The Accidental
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品牌: Ali Smith
基本信息出版社:Penguin Group(CA) (2006年4月6日)外文书名:意外平装:305页正文语种:英语ISBN:0141010398条形码:9780141010397商品尺寸:19.6 x 12.7 x 2.3 cm商品重量:227 g品牌:Penguin Books Canada, LimitedASIN:0141010398商品描述内容简介在线阅读本书
Barefoot, thirty-something Amber shows up at the door of a Norfolk cottage that the Smarts are renting for the summer, insinuating herself into their 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 the mother 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 Accidentalis a Joycean tour-de-force of literary improvisation that explores the nature of truth, the role of chance, and the transformative power of storytelling.--This text refers to theAudio CDedition.媒体推荐Amazon.com
Before writingThe Accidental, Ali Smith wroteHotel World, shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize, and several short story collections. Her work is absolutely original, with a trademark quirky style, with whole passages that seem to have been bound into the wrong book and occasional historical asides completely outside the narrative line. Don"t be fooled; with Smith, every word has a purpose.Amber is the catalyst who makes the novel happen. She appears on the doorstep of the Smart"s rented summer cottage in Norfolk, England, barefoot and unexpected. Eve Smart, a third-rate author suffering writer"s block, believes that she is a friend of her husband"s. Michael is a womanizing University professor, but he doesn"t usually drag his quarry home. He thinks that she must be a friend of Eve"s. Everyone is politely confused and Amber is invited to dinner. She is a consummate liar and manipulator who manages to seduce everyone in the family in some significant way.Magnus, Eve"s 17-year-old son from a former marriage and Astrid, her 12-year-old daughter, are easy prey. Magnus is in despair. He played a prank on a classmate and it went horribly wrong when she killed herself because of the humiliation it caused. He cannot shake the guilt and is about to hang himself from the shower rod when Amber walks into the bathroom, the perfect deus ex machina. She bathes him and takes him back downstairs, announcing that she found him trying to kill himself. Everyone titters. Could it be possible? This is a recurring question as Amber"s behavior becomes more and more outrageous. Is this really happening, or is it some family-wide delusion? To add to the mystery, there is a Rashomon-like character to the story in that the same events are recalled by the Smarts through their own filters.This life force who is Amber is finally thwarted when Eve, after a disturbing event, compels her to leave. The family is left to re-evaluate who they are post-Amber and to decide how to live with the changes she has brought about in them through this "accidental" encounter. This is a completely engrossing novel that raises as many questions as it answers.--Valerie Ryan--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.
From Publishers Weekly
Heather O"Neill plays Amber, a mysterious stranger who wangles her way into the lives of a vacationing English family spending the summer in a remote cottage. O"Neill reads with studious detachment and a persistent air of mischief, as if the entire story is a particularly juicy practical joke. Given Amber"s predilection for wreaking havoc in her new adopted family"s comfortably misguided lives, the emotion is supremely apropos. O"Neill is joined by a cast of performers, including Ruth Moore as the perpetually harried, perpetually preoccupied Eve, who spends all her time dreaming of the characters of the latest historical novel she"s writing, and Stina Nielsen as Astrid, a 12-year-old with a frightening imagination and a propensity for recording the world on her video camera. The bulk of the book, though, is read by O"Neill, who provides a suitably nuanced reading, at times placid, at times flashing an air of free-floating menace. It is her work, above all, that brings Smith"s novel to fully fleshed existence.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to theAudio CDedition.
FromThe New Yorker
Smith"s book, which has just won Britain"s Whitbread Novel Award, concerns an attractive stranger who shows up on the doorstep of an unhappy family and is unquestioningly taken in. The visitor, armed with a perfect combination of candor, free-spiritedness, and rough love, proceeds to manipulate each of her hosts. Just as abruptly, and, perhaps, predictably, she disappears. We never learn much about her—her only purpose, it seems, was to jolt the family members out of their respective messes—and her righteous self-assurance can get tiresome. But the novel is saved by its skillful and touching rendering of the mental state of each family member. Smith"s well-honed, even obsessive prose gives a feeling of eavesdropping on her characters" innermost thoughts.
