I read this book partly due my love of Ali Smith (based largely around her Seasonal Quartet) but also due to its setting in Norfolk (for interest the culmination of the Seasonal Quartet is also set in Norfolk – Smith herself living nearby in Cambridge, my University town, which also features in this novel). Reading Paulette Jiles' revenge western Chenneville, it's easy to remember she's a poet. She plays ... How is Amber so easily able to ingratiate herself with the Smarts? What makes her such a compelling person for all of them?

a b Schaub, Michael (8 January 2006). "Surprise visit upends a family's vacation". San Francisco Chronicle . Retrieved 18 April 2008. 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. The questions the novel raises are persistent and profound. Why has Amber appeared among the Smarts? Was it an accident that she showed up at their door, or did they unconsciously summon her? Is her affect on them catastrophic or ultimately healing? What is it that holds families together, and what tears them apart? The family goes on a short vacation, renting a holiday house. One evening Amber, a woman aged 30 and not related to the family, walks into the rental house and makes herself comfortable. Michel thinks Amber is Eve’s guest, Eve thinks Amber is one of Michael’s conquests. Amber has an affect on all four members of the household. An engaging, worthwhile read.She literally chances into their lives, with everyone believing she is there for a different reason -- Michael thinks she's there to interview Eva; Eva thinks she's one of his student-lovers, etc. Ali Smith is a Scottish author, born in Inverness in 1962. [5] She was a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow until she retired after contracting chronic fatigue syndrome, to concentrate on writing books. [6] Smith's first book, Free Love and Other Stories, was published in 1995 and praised by critics; it was awarded the Saltire First Book of the Year award. [5] Plot [ edit ] 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. Eve assumes she is one of Michael’s student conquests, and Michael assumes she is one of his wife’s feminist acolytes. Astrid thrives on the attention she pays her, and Magnus finds solace in her ready grasp of the hell of remorse he is in. Michael is inspired by her ignoring him and smitten into lust and love by her apparent innocence and goodness. Eve is gratified by her taming effects on her kids and challenged to prove her integrity in the face of being told privately by Amber that she is an expert fake. Is Amber a midwife for healthy development of each character or a malevolent, lying manipulator? These questions get more insistent when she destroys Astrid’s camera and encourages Magnus’ adolescent lusts. The changes in Michael and Eve evolve down strange pathways, a great satire for me who appreciates a humbling of academics prone to getting divorced from the realities of ordinary life.

She comes into the life of the Smart family one summer, and each part of the book is further divided into sections that focus on each of the four family-members: Eva and her second husband, Michael Smart, and her two children, Astrid and Magnus. Amber often tells the truth so directly that she is thought to be joking, as when she comes down to dinner with Magnus announcing that she found him in the bathroom trying to hang himself. Everyone laughs but in fact she is telling exactly what happened. What is the significance of this irony—that the truth, plainly stated, is impossible for the Smarts to believe? 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. Interesting too is the arrangement, the five points of view each of the beginning, middle, and end have some overlap -- and some gaps. How does Smith capture the angst of early adolescence so vividly in the character of Astrid? What kind of girl is she? What are her most engaging eccentricities? Why does she feel so casually hostile toward the rest of her family? Why is she so captivated by Amber?

Remembering Bergman’s films, Eve asks: “Did dark times naturally result in dark art?” [p. 178]. Do they? Is The Accidental itself a dark novel about a dark time? If so, how so? Astrid's mother, Eve, is supposed to be writing the next in her series of "Genuine Articles", books that relate the lives of people who died in the second world war, but then carry on as though they had lived - which enables Smith to make some nice jokes at the expense of the biography industry. Eve's husband, Michael, is a philandering university teacher of literature; her son Magnus, the least convincingly drawn person, thinks in mathematical terms and has done something terrible at school. 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. 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 stranger who arrives in mysterious circumstances and turns a household on its ear may be familiar literary trope, but Ali Smith does it with such panache and vivacity, the familiar becomes fresh and revelatory.

Each of these parts is preceded by a brief section from the accidental of the title, Alhambra/Amber. 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. A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.The Accidental is the bizarre story of a young woman who wanders into a family’s holiday home and insinuates her way into their lives. Each member of the family thinks she’s there because of one of the others, but in fact, she’s a stranger. Spectacular . . . Allusive, ambitious and formally acrobatic . . . Original, restless, formally and morally challenging, [Ali Smith] remains a writer who resists definition." - The Times Literary Supplement. Internal struggle/realization? - Yes Struggle over - actions leading to death of someone Is this an adult or child's book? - Adult or Young Adult Book As Amber insinuates herself into the family, the questions of who she is and how she’s come to be there drop away. Instead, dazzled by her seeming exoticism, the Smarts begin to examine the accidents of their lives through the searing lens of Amber’s perceptions. When Eve finally banishes her from the cottage, Amber disappears from their sight, but not—they discover when they return home to London—from their profoundly altered lives. Set in 2003, the novel consists of three parts: "The Beginning," "Middle" and "The End". Each part contains four separate narrations, one focusing on each member of the Smart family: Eve, the mother, Michael, her husband, Astrid (12) and Magnus (17), two children of Eve's from a previous marriage (to Adam Berenski). Opening and closing the novel, and between each part, we have four sections of first-person narration from 'Alhambra' – who we can assume is Amber, the Smarts' uninvited house-guest.