Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner
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Book Reviews of Hotel Du Lac
Book Review: A meditation on the role of love in marriage (or, at least, upper-class British marriages of the 1980s)
Summary: 5 Stars
Edith Hope is a moderately successful English author of romance novels. But how does she handle love and marriage in her own life? About 39, she has never married, although for years she has been having a discreet affair with a married man. Finally she gives in to social pressures and accepts a proposal, but at the very last second she leaves the groom-to-be standing at the altar (actually, on the steps of the Registry Office). To give the dust a chance to settle after that social faux pas, she secludes herself at the Hotel du Lac on Lake Geneva. There she encounters a few other women guests, also bereft of men for one reason or another, and she has occasion to reflect on what sort of woman she is and wants to be. She also meets a man who leads her to re-evaluate her views about the role of love in marriage.
This is a bittersweet, world-weary contemporary romance. It is, in the end, rather bleak and depressing. The novel reminds me of the fiction of Henry James (in atmosphere and the attention to manners) and of "Excellent Women" by Barbara Pym. Indeed, there are at least two references to "excellent women" in HOTEL DU LAC, and Edith Hope might well be Mildred Lathbury a generation later. With regard to the slights and disappointments of life, both women had "learned to shield them, to hide them from sight, to keep them at bay." For Edith, like Mildred, "to exhibit my wounds would * * * denote an emotional incontinence of which I might later be ashamed." Very British . . . and touching.
The strength of the novel is the graceful and refined prose and the admirably controlled and confident narrative technique. Flashbacks are seamlessly interwoven into the tale and shifts in perspective are deftly managed. It is a true pleasure to read. Still, I am mildly surprised that it garnered the Booker Prize for Anita Brookner (in 1986), because it is not flashy, modern, or envelope-pushing. 4.5 stars, rounded up.
Book Review: A novel of extraordinary delicacy
Summary: 5 Stars
In her novel, Mrs Brookner portrays a middle-aged writer of romantic fiction, Edith Hope. People claim that there is a certain resemblance with Virginia Woolf in her features. At any rate her novels are published under the pen-name of Vanessa Wilde and they bear such titles as "The Sun at Midnight", "Beneath the Visiting Mood" or "The Stone and the Star". Edith doesn't seem to hold writing in high esteem. She describes this activity more like a compulsion: "she bent her head obediently to her daily task of fantasy and obfuscation", enjoying a rest "after her obscure and unnoticeable exertions". In fact she even considers reading as a kind of cure for the psychologically diseased: "Fiction, the time honoured resource of the ill-at-ease..."
After settling down at the Hotel du Lac - set in a small village on the Swiss shore of lake Geneva - Edith meets her extravagant fellow lodgers: Iris Pusey and her daughter Jennifer, Mme de Bonneuil and Monica accompanied by her insufferable dog Kiki. During her numerous discussions with these women, Edith starts reflecting on the life she has led so far and on love in general. The reader also learns about her past and her troubled relationship with her mother. And it is not before the end of the novel that we discover why Edith came to the Hotel du Lac, why she left London in such a haste and what exactly the "unfortunate lapse" was which brought her to her temporary exile in Switzerland.
Like one critic said about "Hotel du Lac": "Novels like Anita Brookner's are why we read novels".
Book Review: Brilliance before it's time
Summary: 5 Stars
It's the end of the season so the guests at Hotel Du Lac are sparse. Edith, a romance novel writer, has been shuffled off to Switzerland by well-meaning friends to readjust her priorities to better reflect theirs. Really, she has become an embarrassment to them and it's easier to just shift malleable Edith off to the continent. The well-heeled Mrs. Pusey and her daughter, Jennifer, are there to use Edith as an audience and sounding board for their shallow lives, shopping and posturing. Monica, who really only eats cake, gives her relief and a laugh and the lonely deaf woman, Mme Bonneuil saves her small but precious gift for last.
Philip Neville tells her she needs to stop worrying about the rest of the world and just do whatever she feels like doing.
It's really just the beginning of feminism, before it turned to fundamentalist overreaction. Brookner assails the women who consume men with their cult of themselves all the while prospecting for he who will best serve their purposes. Women who raise altars to themselves and the men who demand that women produce the lives and children they have been lead to expect.
But Edith writes, she earns her own money. She has a lovely little cottage and a garden to escape to with her tea after a day of writing. She serves her purpose in her small society, to amuse, divert, to relax.
Book Review: The subtleties of the discerning heart
Summary: 5 Stars
Anita Brookner is a writer of enormous intelligence and subtlety. She is a writer who chronicles the small motions of the heart in expectation and disappointment. She writes usually with a kind of fine irony and her characters rarely escape untouched by careful criticism. In this novel still thought to be her best Edith Hope the protagonist a romance- writer who has walked out of her own wedding and is carrying on a passionate( from her side) affair with a married man escapes to a Swiss vacation resort. There she encounters other lives caught in the desperations of love, and there too she comes to meet the one who will be something like her rescuer, the decent Neville who she will commit herself to a loveless marriage too. With Brookner the heart of the story is not in the major movements of the plot but with the line- by- line perceptions which mark out an extremely intelligent observer of the heart's minor motions. Disappointment and learning to live with a life far less than one has hoped are major Brookner themes. She gives the reader that consolation of knowing that a certain kind of quiet suffering is not theirs alone.
I myself have found that reading a few Brookner novels has been enough, but I know one faithful reader of Brookner who continues to see her as the best diagnostician of the ailing human heart writing novels today.
Book Review: A wonderful read
Summary: 5 Stars
A slow-moving, low-key narrative of a season in a woman's life packs a surprising punch. I have had this book for years and just never got around to reading it. Why, I do not know. I am very glad I finally read it!
Edith Hope is a quiet, late 30ish writer of romance novels who is spending some time at the Hotel Du Lac in Switzerland. She has been "banished" there after backing out of her wedding at the time of the ceremony and causing so much embarrassment to her friends, not to mention the expectant groom.
While at the hotel, she meets a number of women and the descriptions of their lives adds to the aimlessness and seeming futility of her existence. She writes to her secret lover, David, describing them and the life at the hotel and speaks of her love and passion for him. He, needless to say, is married and their relationship is sporadic and quite one-sided. Then, seemingly, rescue comes when a wealthy, successful man staying at the hotel, Philip Neville, proposes to her and offers her a very businesslike, loveless marriage.
Through these avenues, Edith comes to some profound understanding about not only her life but the lives and needs of women.
There are so many undercurrents in this story and the writing is marvelous, wry, witty and multi-layered.