What is first? What you see or how you see?
In this novel two narratives are set against each other – one of a troubled teenager, the other of a 15th century Italian fresco painter. At the beginning the reader is given the choice where to start reading, first the story about the girl following the story of the painter or vice versa.
There is George, a bristly, highly intelligent teenage girl, whose mother has just died and who is left struggling to make sense of this death, together with her younger brother and her emotionally absent father, all still under shock.
And then there is Francesco del Cossa, an Italian renaissance artist, a real-life figure who painted a series of striking allegorical frescoes of the seasons in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, the palace to "escape from boredom" in Italy. Francesco also suffered from the far too early death of his beloved mother.
I started with the painter’s narrative first and can only imagine now what my reading experience would have been like had I done differently. A futile thought, never to be resolved.
What is relevant, though is that both narratives form, one way or other, a connection and resonate across time.
At its heart How to Be Both challenges the binary notions which form the basic understanding of our world. Why should we expect a book to run from A to B, why should characters, traits, actions, be easily pigeonholed into male or female?
George has a boy’s name but is a girl on the onset of puberty and troubled by all the sweet insecurities that go with that age. Francesco, the Italian painter, when taken to a brothel for the first time by his childhood best friend, declines to sleep with the girls and rather draws them and not much later we learn that he is binding his chest with linen. Finally his best friend discovers his/her secret but they stay friends. Many of the figures in his paintings could be either male or female. Why not be both? It does not matter.
Francesco, through the tricks writing is able to perform, as some sort of spirit, sees George for the first time in a gallery and takes her for a boy. Not by chance are the paintings exhibited there from the time period he comes from and not by chance does the boy/girl studies intensely his painting which is hanging there, too.
“To be both“. The titular ambivalence or duality is the core of the book. Both intellectually challenging and emotionally moving, simultaneously mournful and full of positive energy, linguistically playful and deadly serious and furthermore, despite its innovative structural setting, the book is a joy to read. The duality does not stop in front of Death. In recalling a trip with her mother to see the frescoes of Francesco in Ferrara, Italy, George brings her back to life and through Francesco’s paintings he himself is resurrected, breathes and lives. George’s mother, a "renaissance woman" with degrees in art history and women's studies, draws her attention to the sexual symbolism and "constant gender ambiguities running through the whole work."
In an interesting twist the reader in the end is faced with the possibility that the narrative of Francesco might just be the imaginative fruit of George’s and her friend’s mind. They had been assigned an art/school project with the task to explore the dichotomy of Sympathy / Empathy.
I personally preferred Francesco’s narrative for its seductive ability to bring to life a time and place quite different from my own. I liked it because I could easily identify with the artist and most of all I liked the voice, the beautiful poetic prose that conveys touchingly convincing how beauty can be found in almost anything. Only the eye and mind of an artist is needed.
George’s narrative is, very appropriately and cleverly so, that of an adolescent contemporary schoolgirl, which is charming in itself and very often hilariously eye-opening.
I liked this truly inventive, mesmerizing novel, dazzling in its scope and I was, as always, delighted by Smith’s penchant for puns. It has been a lovely experience.
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