Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

Amazing book and fantastic writing by Smith. Her novels is well written and truly lovely and captivating to read. The whole series of books are an amazing undertaking. I enjoyed and recommend this book to people who appreciate good writing and plot

"Girl Meets Boy" is a re-telling of the myth of Iphis, which tells how love can be a transformative power, originally found in Ovid's "Metamorphoses". Ovid's myth is about Iphis, a girl raised as a boy by her mother, because her father threatened to kill her child at birth if she was a girl. She falls in love with Ianthe and, in order to marry her, she must be transformed into a boy by the Gods. In Ali Smith's contemporary version of the myth, the story is told by two sisters, Imogen and Anthea Gunn. They live in Inverness, in the house that belonged to their grandparents which had filled their childhood with stories both gender-bender ('Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says...'), and rebellious. Both sisters work at Pure, a multinational advertising agency intent on marketing water, 'the perfect commodity'. Anthea starts her metamorphosis when she meets Robin ('She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.') and falls in love. The changes in Imogen which by refusing to be just "empty clothes" finally rebels against the sexism and bullying of her work mates and also against the unprincipled corporate practices of Pure, lead her to find love. Ali Smith's prose is readable and funny but, at the same time, subtle and intelligent. The book challenges our ideas about gender and also addresses the issues of homophobia (the musings of Anthea when she is running are hilarious), sexism and misogyny. But the book is also about the ability to change and to come out into the whole world instead of being 'inside a tiny white painted rectangle about the size of a single space in a car park'. Anthea wonders 'Do myths spring fully formed from the imagination and the needs of a society?' and how they are created in modern societies - 'is advertising a new kind of myth-making?'-, but what she finally learns is that 'It's what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters.'

I genuinely love Ali smith's prose; I'll admit that right away. I fall in love with her enticing and exuberant language with each book she creates. In this slim, almost too-cutesy-seeming novel, Smith provides a lovely, lyrical love story that tackles issues from feminism to the age of global commerce to language to sexuality to myth and story-telling, to familial relations. Please, keep writing, Ali! If only to prove that words still matter!

"Now I'd become a walking fuse, like in that poem about the flower, and the force, and the green fuse the force drives through it; the force that blasts the roots of trees was blasting the roots of me, I was like a species that hadn't even realised it lived in a near-desert til one day its taproot hit water. Now I had taken a whole new shape. No, I had taken the shape I was always supposed to, the shape that let me hold my head high. Me, Anthea Gunn, head turned towards the sun" (p. 81). Acclaimed British novelist Ali Smith is best known for her 2001 novel Hotel World (2001) and for her 2005 Man Booker Prize finalist The Accidental, which won the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award. Smith is openly gay, and her writing is astonishing. As evident in her latest novel, Girl Meets Boy, Smith has a knack for quirky humor and engrossing wordplay. Her novel is based on the myth of Iphis (from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Iphis (aka Iphys) was the daughter of Telethusa and Ligdus. Upon learning that Telethusa was pregnant, Ligdus threatened to kill the child if it wasn't a boy. In her despair, Telethusa is visited by the Egyptian goddess Isis, who assures her that all will be well for her daughter. When Telethusa gives birth to Iphis, she conceals her daughter's sex from her husband and then raises the girl as a boy. Iphis falls in love with another girl, Ianthe, and prays to Juno to allow her to marry her beloved. When nothing happens, Telethusa prays to Isis to help her daughter. Iphis is then transformed into a man. Iphis and Ianthe marry, and their union is blessed by the gods (Juno, Venus, and Hymenaios, the god of marriage). (Ovid, Metamorphoses, IX, 666-797.) Smith references "Good old Ovid" as the source of her love storu (pp. 86-101), just before her rendering of one of the most poetic lesbian sex scenes in English literature (pp. 101-105). "I was a she was a he was a we were a girl and a girl and a boy and a boy, we were blades, were a knife that could cut through myth, were two knives thrown by a magician, were arrows fired by a god, we hit heart, we hit home, we were the tail of a fish were the reek of a cat were the beak of a bird were the feather that mastered gravity were high above every landscape then down deep in the purple haze of the heather were roamin in a gloamin in a brush unending Scottish piece of perfect jiggling reeling reel can we really keep this up? this fast? this high? this happy? round again? another notch higher? heuch! the perfect jigsaw fit into the curve of another as if a hill top into sky, was that a thistle? was I nothing but grass, a patch of coarse grasses? was that incredible colour coming out of me? the shining heads of--what? buttercups? because the scent of them, farmy and delicate, came into my head and out of my eyes, my ears, out of my mouth, out of my nose, I was scent that could see, I was eyes that could taste, I loved butter. I loved everything. Hold everything under my chin! I was all my open senses he

I love the patter, pattern and playfulness in the rhythmic language of this book. The story has a pointed moral purpose and I commend Smith for weaving so well her outward purpose into the most joyful and passionate prose I have come across in a long while. This book begs, howls, screams for reading out loud. Grab a dear lover or dear friend and speak the words to the wind or the fire and to each other and grow closer and more intimate than before. You will find tenderness and joy here. Do not miss it. Do not let this sparkling-wonderous moment pass you by. BT