Turrentine, Jeff (26 February 2006). "When a Stranger Calls". The Washington Post . Retrieved 19 April 2008. 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 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.

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. While the others' complicated lives involve so many lies, Amber refreshingly says and does as she pleases. What does The Accidental say about family life? In what ways are the Smarts both a typical and an atypical family? 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.” 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.Amber appears to bring catastrophe to the Smart family. In what ways could it be argued that she has been good for them? What do they discover about themselves because of her? Have the Smarts unconsciously drawn Amber to them? Written largely in stream-of-consciousness that captures the most subtle emotional fluctuations and self-deceptions, The Accidental is a bracingly original and deeply unsettling tour de force by one of Britain’s rising literary stars. Questions and Topics for Discussion a b Smith, Ali (2005). The Accidental. ISBN 978-0-241-14190-8 . Retrieved 19 April 2008. The Accidental. And what of that mysterious stranger? The enigmatic Amber arrives Chez Smart and moves in, yet no one in the family is quite up to admitting they have no idea who she is or how she found them. Her past feels irrelevant to the story, yet the stream-of-consciousness snippets indicate she was born in a movie theatre called Alhambra some three decades prior. She seems conjured out of legend, an imp, a sprite, beautiful and irreverent and frankly, rather mean-spirited and of questionable moral judgment. She drills under the skin of each family member, dragging them out of their emotional malaise and entrancing each before blowing the nuclear family to bits, figuratively speaking. Far be it from me, however, to give anything away. This is really hard book to rate. I really enjoyed the writing style and the way the story was told. Ali Smith’s writing style was a little hard to get into at first. She writes in a stream of consciousness style and doesn’t use and punctuation to denote speech. But once I was used to it, it was easy to read. I never got confused as to who was speaking.

Ratcliffe, Sophie (20 May 2005). "Life in sonnet form". The Times Literary Supplement . Retrieved 18 April 2008. Michael is a university lecturer in English literature and has regular affairs with his female students. Eva seems to be aware of this. 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. One thing I found odd was that “outsider character” Amber was an adult – and I think the subsequent implications for her relationship with Michael did not work well, with Michael’s chapters reading like a teenage fantasy. Smith is stronger I think when her outsider is a child – it is perhaps interesting that the Astrid characters are the strongest here. A flat-out triumph of structure, style, shifting narrative voices, rhythm and language. A pitch-perfect technical masterpiece. Split into three components—the beginning, the middle and the end—the story moves between four perspectives: daughter, son, father, mother. Each section describes various events around a holiday trip to Norwich and the arrival of Amber, a charismatic drifter who changes her behaviour to accommodate each person.

Slowly Amber changes each family member in a positive way but this is no cliched Benny and Joon story. Amber usually changes people by antagonising them (except for Magnus) and exposing their true selves. Towards the end Astrid is more aware of life, Magnus is filled with hope, Michael sees the emptiness of his life and Eve begins to be more genuine. There’s also the subplot about the history of cinema, this is presumably Amber’s personal story. A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. 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.

Smith was an English lecturer at Strathclyde University before falling ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year. She then became a full-time writer. Did you know? I can understand why The Accidental is getting a lot of noise. Its a very "writerly" book and very good in that sense. It's written in a stream of consciousness type style, with every chapter representing the internal thoughts of one of the four main characters - Astrid, Magnus, Eve or Michael. Eve is a writer, Astrid and Magnus are her children, and Michael her husband/their stepfather. Smith is especially good at writing the teenagers - it seems that she has absolutely captured the exploration and angst that adolescents go through. The parents are less interesting, because they seem more cliched. Michael is a professor who sleeps with all his students, Eve a writer who is unhappy with her childhood. Both are characters we have seen before (seriously, literary fiction would lead you to believe that every professor sleeps with his student, which really was not the case at either of the institutes of higher learning in which I attended). The children's voice was more fresh to me, and thus their chapters more interesting.This is a book for folks who have an appetite for literary experimentation. If you liked Ulysses, you will like this. If you like guessing where dialogue begins and thought ends, you will love this. As for me, I think that punctuation was invented for a reason. Call me pedestrian. I also like some literary experimentation, for example I loved Shadow Tag by Louise Erdich. But Erdich’s book drew me in inexorably and I watched in horror as a relationship imploded. It was a compelling and satisfying work and well worth putting the time into. This one was simply boring and annoying and it alienated me. Into this atomised family one day walks Amber, a thirtysomething blonde wastrel with no love of social niceties. She turns up on the doorstep claiming her car has broken down. Michael assumes she has come to interview Eve, while Eve assumes she is one of Michael's student mistresses; somehow Amber ends up staying with them in the rented cottage for several weeks. Everyone falls in love with Amber in a different way. But who is she, and what does she want? What effects does Smith create by telling the story through each family member’s point of view? How would the novel have been different if told through a single omniscient narrator? 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. After graduating from Aberdeen University, Smith went to Cambridge to study for her doctorate. Other jobs