There but for the Free

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Look Inside. When a dinner-party guest named Miles locks himself in an upstairs room and refuses to come out, he sets off a media frenzy. He also sets in motion a mesmerizing puzzle of a novel, one that harnesses acrobatic verbal playfulness to a truly affecting story. Miles communicates only by cryptic notes slipped under the door. There But for the see him through the eyes of four people who barely know him, ranging from a precocious child to a confused elderly woman. As it probes our paradoxical need for both separation and true connection, There but for the balances cleverness with compassion, the surreal with the deeply, movingly real, in a way that only Ali Smith can. More about Ali Smith. If you enjoy surprising, often comic insights into contemporary life, [Smith is] someone to relish. Beautifully elusive. It is really about small stuff like life and death and the meaning of human existence, all told with sharp humor and real insight. Exceedingly There But for the. A book about loss and retention: about what we forget and what we remember, about the people who pass through our lives and what bits of them cling to our consciousness. Contains all the There But for the, solid stuff of a novel. With her penchant for wordplay on full display, the author of The Accidental switches between the perspectives of four people whose lives have been peripherally There But for the by her gentle shut-in, a man who, like J. Smith blasts a window open in our heads. Here we have a novel, and a novelist, delighting in the joy of language itself. Smith is a writer with a rich array of conventional strengths. Her prose responds to the world with loving attentiveness. The writing in There but for the is lovely, the imagery sharp and moving, and the flow unstoppable. Nobody writes with more panache. She always surprises, she never disappoints. Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today. When you buy a book, we donate a book. Sign in. Read An Excerpt. Jul 24, ISBN Add to Cart. Also available from:. Sep 13, ISBN Available from:. Paperback —. About There But For The When a dinner-party guest named Miles There But for the himself in an upstairs room and refuses to come out, he sets off a media frenzy. Also by Ali Smith. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Alan Hollinghurst. The Edwardians. Vita Sackville-West. The Rachel Papers. The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing. The Blue Afternoon. William Boyd. The News from Spain. Joan Wickersham. The Accidental. The Photograph. Penelope Lively. Quartet in Autumn. Hotel Du Lac. Anita Brookner. The Autograph Man. How to Save Your Own Life. Jonathan Coe. The Safety of Objects. Lorrie Moore. Salley Vickers. Margery Kempe. Robert Gluck. Freddy and Fredericka. Mark Helprin. England, England. Julian Barnes. The Witches There But for the Eastwick. Louis de Bernieres. My Uncle Oswald. Tom McCarthy. Hope: a Tragedy. Shalom Auslander. The Invisible Circus. Jennifer Egan. The Buddha of Suburbia. Hanif Kureishi. The Go-Between. To the North. Elizabeth Bowen. The Summer Before the Dark. Emerald City. Related Articles. Looking for More Great Reads? Download Hi Res. LitFlash The eBooks you want at the lowest prices. Read it Forward Read it first. Pass it on! Stay in Touch Sign up. We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later. Become a Member There But for the earning points There But for the buying books! 'There but for the grace of God, go I' - meaning and origin.

Symbol alert! A small boy appears, jimmies the flaps off with a dinner knife and instructs the man in how to make a paper airplane. Inside, underneath, it is packed tight into itself with surprising neatness like origami, like a small machine. The point of those mailbox flaps will become apparent, or semi-apparent, only at the very end of the book, but from the beginning There But for the paper plane serves as an apt emblem of Ms. The plot borrows There But for the device Ms. In the new book a guest at a dinner party in Greenwich, England — a man named Miles Garth — gets up between the main course and dessert and locks himself in There But for the upstairs bedroom, where he remains for months. When word about Miles or Milo, as he is popularly known gets out, he becomes a celebrity. Crowds camp out, hoping to sight him at the bedroom window, and they light candles and leave teddy bears. Brooke, delighted with language and exploring all its possibilities, is a helpless punster. Yet there is a thematic point to all this showing off, or to most of it, anyway. Anna used to work at a refugee organization she calls the Center for Temporary Permanence, and that, or its reverse — permanent temporariness — is the condition the novel explores in its intricate cross-weaving and careful ellipses. The main web we have for holding experience together, the novel suggests — for recreating a past in the present — is language itself, which in Ms. Yet language here also proves itself to be dense and referential, capable of making unexpected connections and of imprinting itself feelingly on the mind in a phrase, a rhyme, a snatch of song lyric. Home Page World U. There But For The, By Ali Smith | The Independent

I know There But for the than one person who, when picking up a book to see if it's worth reading, turns to page 62 and, if that's any good, buys it. This is a sound technique, as far as it goes, but I prefer to start as the author wished me to. So I hurled a copy of The Da Vinci Code across the room in disgust before I'd even finished the first sentence; and I There But for the this book to my bosom also before I'd even finished the first sentence. The opening words are: "The fact is, imagine a man …" I loved that glaring disjunction, that violent yoking together of fact and imagination, seemingly artless, casually knowing. This is a writer who has inhaled the masters of what was once called the avant garde in a way that writers from Britain rarely do. Maybe all English, with the possible exception of Jeanette Winterson. And Nicola Barker. If I have made any glaring omissions about the English, do write in. One interesting thing about unconventional narration is that it neatly sidesteps the "oh-no-he-didn't" problem, whereby an inept author who is often, to the boundless vexation of readers such as myself, a raging bestseller cannot convince us of the veracity of even the most banal thing, so heavy-handed and familiar is the style that describes it. Which is how Smith gets us to assent to the central conceit of her novel: that one evening, in between the main and dessert courses of a dinner party in Greenwich, a pleasant and thoughtful man named Miles Garth, hitherto unknown to the hosts, goes upstairs, locks himself in the spare bedroom, and refuses to budge, or communicate. For months. This will remind you of Smith's previous There But for the but one, The Accidentalin which the life of a middle-class family is also interrupted by an unexpected outsider. There the influence is malign; here, benign, relatively: Miles's presence is taken by the outward world as some kind of noble gran rifiutoor the enactment of Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" the words occur in the novel, so we're meant to think of him. A sort of Occupy camp, complete with oddballs, springs up outside the Greenwich house. The lady of the house does an " Experience " column for the Guardian you know the one — it's in the magazine. The novel then splits into four: each section is narrated from the mind of four people whose lives have, in some way, been touched by Miles: a woman he met as a teenager on a European trip 30 years before; the man There But for the invited There But for the to the dinner party in the first place, There But for the year-old picture researcher who is gay; the grandmother of a girl who died when she was 16 who used to sort-of-go-out-with the young Miles; and the year-old daughter of another couple who went to the same dinner party, significantly black, and clever and, if you are not in the mood for puns, rather irritating. It turns out she is the originator of the "The fact is" opening gambit. In terms of technique, Smith is a master of what one reviewer has felicitously called "dropped stitches", deliberate There But for the in the story, little scootings-off to the side, connections that don't quite connect and apparent non-connections that do. This is great, and which is why I am pleased she is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. But the dinner party … would anyone, however stupid, ask, inan obviously educated black couple with Yorkshire accents if they'd ever seen any tigers "where [they] came from"? Dinner parties are awful, I know that, and you can find some prize creeps at them, but this strains credulity somewhat. Nicholas Lezard's choice Books. There but for the by Ali Smith - review. Ali Smith is a master of stylistic daring, writes Nicholas Lezard. Ali Smith:'connections that don't quite connect and apparent non-connections that do. Nicholas Lezard. Page 62 is good, though.