Copyright © 2006The New Yorker--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.
From The Washington Post"s Book World/washingtonpost.com
"Id est is long for i.e. or rather i.e. is short for id est," explains 12-year-old Astrid Smart in Ali Smith"s spellbinding novel The Accidental, which won England"s Whitbread Award for best novel last month. Astrid is almost as fond of saying "id est" as she is of making mini-documentaries on her very expensive digital video camera, which she uses to record the goings-on at the not-quite-as-nice-as-it-was-billed summer house she"s sharing with her mother, brother and stepfather in Norfolk, in the rustic countryside north of London. As they all discover, you can take a vacation from your job, your school or your friends -- but you can"t take a vacation from your id, that murky province of the Freud-mapped psyche governed by primitive desires and unsavory impulses. The Smarts have big secrets. Astrid is being bullied at school, and her frustration is morphing into fury. Her teenage brother, Magnus, is so guilt-racked over the tragic result of a prank gone bad that he has convinced himself he is a monster and has privately condemned himself to death. Their stepfather, Michael, seems unaware that the role of the womanizing English professor is a hoary cliché and has thus cast himself in that role with abandon. And their mother, Eve, is still scratching at familial wounds inflicted during her childhood that have stunted her ability to connect with her husband and children. Into this psychological briar patch strolls Amber, a blonde, brazen Rorschach blot of a houseguest who will profoundly shake up each family member before wearing out her welcome. She arrives one day, unannounced and very much uninvited, and immediately makes herself at home. Michael assumes that she is a journalist there to interview Eve about her best-selling books. Astrid guesses that she is a friend of the family. Eve sullenly figures that she is just an especially nervy student (and lover) of Michael"s, though she is long past the point of feeling anything like jealousy. To be honest, Eve doesn"t feel much of anything these days, save the constant, low-grade panic that accompanies her writer"s block. When Amber meets Magnus, who has reached the end of his figurative rope and tied a literal one around his neck, her countenance -- "very beautiful, a little rough-looking, like a beautiful used girl off an internet site" -- is enough to lull him down from his noose. Presented with this new reason to live, he rebounds; before long, Amber is regularly escorting him into the village for mid-day assignations in an empty church. Astrid, too, becomes enchanted with this mysterious, magnetic stranger who takes her into town for adventures at the grocery store, where Amber earns the scrutiny of security guards with her odd behavior and tests the loyalty of her much younger friend by intentionally destroying her video camera. Turns out Amber doesn"t like to have her picture taken. Or is it that her picture can"t be taken? Amber is flippant, caustic and conniving, traits that make her recognizably, albeit unattractively, human. But throughout The Accidental, up until the very last words, Smith drops subtle and tantalizing hints that Amber may in fact be a projection of the Smarts" damaged psyches, a shared delusion whose purpose is to rattle them out of their torpor and compel them to act. For Magnus, a gawky math nerd, she clearly represents the promise of incipient sexuality. When Amber pays a scary visit to the bullying girls who have been tormenting poor Astrid at school, it leads ultimately to the rapprochement that Astrid seems incapable of effecting on her own. Michael, whose extracurricular activities with female students are beginning to attract attention, is stunned to discover that -- try as he might -- he cannot picture himself having sex with Amber. On a train ride, doing his best to think lascivious thoughts of her, he is capable only of imagining her sitting opposite him, "looking out of the train window. She was examining her nails. She was examining the ends of her hair. She was reading a book in a language he didn"t know." Despite the fact that she treats him with barely concealed contempt, or perhaps because of it, he has fallen deeply in love with Amber, and the introduction of true love in his life threatens to put an end to his Don Juan ways. Speaking of Don Juan, did I mention that a fair chunk of Michael"s interior monologue is written in ottava rima, the stanza used by Lord Byron in his epic poem about the legendary Spanish swordsman? (Other portions self-consciously evoke Shakespeare and e.e. cummings.) Smith"s flights of fancy would grate if she weren"t so nimble. But like the stream-of-consciousness she employs to describe each character"s