A review by chrisbiss
Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking by Han Smith

3.5

 
When I first saw the Goldsmiths Prize shortlist, Han Smith's Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking was the title that stood out to me as the one I most wanted to read. 
Now that I've read it I'm not sure how to write about it, exactly. I know that I liked it, and that it's written well, but finding a way to talk about what it is is eluding me. 

This is a book that I read slowly. Part of that is because it's only available in a physical edition, which limits the amount of time I'm able to give to it. I read a lot in bed at night with the lights off, or on the bike at the gym after a workout, and both of those scenarios require my Kindle. So I had less time to dedicate to this, but it's also a book that seems to resist being read quickly. Smith's writing often feels like a prose poem, especially when combined with the frequently very short vignette-like chapters, and I found myself pausing after each "Portrait" to reflect on what I was reading and to try and glean some meaning from it. 

Abigail Shinn, one of the judges of the Goldsmiths Prize, writes this about the novel: 

Composed as a series of portraits, some fragmentary, all multi-faceted and allusory, Smith’s novel is a hallucinatory window into what it means to excavate the past in a world committed to its erasure.

At once a poignant coming of age story and an exploration of how language is shaped by ideology, Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is tender and merciless in its slanting look at the history of state violence and its unacknowledged but profound effects on individuals and communities.

An important reminder that the stories we tell can serve as propaganda and as powerful works of resistance, Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking, demonstrates how the novel can reflect and resist the double speak of our own time.

The key word for me in this is "hallucinatory". Much of the prose here slips sideways into an ethereal, dreamlike quality. The old woman the main character - known to us only as "the almost daughter" - visits thinks of her as a "ghost of a ghost of a ghost of a ghost"; we see scenes in fragments divorced of geography and time; we're given barely anything of the setting, or the era, or the relationships we're exploring. This is a novel full of very deliberate holes, the vaguest web of meaning that we're asked to stitch together.
 
At the time that I write this I'm still chewing over this book and trying to figure out, in large part, what I actually read. I do know that I liked it and that it's worth reading, though, and I think this was a very worthy addition to the Goldsmiths shortlist.