Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner
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Book Reviews of Hotel Du Lac
Book Review: a gem
Summary: 5 Stars
Hotel du Lac is Anita Brookner at her best (recognizing that she's a writer who either draws you into her spell or doesn't.) In this novel she held me spellbound. A young woman has been sent by well-meaning friends to respectable Swiss lakeside hotel, elegant and restfully dull, to get over a disastrous love affair. But as in all of Anita Brookner's novels, there are deep layers to apparent dullness, and the traquillity of the hotel's atmosphere and the predictability of its guests is only apparent. The melancholy yet lovely coming of autumn on the shores of the lake is as much an integral part of the story as the heroine's lonely and reflective voice. The other guests at the hotel frame Edith's awareness and become major catalysts of the book's plot. The sadness of the events Edith reveals to the reader is always balanced by her deliciously honest irony toward herself--her awareness that she has chosen her destiny. The ending is remarkable.
I read Hotel du Lac when it was first published and again recently. It's even better on re-reading, richer and deeper, proving itself a contemporary classic. Anita Brookner has a voice that's unique, original, and, certainly in this book, perfect.
Book Review: Flawless
Summary: 5 Stars
Anita Brookner offers up a deft and moving work in her lyrical tale of loneliness, love, and human interaction. Edith Hope, a writer of romance novels, has been banished to an isolated hotel in Switzerland for reasons which are at first unclear. The slow unfolding of her story and the reasons behind her banishment kept me mesmerized, as Brookner weaves a delicately intoxicating spell in Edith's interactions with the often bizarre hotel guests, including the wealthy and selfish Mrs. Pusey and her over-shadowed daughter, Jennifer, whose brilliant vibrance at once attract and repels Edith. She also finds herself courted by the equally wealthy, charming, and unscrupulous Mr. Neville, who understands her and yet would use her to his advantage. In long walks, dilatory conversations, and her meetings with and reboundings on these people, Edith is revealed more and more to be a woman of incredible depth and intensity, facing a turning point in her life, and her story, told in Brookner's clear prose and spiced with subtle irony, humor, and tragedy, is like sinking luxuriously into cool water. A quietly vivid, modern masterpiece, and not to be missed.Book Review: A Woman's Illusions Revealed...
Summary: 5 Stars
Within the exquisitely refined prose of Hotel du Lac, British novelist Anita Brookner illuminates the quest of the human soul through the journey of one apparently meek, middle-aged writer of romance.Encouraged to take some time away in order to come to her senses after committing a rather glaring social faux pas (which just so happens to be a manifestation of genuine truth), Edith Hope sees little to be gained from her exile. Yet, whether enveloped within the solitude of her dreary room or lingering within the company of the hotel's curiously assembled guests, this unassuming heroine finds herself gleaning perspective into the nuances of romantic entanglements while, at the same time, acquiring heart-wrenching insight into the ways of the world.
The subtlety with which Brookner so gracefully propels the tale, without question, serves to intensify the profundity and depth of the work upon its conclusion. Indeed, a moment arrives in which the reader holds within her hands not merely an engaging work of contemporary fiction, but a mirror within which she may discover her own illusions revealed.
Book Review: read and re-read 5 times
Summary: 5 Stars
i will confess that for no reason apparent to me, i am hurt some people didn't like it much. perhaps i think it says something about my taste in books. in any case, i've read reviews of penelope fitzgerald's blue flower and thought the same thing then that i think when i read the reviews here--both are luminescent books and there is something ephemeral about they way they resonate for the people who love them that is muted and subterranean, but persistent and i can well understand that perhaps such subtlety-bordering-on-invisiblilty isn't for everyone. i often think of it as a peculiarly rational femininity. i have wondered for some time whether the two sets of reviewers are congruent; those that dislike this book disliked the blue flower as well and vice versa.Book Review: Emotion seethes beneath the surface of this quiet novel
Summary: 5 Stars
British author Anita Brookner poses many difficult questions in Hotel du Lac, not the least of which is what, really, can women expect to achieve in this world? This novel, which won the Booker in 1984, like her others, has a main character who is sensitive and solitary - not the stuff of which an adventure tale could be told. But at the book's end, a lot has happened. Her family fears Edith, a 39yo romance novelist, is headed for a nervous breakdown when she stands up her fiancé on their wedding day. They send her to Switzerland, where she spends her days working on her next book, observing other guests at the hotel on the lake, and communing with her married lover. Doesn't sound like much, does it? Suspend your disbelief and read it. It's excellent.