Ali Smith: 'There are two ways to read this novel, but you're stuck with it – you'll end up reading one of them'

The academic turned author talks to Alex Clark about modernism, imagination and why she could 

• Alex Clark - The Guardian, Saturday 6 September 2014

'I love language. And I also love butterflies, and cloud-shapes, and types of train' … Ali Smith. Photograph: Antonio Zazueta Olmos for the Guardian

Visit Ali Smith's terraced cottage in Cambridge and you'll quickly begin to suspect that you've stumbled into one of her fictions. For a start, you can't quite find it as you wander up and down the street, and it's only when you spot a discreet gap in the houses that you're on the right track. Suddenly, a tiny cul-de-sac is revealed, a row of diminutive dwellings on one side, their gardens of tumbling roses on the other. There is an enchanted air, a feeling of a secret world just off to the edge of the real one, out of ordinary time. And once Smith has ushered you inside, where stacks of books and magazines wobble precariously alongside rows of vinyl, and postcards and photographs are pinned to walls, you begin to realise that there is a distinct overlap between the author, her surroundings and her fantastical, expansive, time-slipping, language-juggling books.
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