The Accidental

By: Ali Smith

Narrated by: Heather O'Neill, Stina Nielsen, Jeff Woodman, Simon Prebble, Ruth Moore

Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

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 Amber is a student her husband is sleeping with. Michael, an English professor, knows only that her car broke down. Daughter Astrid, age 12, thinks she's her mother's friend. Son Magnus, 17, thinks she's an angel.

Gradually, Amber insinuates herself into the family. Dazzled by her seeming exoticism, the Smarts begin to examine the accidents of their lives under the searing lens of Amber's perceptions. When Eve finally banishes her from the cottage, Amber disappears from their sight, but not, as they find when they return home to London, from their profoundly altered lives.

Fearlessly intelligent, disarmingly playful, The Accidental is a Joycean tour-de-force of literary improvisation that explores the nature of truth, the role of chance, and the transformative power of storytelling.

©2005 Ali Smith (P)2005 HighBridge Company

Critic reviews

• 2005 Man Booker Finalist, Fiction

"Spectacular....Allusive, ambitious and formally acrobatic....Original, restless, formally and morally challenging." (The Times Literary Supplement)
"An outstanding novel....Exuberantly inventive....Beautifully formed and astringently intelligent." (The Sunday Times [London])
"Her simple, disquieting story lifts into brilliance." (Publishers Weekly)
"Acrobatic prose that seem in a perpetual state of acceleration....Mesmerizing." (Booklist)

I do not recommend

I do not recommend the audiobook "The Accidental." I did not think it was engaging. It is written in a stream of consciousness style that I found boring. It might be a realistic portrayal of the random thoughts that people have, but I often found these thoughts uninteresting. I bought this book because I liked the plot summary and the critical reviews. After I was a couple of hours into it, I went back to re-read the reviews, and this time I clicked on the customer reviews and I saw that other listeners had reactions similar to mine.

However, professional reviewers praised it highly, which leads me to believe that I might be missing something, which is entirely possible. Maybe the characters' thoughts are not really random, but cleverly presented and tied together nicely. I stuck with it to the end to see if it would have a "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" style of ending, that almost makes it worthwhile, but it did not.

can't make heads or tails out of this

After an hour I was still confused by what this story was supposed to be about. didn't seem to relate to the summery!

Tedious

Trying to finish this audiobook was pure agony. Obviously I'm not seeing something the other reviewers are.

Runs out of steam

Found the first half funny, well written and very compelling. The four characters were brilliantly crafted and the 'wait for what's next' air of the story left me wanting more.
But like so many other stories, the revelation left me flat, and the story ran out of steam.

A decent listen with excellent prose and reading. Just not enough story for the length.

Brilliant, Hilarious, Subtle

If you could sum up The Accidental in three words, what would they be?

Clever, Entertaining and Memorable

What did you like best about this story?

Excellent writing, not for USA Today/Enquirer readers, as it's subtle and brilliant.

What about the narrators’s performance did you like?

Perfectly matched with the literature

Any additional comments?

This book is superb. Smith's writing is subtle, powerful, comedic, brilliant. I definitely recommend this book. Great literature.

boring

slow read, uninteresting story, waste of time, its two downloads and I barely got through the first one, skipe it.

Bloated

Long winded narrative prose does not even begin to describe the never ending, unconscious, bordering psychotic, ramblings that plague this novel. I half expected the poor actors to suffocate as they desperately tried to find a mark of punctuation resembling the completion of a thought. If you are able to bear or endure pain, difficulty, provocation, and annoyance with extreme calmness, you MIGHT be able to make it through this one.

At the end, one can reflect back and find the semblance of a story that is actually interesting. However, as stated earlier, the author stuffed this work with prose as one would fill a large empty box with packing material. If all of the excess prose was to be removed, one would find a story that should have been found in a novelette or as the “story of the week” in some literary magazine.

As a literary work, I found the story line of "The Accidental" extremely hard to follow and I often found myself struggling to understand what exactly was going on. This negated any possibility of actually enjoying the work.

Ali Smith has made the "never again" list.

eh?

I tried - I really did. But 2 1/2 hrs into it I give up. Is there a purpose to this thing? Perhaps abstract random prose is not entirely suitable to listening, and it might be ok to read it in print. I don't know. I'm going to go find something with a plot.

Easily forgettable

Very few books I've completed have very little redeeming value, this is one.

Not the best Story

I had problems really appreciating the purpose of the story. Took me back to high school days when we studied free-thought prose 'a rose, is a rose, is a rose,etc.' Didn't really get my attention or understanding even after it was all over.