Product Description
Shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize! Read by an ensemble cast A chance encounter forever alters a family’s understanding of itself. An exhilaratingly inventive, thought-provoking novel from the author of Hotel World. Barefoot, thirtysomething Amber shows up at the door of a Norfolk cottage that the Smarts are renting for the summer. Amber doesn’t know them, but she talks her way in, telling lies, and stays for dinner. Eve, an author, thinks Ambe… More >>
#1 by K. L. Cotugno on July 2, 2010 - 6:18 pm
There are so many pleasures to be found in this skillfully crafted book. Whether it is the characters’ names, their hidden perceptions, the setup, or the interior monologue of the catalyctic Amber, the only story told in first person. Initially, the four “Smarts” are so wrapped up in their individual dramas, that they barely intersect. Many issues of the day are addressed, some of which don’t become apparent until after the book has been closed. The reader keeps returning to passages, wondering how this or that was missed the first time around, but realizing that until the entire picture has been presented, it would be impossible to isolate a revelation. To say more would ruin new readers’ experience of taking this journey for themselves. It provided more fun than I’ve had in a long time with a book.
Rating: 5 / 5
#2 by Eric Anderson on July 2, 2010 - 8:30 pm
Surprise and chance have a way of intrusively wedging a new perspective into people’s lives. The four members of the Smart family seem in particular need of just such an unexpected element during their holiday in the Norfolk countryside. All of them are on the brink of a major crisis in their lives, but most of them are carefully avoiding the reality of their situations. At their idyllic getaway which the daughter Astrid views as an “unhygienic dump” they receive an unexpected visitor who brashly delivers a new point of view. From beginning, middle to end they are shaken into a new understanding of the world.
This is an intelligent, carefully structured novel that is both funny and illuminating. A chance trip to watch the movie Love Actually leads Magnus, the confused young son of the family to ruminate on Plato’s ideas about Belief and Illusion. Ali Smith is able to incorporate myth and philosophy into her wry look at ordinary modern life in a way that produces an entirely fresh way of seeing. From the minute details of life to the war in Iraq playing in the background, the methods we use to understand things are exposed and questioned. Whether seeing reality through the filter of Astrid’s camera lens or the mathematical equations of Magnus, the way we view the world is scrupulously examined. But the characters have a sense that truth is still hidden from them leading them to use new tools to examine it. Ali Smith bravely experiments with language and the form of the novel to re-view life. If her technique is viewed by some as placing literary panache over essential meaning then Smith seems to answer this through her character the novelist Eve who responds, “It’s not a gimmick. Every question has an answer.” Smith cleverly constructs different paths to bring us to new answers.
Rating: 5 / 5
#3 by Bookreporter.com on July 2, 2010 - 8:46 pm
Novelist Ali Smith’s books (HOTEL WORLD, THE ACCIDENTAL) have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and it is certainly no mystery as to why. Her writing is fresh, her character development is thorough and refreshingly consistent, and her motivation for writing clearly is not to prove a point, to push an overarching authorial voice, or to flaunt her obvious talent, but simply to allow her characters to tell a good story. Winner of the 2005 Whitbread Book Award, THE ACCIDENTAL is such an engrossing and contemplative novel that you’ll want to read it a second time in order to pick up what you might have missed the first go-round.
Although Smith’s stream-of-consciousness writing style takes a bit of getting used to, it is inevitably the glue that holds this fascinating book together. Split into three sections (the beginning, the middle and the end), the story slowly and deftly unfolds as the perspective switches from character to character, narrator to narrator. What we are left with at the novel’s conclusion is a patchworked, pieced-together glimpse into a broken down yet blazingly human family before, during and after the strange summer that permanently altered each member and changed their outlook on life (and each other) in mystifying ways.
