![]() ![]() ![]() Therefore, if it is too much to say that one can tell a tale of time, it is none the less true that a desire to tell a tale about time is not such an absurd idea.” Smith has written and published very quickly – making Autumn the first “post-Brexit novel” – and the galloping style and speed of composition fit with the central theme. ![]() The enterprise is very strange and, as Thomas Mann wrote in The Magic Mountain, “it is clear that time, while the medium of the narrative, can also become its subject. Despite this indeterminacy, novelists convey invented characters through linear time and even seek to imagine their “duration” as well. It is impossible to know precisely how other people experience time. As in: time flies when you’re having fun. 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. This question – of the nature of time itself, and the nature of our experience of time – is ancient and baroque. A li 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”. ![]()
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