peculiar relationship to Amber, these aren"t just literary gimmicks. When Michael slips into verse, Smith is revealing much more than her winning way with iambic pentameter. She"s showing us how Michael sees his own tawdry situation: as epic, meaningful, worthy of commemoration. To illustrate Eve"s style of writing -- she is famous for a series of biographies that imaginatively "extend" the lives of those who died before their time -- Smith has Eve tell the story of her life, and her own premature emotional death, using the same Q&A format as her books. In winning the prestigious Whitbread, the Scottish-born, 43-year-old Smith beat out the likes of Salman Rushdie and Nick Hornby. Good for the judges. Smith is a dazzling talent, fearlessly lassoing different styles and ideas and playfully manipulating them. Though The Accidental is not a conventionally funny novel, readers may find themselves laughing -- in surprise and delight -- at the way Smith takes a literary trope and riffs on it until she"s turned it inside out, the way a great jazz musician might. (When Amber obliquely tells the story of her childhood through the recitation of scenes from classic movies, the tour-de-force passage gets at the unique symbology of cinema in a way that eludes even our most erudite film critics.) Upon returning to London, the Smarts are presented with evidence of Amber"s existence -- which doesn"t make her presence in their lives any less spectral, however. Like a mesmerizing image caught on camera and projected onto a screen, she has been both real and not real at the same time. Her ghost continues to reside in each family member long after she has disappeared, i.e., she"ll be haunting them -- and readers -- for quite a while. Jeff Turrentine is a Washington Post staff writer.Reviewed by Jeff Turrentine
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.
FromBookmarks Magazine
Scottish writer Ali Smith has a good stiff breeze filling her writerly sails. Her novelHotel World(2001) was short-listed for the Booker Prize, as wasThe Accidental. Both books lost, but Smith did claim the prestigious 2005 Whitbread Prize forThe Accidental. Critics praise her handling of multiple points of view (the chapters are narrated by each of the characters) and are in awe of her ability to transform a simple story into something wholly engaging and thematically complex, with echoes of the war in Iraq. Amber, the catalyst of the book, comes under the most scrutiny: is she real or just a thinly veiled allegory? Most reviewers echo Stephanie Zacharek inNewsday: "Even if she’s just a metaphor, she’s more human than some of the ‘real’ characters you find in contemporary literary fiction."Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.
FromAudioFile
Author Ali Smith gets full use of a quintet of readers who perform their roles impeccably. Stina Nielsen, Jeff Woodman, Simon Prebble, and Ruth Moore take on the roles as members of the Smart family, whose lives are decimated when a mysterious young woman named Amber (played by Heather O"Neill) enters their home, seemingly by accident. The book has a nonlinear structure and an ambiguous ending. It retells the same incident from the points of view of the philandering father, the clueless mother, the guilt-ridden teenaged son, and the rebellious pre-teen daughter. Stina Nielsen deserves to be singled out for her portrayal of 12-year-old Astrid. She has just the right touches of arrogance and innocence to bring the girl to life. M.S. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine--Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine--This text refers to theAudio CDedition.
FromBooklist
British novelist and Booker Prize nominee Smith (Hotel World, 2001) renders acrobatic prose that seems in a perpetual state of acceleration. At the opening of her mesmerizing new novel, a barefoot, thirtysomething stranger named Amber abandons her broken-down car and arrives at the doorstep of Eve and Michael Smart, who are summering in Norfolk, England, with Eve"s children, 12-year-old Astrid and 17-year-old Magnus. Amber stays for dinner and quickly weaves her way into the Smarts" lives, befriending impressionable Astrid; seducing math-whiz Magnus (guilt-ridden over his unwitting role in the suicide of a fellow student); enchanting their haughty, adulterous stepfather, Michael; and swiftly sizing up their mother, Eve, a writer conflicted over the success of her hack novels. The novel is alternately narrated by each member of the Smart family, but it is candid Astrid who steals the show, wandering through town with digital camera in hand. Some readers may be frustrated by the transparency of Amber, who serves as little more than a catalyst, prompting dramatic changes in the lives of her "accidental" hosts.Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.