Before “escaping” for a summer to a rented cottage in Norfolk, the Smarts (12-year-old Astrid, 17-year-old Magnus, and parents Eve and Michael) resemble a typical dysfunctional family. Astrid spends her days either walled up inside her imagination or behind a video camera filming other people’s “far more interesting” lives. Magnus sequesters himself in his room, refusing to bathe, eat, or speak to his family after a school prank he masterminded results in a classmate’s suicide. Michael sleeps with countless of his students at the university and ignores his family, and Eve halfheartedly whittles away at the writing block that is preventing her from beginning her next novel. Collectively, they are a pathetic sight to behold — incommunicative, worn-out, and apathetic about each other and their future.
Enter Amber MacDonald, the barefoot and unshaven thirty-something year-old stranger, who appears one day out-of-the-blue at the cottage and stays long enough to make a few unexpected — and frightfully lasting — impressions on each of them.
Despite the fact that she isn’t directly connected to the family (although each of them assumes she’s a friend, lover or colleague of the other), Amber manages to worm her way into the Smarts’ day-to-day routine.
“Amber is ruthless with Astrid. She is unbelievably rude to Michael. As if I give a monkey’s f— about what you think about books. She is bored silly by his mother, makes no attempt to hide it. Uh-huh. So: Astrid is besotted. Michael looks more determined every time. His mother gets keener to dredge up ‘interesting’ things to say. It is like a demonstration of magnetic gravity. It is like watching how the solar system works. As concerns Magnus himself, Amber = true. Amber = everything he didn’t even know he imagined possible for himself.”
Accidentally — or quite on purpose — her magnetic presence becomes a turning point for each of them and forces them to take control of their lives, presumably for the better.
In the end, Amber disappears from the scene (after being banished by Eve), and what follows in the last section (a plot twist; universal questions posed by each of the characters, including reflective musings on the nature of truth, the role of chance, and the importance of choice in life; and deliciously long and quiet yet immensely powerful sentences) is what makes the novel worth reading again and again. Indeed, Ali Smith’s THE ACCIDENTAL is truly worthy of the praise it has garnered thus far and is the mark of a writer with a rare gift of divine expression and an acute insight into the frailty of human existence.
— Reviewed by Alexis Burling
Rating: 5 / 5
#4 by mikka12 on July 2, 2010 - 9:39 pm
I have to say I’ve never written an even indifferent book review before, but in this case, I felt compelled. I forced myself to finish the book and though there were interesting tidbits (Magnus’ emotional turmoil), I would rate the reading experience as bordering on unpleasant. I found myself skimming entire pages at a time and becoming annoyed at the constant sentence fragments. I will admit that I went into the book anticipating a light read, and perhaps that is why I wasn’t fond of it. The writing style requires interpretation throughout. I will even grant the fact that I am not a literary critic and thus may not understand the complexities of the story. I will leave it at this: if you are looking for a page-turner or other easily engaging story, skip The Accidental.
Rating: 3 / 5
#5 by authentic_fraud on July 2, 2010 - 11:33 pm
While this book is not the best and most life defining I have ever read, I really did love it. I didn’t find the different voices used pretentious because they shed light on the character of the.. characters, as it were. For instance Michael talking in verse shows how he himself is pretentious and sees himself as more than he really is, as if his life is so ultimately important that sonnets and epic poems need to be written about him.
Astrid’s use of ‘i.e’ and ‘and’ was actually the thing that made me thing that this book could be something special. Because it IS exactly how I was when I was twelve, I remember saying things like that and it seemed like a very accurate observation. It shows her ‘teen angst’ mentality: everything is repetitive and needs explaining, and people are ‘weird’ or ‘wankstains’. Astrid’s voice was for me incredibly apt, and the fact that she didn’t even know what i.e. stood for until she was told by Amber was touching in a way because Astrid sees herself as so worldly and bored by everything.
I was disappointed by the chapters told from Amber’s point of view because we learnt next to nothing about her and the pop culture references largely left me confused because I’m too young to understand
But I want to find out about them now.
I wasn’t biased by reading rave reviews, as I just picked it up of a shelf in the library and thought ‘this looks ok’ and took it home after never having heard of it before. All I can say is that it got inside my head, and I think that speaks for itself.
Rating: 4 / 5