The Accidental

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Winner of the Whitbread Award for best novel and a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, The Accidental is the virtuoso new novel by the singularly gifted Ali Smith. D)ynamic if flawed (.....) It's hard for readers to buy these larger dimensions to Amber, but once we accept that she is a sort of hokey deus ex machina figure -- introduced, in this case, not at the end of the story, but near the beginning -- then it's easy enough to focus on the Smarts and the ways in which their lives are altered by her arrival." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times 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

Derelict of parental and professional duty? Neither parent is engaged in their children's lives, to the children's detriment -- and both parents are engaged in unethical and legally questionable activities and in their respective work lives. Among much amusing word-play throughout the novel are the reactions to Amber's straight-faced truths, as when she leads Magnus down to dinner: "I found him in the bathroom trying to hang himself, she said. Everybody round the table laughed."). Ali Smith has yet to disappoint me and I’m so thrilled about that! The Accidental was an absolute joy to read, and with the exception of one tiny chapter (I had the same issue with Hotel World), it was perfection. The chapter in question was written in verse and I don’t get on with poetry. July 2018 Bumping this rating up to four stars because I am still thinking about it a month later. Sometimes it’s best to sit on your feelings for a bit. * After graduating from Aberdeen University, Smith went to Cambridge to study for her doctorate. Other jobsEve Smart, the author of a best-selling series of biographical reconstructions, thinks Amber is a student with whom her husband, Michael, is sleeping. Michael, an English professor, knows only that her car broke down. Daughter Astrid, age twelve, thinks she’s her mother’s friend. Son Magnus, age seventeen, thinks she’s an angel. Brilliant and engaging, frequently hilarious, exhilaratingly sharp-eyed . . . Smith makes one look at the world afresh Sunday Telegraph Still, Amber is only a catalyst: the mess that is the Smart family is, for the most part, their own doing. The story is told in the third person but with the focus changing from character to character. All the four characters get their turn (or, rather, multiple turns) and all four have things to reveal and things to hide and all four change during the course of the book.

The Accidental may claim the record for time spent in my reading queue - I bought it over five years ago, and finally got around to reading it this weekend. When I bought it, it had already generated quite a buzz - nominated (unsuccessfully) for the Booker prize, winning the Whitbread. I wasn't sure what to expect. The family is staying in a rented cottage in Norfolk for the summer. Eva is not happy, as she feels the cottage is of a poor standard. Michael is not happy, not just because he has to commute to London for his job (and for his sex), but also because people just do not go to Norfolk any more, they go to Suffolk. Astrid is not happy, as there is nothing to do in the village. Turrentine, Jeff (26 February 2006). "When a Stranger Calls". The Washington Post . Retrieved 19 April 2008. This story doesn't really (well, I think) do anything subversive with its subject matter, and maybe that's one way in which it actually is subversive, because you don't exactly expect Smith to let the plot run its course in the usual way. There's playful wit, language-bending and experimentation with form, and at least one Chekhov's gun that doesn't go off, but I was disappointed that the story was neither as disruptive as I wanted it to be nor as conclusive as I, then, hoped it would be. It's a revealing detail that the daughter Astrid's first impressions of Amber are the truthful ones, later you see different family members seeing her as "angelic," "beautiful," & so on.Eve’s head was full of sentences which she’d been practising overnight. Who is to say what authenticity is? Who is to say who owns imagination? Who is to say that my versions, my stories of these individuals’ afterlives, are less true than anyone else’s? She was going to answer every question with a question. This would let her answers seem open, let her seem willing to be discursive, at the same time as be rhetorically cunningly closed." I cannot believe this book is on the 1001 books list. Do the people who write the list not like people who read books anymore? Why would they punish us so? 1001 list writers, once again I question you. Why? 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

Smith's work has been the subject of critical acclaim from the publication of her first Saltire award-winning collection of stories, Free Love and Other Stories, in 1995. She has since been shortlisted for the Booker and the Orange prizes for both her second novel, Hotel World, and her third, The Accidental, for which she received the 2005 Whitbread novel award. Her fondness for the grandscale and her employment of shifting perspectives, formal risk-taking and rich language all mark Smith out as a "literary" writer, but her confident, inventive tales also display a humour which lightens the ambitious themes she covers. Her penchant for wordplay and the pleasure she takes in the outlandish and idiosyncratic have, however, given rise to the criticism that she can on occasion stray a little too far into the arch. Recommended works 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.So is, soon enough, Magnus (helped by the fact that she's willing to sexually initiate him -- and then practise with him, over and over).