):
What is that book at this moment in time then?
Ali Smith (24:48):
Oh, okay. That's complicated. Because I'm reading two or three books at once at the moment. Let's see. Which one of those would I take? A reader or writer I hadn't read before. And she's writing now and she's just wonderful. Her name's Michelle de Kretser. Have you read her?
Nihal Arthanayake (25:04):
No.
Ali Smith (25:05):
Michelle de Kretser is an Australian Sri Lankan, Sri Lankan Australian writer whose books are really just brilliant. I'm going to send, again, anybody who hasn't read her to a book called, The Life to Come, which is one of the best novels I think I possibly ever read.
Nihal Arthanayake (25:22):
Wow.
Ali Smith (25:23):
I know it's really, really good. It is. As you move through it, a critique of the novel, of the Australian novel, and of why we have novels and how lives work out in history and in the stories that get told that become history. And it is such a lovely, good... I've just started her another novel of hers called Questions of Travel. And that's the book I'd take with me.
 
Nihal Arthanayake (25:49):
Interestingly, when I was a radio one DJ back in the days, and I used to listen to a lot of music. I had to listen to a lot of it. Each song had a minute and if I wasn't in by a minute, it wasn't going to happen.
Ali Smith (26:04):
Understand.
 
Nihal Arthanayake (26:07):
Can you apply a similar, not a minute, of course. You can't read for a minute and then go around, I'm not into this. But can you apply a similar principle in your own life to reading? Because you're obviously a voracious reader. But how long do you know before you know that it's not for you?
Ali Smith (26:24):
I tend to be quite patient with my own impatience as it were, because sometimes the book doesn't come together until the, say, the last third or even sometimes, oh, sometimes the book doesn't come together until it's very last page. For, which I can give you as an example, a book called Reunion by a writer called Fred Uhlman who only wrote one novel.
Ali Smith (26:51):
And this one novel he wrote is very, very, very slim. And you are reading it. And the novel goes along. And then you get to turn the last page where there's a couple of paragraphs on the very top of the blank page, because that's its end. And it is breathtaking. And up to that point, it was a good novel. And then it's breathtaking. So you there's not that I would ever have been impatient with Uhlman, because I wouldn't, because he's a wonderful writer for me. But my impatience will give, if there's something that I really, really want to read. And I'll put down that book that I'm not getting along with and maybe come back to it later. I find it very hard to just stop and give books away because I tend to think it is my fault. If I'm not going with a book, then it's most likely is my fault.
Nihal Arthanayake (27:40):
That's a strange way to look at it, that it's your fault. Because it's the author's job to connect with you. And if it hasn't connected with you, it's failed in it's purpose.
Ali Smith (27:50):
It's not that. Sometimes you're not in the mood to be connected by that particular writer or that particular book. And there might be a different book and a different day in which you will be. I know from writing myself, to cut books some slack.
Nihal Arthanayake (28:06):
I don't think you cut yourself any slack when you're writing.
Ali Smith (28:07):
No, but I know that, out go the book and if it doesn't hit you on that, that time, you don't like it, whatever then, okay, let it go. But you know if you cut some slack, maybe you'll like it later.
 
Nihal Arthanayake (28:18):
As if you have the time to return back. As if you, Ali Smith, have the time to return back to a book. In 2015, you went, "Oh, I'll come back to that at some point." Listen, Ali, it's been such a pleasure simply trying to keep up with your extraordinary brain for the last-
Ali Smith (28:35):
Stop it.
Nihal Arthanayake (28:36):
Hour.
Ali Smith (28:36):
For goodness sake.
Nihal Arthanayake (28:37):
No, it's the truth. It's true. I interview so many people, but this has been brilliant. I feel like I... Because as I can't go to a physical gym, I literally actually feel like I've just been to a brain gym for the last hour.
Ali Smith (28:50):
Thank you.
Nihal Arthanayake (28:50):
Take care Ali. Thank you so much.
Ali Smith (28:51):
Good to talk to you.
Nihal Arthanayake (28:53):
And good to talk to you.
Nihal Arthanayake (28:54):
And before we go, don't forget to subscribe to the penguin podcast, comment, rate, and most of all, share. I'm almost begging you. It helps us make more of these. Thank you.