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| The Accidental | 
 enlarge | Author: Ali Smith
Publisher: Penguin
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £0.01
You Save: £7.98 (100%)
New (49) Collectible (7) from £0.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  69 reviews
Sales Rank: 6770
Media: Paperback
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0141010398
EAN: 9780141010397
ASIN: 0141010398
Publication Date: April 6, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Penguin; 2006; 0.87 x 7.72 x 5.04 Inches; Paperback; 320 Pages
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| Customer Reviews: Read 64 more reviews...
plot borrowed from 1968 film! November 7, 2008
No-one has remarked on the enormous resemblances between the plot of this book and Pasolini's 1968 film 'Teorema', in which a beautiful young man infiltrates a wealthy family, makes everyone fall in love with him, and the film ends with the father of the family stripping off at a train station and apparently leaving all his worldly goods behind.
This gives the beginning of the book, and the reference to 1968, a new meaning.
 crackling, witty writing with a sense of many layers - worth re-reading October 22, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
An `accidental' is an occasional musical note outside the key signature of a piece and also a migrating bird blown way off its normal route and into a strange new land. The `accidental' in this novel is Amber, a 30-something, hippy-ish stranger who arrives at the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart Family and insinuates herself into the lives of Astrid (aged 12), Magnus (aged 16), their mother Eve, and step-father Michael. Amber is an unusual visitor, an exotic, but very much an assured presence who proceeds to disrupt, challenge and infatuate each of them.
This book has acquired something of a reputation in various quarters on account of its playful and experimental style. Some of the angrily critical readers' reviews on Amazon clearly think this too clever by half but I found the book to be witty, light of touch, and with a sympathetic insight into each of her characters. Astrid - `two vowels short of an asteroid' - stole the show for me as a precocious, bored and sometimes irritating young girl on the edge of her teens. Ali Smith, in my view, manages brilliantly the complex and unusual challenge of writing in the third person whilst giving voice to each member of the family in turn, so that the prose itself mirrors and gives insight into the thought patterns of each.
Another aspect of the book that seemed to stimulate the bile of some of the Amazon reviewers concerned the middle-class, self-absorbed, Islington-based Michael and Eve. The former is a philandering Eng Lit academic who seduces a string of his female undergraduate students, pretentious at times but also struggling to maintain his faith in, and the good name of, literature. Eve is a moderately successful author engaged in an ethically dubious series of `biographies' in which she has appropriated the lives of people who have died prematurely by inventing a second half of their lives as they might have developed had they lived.
The novel touches, very gently, the events of our time whilst also joking and teasing its way through the parochial concerns of this family stuck at a distance from each other - until Amber arrives - in a holiday home that has fallen far short of their expectations. Whether or not they elicit a reader's sympathies - in that we actually aspire to be like them or could enjoy or tolerate their company - seems beside the point. We have all come from some family arrangement that has taught us implicit lessons about belonging, insecurity, loyalty and abandonment, by fleeting nuance or deliberate act, and many of us will make our own adult contributions to another. Smith's characters, for me, captured significant aspects of the texture of family life, sympathetically, critically, and in prose that bubbled off the page.
In summary, I found this book such good fun - crackling, witty writing with a sense of many layers - and worth re-reading. I'm giving it 4 rather than 5 stars only because my previous two reviews to which I gave the maximum rating were concerned with huge historical events (WW2 - `The Book Thief' and the Biafran War - `Half of a Yellow Sun') and hence seem more 'deserving' of the full 5.
I look forward to reading more of Ali Smith's work.
 Oh dear August 29, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Having read a few excellent reviews of this book on Amazon I decided to give it a try. Only when I reached the last page did I realise that it's by the same author as Hotel World. If I had realised that I would never have tried this book at all.
It's true that some of the prose is passably good - but that's as far as it goes. There is a lot of rhetorical discussion about cliches. However,that's exactly what the characters are in this story. There isn't an ounce of credible characterisation of any of the main characters. They are all totally two-dimensional characters - the philandering lecturer; Bisto Mum in a mid-life crisis; Adrian Mole with a guilty conscience etc.
I'm personally amazed that this book has been so highly praised not just on Amazon, but in general.
tedious July 21, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Oh dear, I loved the idea of this book, it promised a thought provoking, interesting read and it turned out to be the opposite. It tries to be clever with an immediate but bizarre narrative which doesn't allow the characters to flesh out. Their thoughts just spill out haphazardly across the page and frequently lead the reader nowhere. It's like a butterfly flitting from one thought to the next and although I'm well aware that many of us have minds that work just that way it proves tedious to read someone else's. If I could write down every thought I had during the day would anyone want to read it? If the answer is yes then you may enjoy this book but I suspect the vast majority would answer no and this majority should steer clear.
 A very rewarding book - more truth with fewer facts January 21, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
You do not have to be clever or well read to enjoy this book! But perhaps you do have to be perceptive. What a fantastic book. I found it got inside me and stayed in parts of my mind without my permission. A beautifully written work that has more resonance than the story would appear to offer. Ali Smith effortlessly conveys her characterisation through the eyes of her subjects and their thoughts and observations. Not a book for people who like stories to be made up of events or facts which are revealed sequentially. "The Accidental" is more complex and more perplexing. It comes at you like life. It is bewildering at first and more true than other books I have read. I found reading the book exciting and liberating - as if I had shared the experiences.
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