Girl Meets Boy - Ali Smith [0]
A Globe and Mail Best Book
Winner of the Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the International IMPAC
Dublin Literary Award
Finalist for the Clare McLean Prize for
Scotland’s Best Novel
Finalist for the Prince Maurice Prize for
Literary Love Stories
‘As a storyteller, Ali Smith’s supreme gift is that, with what seems effortless confidence, she shows us unfamiliar beauty within the mundane, as if we were children again. In prose marked by harmonious opposites, she’s childlike and wise, exuberant and subtle, humorously intelligent and provocatively dry.’
—The Globe and Mail
‘The great thing about stories is that they can build their own walls and then let us walk right through them. Girl Meets Boy is a joyful celebration of life in all its strange shapes, on all sides of the wall.’
—Jeanette Winterson, The Times
‘As fanciful as it is honest and as moving as it is hilarious, this is a gorgeous story.’
—The London Paper
‘A spritely love story that plays on notions of gender and sexuality to exuberant effect.’
—The Observer
‘An ecstatic, exhilarating helter-skelter ride of a story.’
—Financial Times
‘Smith creates a story of the head-spinning ecstasy of falling in love.… Gentle, generous and wonderfully imaginative, this is a joy to read.’
—Metro
Also by Ali Smith
Novels
Like
Hotel World
The Accidental
Collections
Free Love and Other Stories
Other Stories and Other Stories
The Whole Story and Other Stories
Plays
Trace of Arc
Just
The Seer
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2009
Copyright © 2007 Ali Smith
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2009. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2008. First published in 2007 in Great Britain by Cannongate Books Ltd., Edinburgh. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
www.randomhouse.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Smith, Ali, 1962–
Girl meets boy / Ali Smith.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36734-1
I. Title. II. Series: Myths series (Toronto, Ont.)
PR6069.M4213G57 2009 823′.914 C2008-905514-4
Typeset in Van Dijck by Palimpsest Book Production, Grangemouth, Stirlingshire
v3.1
for Lucy Cuthbertson
for Sarah Wood
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
I
you
us
them
all together now
Acknowledgements and thanks
About the Author
Far away, in some other category, far
away from the snobbery and glitter in
which our souls and bodies have been
entangled, is forged the instrument
of the new dawn.
E M Forster
It is the mark of a narrow world that
it mistrusts the undefined.
Joseph Roth
I am thinking about the difference
between history and myth. Or between
expression and vision. The need for
narrative and the simultaneous need
to escape the prison-house of the
story – to misquote.
Kathy Acker
Gender ought not to be construed as
a stable identity … rather, gender is an
identity tenuously constituted in time.
Judith Butler
Practise only impossibilities.
John Lyly
I
Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.
It is Saturday evening; we always stay at their house on Saturdays. The couch and the chairs are shoved back against the walls. The teak coffee table from the middle of the room is up under the window. The floor has been cleared for the backward and forward somersaults, the juggling with oranges and eggs, the how-to-do-a-cart-wheel, how-to-stand-on-your-head, how-to-walk-on-your-hands lessons.