Amber arrives unannounced, and manages to change the life of this family forever, by always telling the truth, by speaking her own mind, and by entering the mind of each member of the family, the whole with disastrous consequences.Īmber's life seems to be governed by cinema: conceived in the Alhambra film theatre, after which she was named, the young woman sees everything as if it were a film, while treating the people she meets as characters in a film directed by her. Michael is a philandering university lecturer Eve is a writer who has found success with the series 'Genuine Articles', sort of 'autobiotruefictinterviews', books that relate the lives of people who died in WWII, but then carry on as though they had lived (a subject that allows Smith to make fun of the biography industry) their 17-year-old son Magnus is having troubles at school for having superimposed the head of a girl to a naked female body causing his school fellow to commit suicide their 12-year-old daughter Astrid is an introverted girl with the hobby of filming dawns and vandalism attacks. The Smarts are going through a deep crisis: though superficially they are happy, they are all depressed, each in their own way. It follows the vicissitudes of Amber, a young woman who arrives, out of the blue, in the middle of a family holiday, revolutioning it. This is the beginning of Ali Smith's third novel The Accidental. On the screen above them the film was Poor Cow, with Terence Stamp, an actor of such numinousness that my mother, young, chic, slender and imperious, and watching the film for the third time that week, had stood up, letting her seat thud up behind her, pushed past the legs of the people in her row and headed up the grubby aisle to the exit, through the curtain and out into the light.'

One short flight of stairs away, up behind the balding red velvet of the Balcony curtain, the usherette was yawning, dandling her off torch, leaning on her elbow above the rustlings and tonguings of the back row and picking at the wood of the partition, flicking little splinters of it at the small-town heads in the dark. 'My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town's only cinema.

Erasing clouds book review: ali smith, the accidental

The Accidental by Ali Smith