This story collection—Ali Smith’s first published book—started brilliantly with “Free Love” which felt like an eighteen-year-old girl you know simply telling you about her first sexual experience, with a prostitute in Amsterdam. The girl had been aimlessly biking around the city and found herself in the red-light district, taken in by a prostitute’s sign that read, LOVE FOR MEN ALSO WOMEN. The story is all extremely straight forward and unguarded.

“Then she did this thing, she put my hand to her mouth and put her tongue between my fingers at the place where my fingers meet my hand, and she pushed it in, going along between each. I think my head almost blew off just at her doing that.”
Many times, as I was reading, it was if it was just happening, and I wasn’t being pulled out of that story by anything that didn’t ring true. It was like someone’s personal story or memory being shared. How a short story can deeply imprint on your mind in just a few pages (nine pages here), is why I continue searching for short stories as golden as this one.

I find I will read her stories in their entirety, find segments that feel strikingly real and relatable, but still sometimes by the end of a story it won’t always have jelled into something that will leave me content. Yet, she will continue to blow me away every few pages with those segments and lines, like the following.

“A Quick One” had the following section of remembrance that felt so immediate and true.
“The woman who served me the coffee is clearing the table next to mine, and she’s saying something to me. I tell her I’m sorry and ask what it was she said again. I was miles away, actual years away now, running old footage in my head where you’re looking at me and I’m looking at you in broad daylight, and it’s just the moment before your arms come up and round and mine drop helpless by my side and your mouth is on mine for the first time ever there on the pavement right in the middle of people passing and staring …”

In the story, “To the Cinema,” it had a few lines that reminded me of the intense longing I always felt for my wife, a longing that has changed, but has remained constantly with me every day since she died.
“I am in love with the girl who tears the tickets at the door of the cinema on Sunday mornings. I love her. I love her desperately. I have never been so desperately in love.”
“Now that it’s summer she wears open-topped shirts and I’m close enough to see her collarbone. The hollow of it is one of the places I think about touching.”

The following line from “Scary” was brilliant, and it seemed a much loftier way of expressing oneself than my old standby of “I just didn’t get it.”
“Because when I see one of his films, when I’m sitting there in the cinema watching him in action, even when I’m watching him on the small screen, I get this feeling that I just don’t have enough senses to cope with what I’m being given.”

Forgive me for my laziness of quoting so much from her work, but these are some of the passages that remain in my head from these stories. Despite not every story impressing me beyond measure, it was a pleasure to live between these covers. ( )

"Then she pushed the board right up and wrote in large letters, bangles jangling in the silence, the words Look Upon The World With Love. Then she sat down at the table."

Free Love is an early collection of Ali Smith's short stories. it was published in 1995 and contains the following:

Free love*
A story of folding and unfolding
Text for the day*
A quick one*
Jenny Robertson your friend is not coming
To the cinema
The touching of wood*
Cold iron
College
Scary
The unthinkable happens to people every day
The world with love*

I marked my personal favourites (*) but unlike other collections there weren't as many stories in this one that have stuck with me.
Even though Free Love is an early collection, there is visible brilliance in these stories. It is just that they are not moving with the same momentum or creating the same level of impact as some of the later stories. And yet, I cannot help but feel that some of the stories are more personal to the author than her later work. ( )

I read Ali Smith’s latest novel, There but for the a while back and loved it lots (in fact it was my favourite new release in 2011), so now I’m going to read the rest of her works, if possible in chronological order (because I am that way), starting with her first collection of stories.

Free Love and Other Stories is separated from There but for the by fifteen years and several novels and other story collections, and while the difference is quite noticeable, Ali Smith’s first collection already showcases many of her talents, in particular her love for slightly off-beat characters and her multi-hued, scintillating prose. The stories here are still a bit rough around the edges, though, and there is no single one that pulls all of traits of her writing together – they’re still spread out over the individual stories which makes for a somewhat uneven collection. But even so this is a highly enjoyable read, not just from a teleological perspective of how good a writer the author of these stories will eventually become, but very much in and for itself.

Weirdly, and very unexpectedly, I was being reminded a lot of Austrian writer Peter Handke while reading Free Love and Other Stories. I never read Handke in English translation, nor Ali Smith in German, so it is possible that this is just a misguided quirk of my imagination; on the other hand, both authors do seem to share a love of nature, of literature, of popular culture, and their description of those can at times be achingly beautiful, also they are both very versatile prose stylists. What Ali Smith completely lacks is Handke’s occasional preachiness, her writerly reaction to things she dislikes in contemporary society seem more inclined towards scathing satire – as evidenced in this volume by “Scary” which is indeed almost a horror story in its depiction of a creepy case of celebrity idolatry.

Generally, these stories tend to be more straightforwardly realistic than There but for the is, some of them even have a “slice of life” feel to them (although those were generally those I thought the weakest of the lot). This might of course be owing to the short form, I assume I will find out when I read her other story collections.

My favourites in this collection are the title story “First Love” (a sweet but never saccharine narrative about first love and first sex), “College” (a moving story about a girl coping with the loss of her sister) and “The world with love” (which is really about a lot of things, first love manqué, remembrance, words and language. It also features the wonderful phrase “the words look upon the world with love” which again made me think of Peter Handke, but is also very Ali Smith because this is precisely what she achieves in her best moments (even if those are sad or melancholy), and she makes the reader share that love, and love the words back).

But the highlight of this collection is for me “Text for the Day”. It has a premise that loosely resembles There but for the – someone behaves in an eccentric, inexplicable and unexplained manner, and then is viewed mostly from several outside perspectives. The story does something entirely different with this set-up than the later novel, and is a fascinating, highly intelligent as well as very touching meditation on books and literature and what they mean in today’s world. It also has what is likely my favourite variation on the ending of Joyce’s “The Dead” – replacing parochial Ireland with the whole wide world, turning the snow into leaves torn from books, and thus replacing the sheer whiteness of the snow that is both innocence and winding sheet in Joyce with the inscribed whiteness of the written word, dead leaves that have their own kind of innocence.

She writes well. Smith's style is an odd, matter-of-fact mixture of deliberate and provocative, a lyrical style combined with a great economy of events. In other words, nothing much happens. It's well-written, but in the strictly technical sense; the sentences are nicely constructed, the sentences are pretty, but there's nothing in them, no plot, no characters to care particularly about. And it's a great shame, because her later writing, Girl Meets Boy in particular, knocks it out of the park with that beautiful stylistic ease coupled with a deep heart beneath it. This first collection shows the beginnings of that, but only the start.

There are, however, two really good stories here: "Free Love", a lovely tale of a teenager finding her first love on a trip to Amsterdam, and "The World With Love", a funny, lovely little meditation on some of the same themes. But the other stories are perhaps not worth the price of admission.