The 100 best books of the 21st century
No 8
Autumn by Ali Smith review
– a beautiful, transient symphony
Set just after the EU referendum, the first post-Brexit novel is a poignant and subtle exploration of the way we experience time
Joanna Kavenna
Wednesday 12 October 2016
Ali Smith’s latest novel is billed as the first in a four-part series, Seasonal, with each novel to be named, as the title suggests, after a season: Smith seeks thus to explore “what time is, how we experience it”. This question – of the nature of time itself, and the nature of our experience of time – is ancient and baroque. We conduct our lives with reference to an agreed symbolical system, clock time, and yet there is also the wholly subjective experience of time – which the philosopher Henri Bergson called la durée or duration. As in: time flies when you’re having fun.