Customer Reviews

Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

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"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!

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

This is the second book i have read by Ali Smith. Girl Meets Boy is a modern tale gracefully intertwined with the ancient Greek myths. It is a somewhat short tale but Ali Smith shines as always in her verbal style. The writing is unique, the story is fresh and breaks the rigid gender boundaries of fiction.

Smith adds a fresh perspective using political and social witty sarcasm that evokes the rebellious era of the 60s all the while being set in the new millennium. It is definitely a good, light read.

I'm not familiar with Ovid's Metamorphoses,but no matter. This was still an enjoyable, if not weird, little book.

When the opening lines are 'Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says', you know this is no ordinary story. At the heart of it, minus all the mythical allusions and girl becomes boy becomes girl transformations, it's actually about finding your conscience and daring to love whoever you want to. There's this political slant and some really current references that makes the story relevant to modern life.

As always, Ali Smith writes with her distinctive dual-protagonist style that allows the reader to see both sides of the story convincingly. This works well for a story with two sisters as central characters who can't be more opposite from each other than night and day. If there's just one complaint from me, it's the overlong description of bliss and marriage, though always tastefully and poetically done.

Well, clearly this worked for some people. I'm amazed.

I thought it was bad, bad, bad - a thin, preeny, facile, substanceless book. Perhaps Canongate should seriously consider asking people less famous to write for this Myth series: some of them have been good (Winterson's is clever and stylish), but it's clearly tempting for a celebrity author just to doodle something over the dinner table. And the gender-switching Iphis-Ianthe story is so promising! A witty writer could have done so much with witty Ovid. This is as flat and predictable as shop-bottled water, and will last about as well.

The Ovid story is in "Metamorphoses", available in a very lively translation by Charles Martin. So much more fun than this ...