The Accidental

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Starred Review. So sure-handed are Smith's overlapping descriptions of the same events from different viewpoints that her simple, disquieting story lifts into brilliance." - Publishers Weekly.

I associate this happy, whimsical music, arch in places, with the sound of antique English children’s literature. Perhaps it’s odd to find this old, golden register in the work of a contemporary author, who grew up in a working-class family in the Highland town of Inverness, who is gay, and who often writes about gender, sexuality, and politics. But Smith’s capacious art warmly embraces variety, and creates eccentric stylistic families out of disparate inheritances: “English” whimsy sits easily enough alongside “Scottish” postmodernism; the realistic premises of conventional bourgeois fiction (families on holiday, unfaithful spouses, unhappy children, difficult parents) are regularly disrupted by surreal, experimental, or anarchic elements (time travel, ghosts, digressions, adaptations of late Shakespearean romances, and, in “Winter,” apparitions such as a floating head and a piece of landscape that hangs over a dining table, visible only to one of the characters). Sometimes you finish an Ali Smith book unsure about the final meaning of this variety show but certain that you have been in the presence of an artist who rarely sounds like anyone else. a b Smith, Ali (2005). The Accidental. ISBN 978-0-241-14190-8 . Retrieved 19 April 2008. The Accidental. Like the musical notation with which the novel shares a name, the Buñuelian absurdity at the heart of The Accidental lifts the tale a step sharp from domestic realism (the discretions of the bourgeoisie indeed !). What's more, it demands that the reader make decisions." - Jessica Winter, The Village Voice My favorite character is of course Astrid. She is now one of the fictional characters that I will remember for a long time or maybe remember forever. Smith was able to beautifully capture the eccentricities and intensity of a 12-y/o lost character. The Smart family, composed of Michael, the father, Eve the mother, Magnus, the son and the daughter Astrid, is a typical Western dysfuntional family. In the beginning of the book, the young girl Astrid brings with her, anywhere she goes, a camera and she has this habit of capturing sunrises and sundowns. My take on this is that Astrid tries to filter what she sees through her camera because it is through the lens where she can figure out things better. It's kind of metaphor and I loved it.

The mysterious fifth character -- or fifth column -- is "Amber MacDonald" aka "Alhambra," (or, later, mysteriously, "Catherine Masson"). We meet her mainly through her increasingly outrageous, even criminal, encounters with each family member. The ironic tension becomes very uncomfortable, as it clear early on (but only to the reader) that she's a highly skilled con artist who regards Eve and Michael as disgustingly easy marks. She even claims to be descended directly from the MacDonalds of Glencoe** and quotes in Gaelic, then translates, a saying: "Be sure you know who you are letting into your home before you let them in" -- a warning the Smarts ignore. Even her names -- Amber (Yellow) and her birth name, Alhambra (Red), after an old local theatre where she was supposedly conceived, are warning lights. But all the hints Amber throws out go right over the self-absorbed parents' heads. What does The Accidental say about family life? In what ways are the Smarts both a typical and an atypical family? Ali Smith is the author of six works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World, which was short-listed for both the Orange and the Booker prizes in 2001 and won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002. Her story collections include Free Love, which won the Saltire Society Scottish First Award, a Scottish First Book Award, and a Scottish Arts Council Award, and The Whole Story and Other Stories. Born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1962, Smith now lives in Cambridge, England. Suggested Reading Amber—thirtysomething and barefoot—shows up at the door of the Norfolk cottage that the Smarts are renting for the summer. She talks her way in. She tells nothing but lies. She stays for dinner.

Amber is the central catalyst of the book (little portions between each section are devoted to her voice, or what is assumed to be her voice), the one trigger that sends the story and characters into strange spirals, while their mundane domestic dramas continue undisturbed. She steps into the novel as an unrestrained, truly free individual and compromises the stifling repression rippling at the heart of this typical family. Even better is the way that Astrid changes. Many child narrators are artificially fixed in an idealistic moment to teach us something about youth and innocence. Though the action of The Accidental spans only a few months, Smith manages to render a sense of learning and linguistic faddishness in the girl. When the novel begins, Astrid's favourite word is "substandard", but by the end it is in the process of being replaced by "preternaturally". She uses "ie" a lot at first, and then switches to "id est" once someone tells her that it comes from Latin.

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Why does Smith choose to end the novel with Eve’s journey to America? What is likely to happen in the future to the Smart family? About this Author Aus den wechselnden, mit großem Einfühlungsvermögen dargestellten Innenperspektiven der Smarts entwirft die Autorin dabei allmählich das Bild eines leeren Raums, in dem sich das soziale Ideal der Familie zu verflüchtigen scheint und sich als ähnlich untaugliches Wahrnehmungsmodell erweist wie die mutmaßlich sinnstiftenden Systeme, in denen die Figuren ihre individuellen Welten eingerichtet haben." - Thomas David, Die Zeit

Eve: deliberately blind-deaf-and-dumb? She is oblivious to her children's distress and ignores her husband's unfaithfulness.O.K., so she borrowed the plot, such as it is, from a Pasolini movie -- Teorema (1968), with an unforgettable Terence Stamp in the lead role -- and the novel is almost too cleverly constructed, too pleased with its own tidy symmetries. But those are the only quibbles I’ve come up with, so I’ll just blurt it out: Ali Smith’s The Accidental, which two weeks ago won Britain’s Whitbread Novel of the Year award, is a delightful book, a satire that’s playful but not cuddly, tart but not bitter, thoughtful but not heavy." - Adam Begley, The New York Observer Interspersed with the episodes on the family are segments told by someone who calls herself Alhambra, named after the movie theater where she was conceived. Her riffs on cinema history and the impact on our culture are marvelous. It seems likely this is Amber, based on what she says she gained from her parents: “ From my mother: grace under pressure; the uses of mystery; how to get what I want. From my father: how to disappear, how not to exist.” I enjoyed this more than There but for the and Autumn; less than How to be both. I'm fond of Smith's writing, but I can't seem to fall in love with any of her books quite as I would like to.