The Accidental (32 page)
It’s real! It’s in Spain. Book early, it’s time-allocated. Three hundred and fifty people can see it every hour. Bits of it are more than a thousand years old. The film director Ray Harryhausen recorded a lot of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad in it because it looks like Old Baghdad. It was Moorish. It was Arab. It was Berber. It was Muslim. It got ruined. They restored it. It was very briefly Jewish. It was very briefly Gypsy. The Christians threw the Muslims out. The Catholics kept the palace but put a church on top of the mosque. Poets loved it. Writers loved it. Painters loved it. Nineteenth-century tourists loved it. They chipped bits off its walls and took some of it home with them. The writer John Ruskin said it was too un-Christian to be art. The designer and architect Owen Jones studied it, then built the Crystal Palace. The circus promoter P.T. Barnum built himself a mansion based on it. The mansion didn’t last. It burned down in the end. The people who built cinemas gave some cinemas its name. Like the one I was conceived in. Now we’re back at the beginning.
Heaven on earth. Alhambra.
It’s a top-of-the-range but still-affordable five-door seven-seater people-carrier with a 2.8 litre engine that can go from 0–62 in 9.9 seconds.
It’s a palace in the sun.
It’s a derelict old cinema packed with inflammable filmstock. Got a light? See? Careful. I’m everything you ever dreamed.
Ali Smith
The Accidental
Ali Smith is the author of six works of fiction, including the novel
Hotel World
, which was short-listed for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize in 2001 and won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002. Her story collections include
Free Love
, which won the Saltire First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award, and
The Whole Story and Other Stories
.
The Accidental
was short-listed for the Orange Prize, the Booker Prize, and the James Tate Black Memorial Prize, and won the Whitbread Award for Best Novel in 2005. Born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1962, Smith now lives in Cambridge, England.
by the same author
Free Love
Like Other stories and other stories
Hotel World
The whole story and other stories
Acclaim for Ali Smith’s
The Accidental
“Smith is a dazzling talent, fearlessly lassoing different styles and ideas and playfully manipulating them.”
—
The Washington Post
“Allusive, ambitious and formally acrobatic….
The Accidental
is a theatrical novel—one full of spectacular tricks…. Original, restless, formally and morally challenging, she remains a writer who resists definition.”
—
The Times Literary Supplement
(London)
“A brilliant work by a major literary talent…. Smith is agenius of voice.”
—
The Baltimore Sun
“Bold…hallucinatory…. Dazzling—as twisty and surprising as life itself.”
—
Elle
“Smith spins her symmetries and exercises a cool command of her structures…. Her touch is light, almost joyful, taking full advantage of that modern source of energy: surprise.”
—
The Plain Dealer
“[A] saucy novel…with terrific pizzazz.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Although the novel dazzles with the richness of language and ideas, it retains a delicious lightness. It is funny, sexy, poignant, surprising, playful.”
—
The Observer
(London)
“Brilliant…. Smith [pulls] off rotating viewpoints perfectly, without a hint of clumsiness or tentativeness.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
“Striking and thought-provoking…. Dizzying, gut-wrenching.…It seems, on occasion, to promise more, and something of a different order and magnitude, than a novel ought to.”
—
The Daily Telegraph
(London)
“Smith’s well-honed, even obsessive prose gives a feeling of eavesdropping on her characters’ innermost thoughts.”
—
The New Yorker
“Absorbing…. Told with sympathy and subtle humor…. Complex and highly compelling.”
—
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Outstanding…. [
The Accidental
] is as good as anyone who has been watching the progress of this talented author could possibly have hoped…. Exuberantly inventive…. Beautifully formed and astringently intelligent.”
—
The Sunday Times
(London)
“[A] tour de force…. [
The Accidental
] works so well because of whip-smart writing, characters who are fully drawn and Smith’s unblinking eye for moving those characters toward the light.”
—
The Seattle Times
“
The Accidental
is a shot across the bows, a clarion call, the first line of a revolutionary manifesto…. It is a kind of writing that is nothing short of an enormous vote of confidence in her readers’ imagination, an invitation to a true, joyous interaction…. Smith plays dizzying games with her story and language; she bends and buckles her prose, breathes fire into it, lets it cool, swirls it up in unimaginable shapes. This is writing as pure rapture, as giddy delight.”
—
The Times
(London)
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2007
Copyright © 2005 by Ali Smith
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Hamish Hamilton, the Penguin Group, London, in 2005, and subsequently in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Smith, Ali, [date]
The accidental / Ali Smith.
p. cm.
1. Strangers—Fiction. 2. Summer resorts—Fiction. 3. Norfolk (England)—Fiction. 4. Women biographers—Fiction. 5. Truthfulness and falsehood—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6069.M4212A64 2006 823'.914—dc22 2005051031
eISBN: 978-0-307-27975-0
v3.0