Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner
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Book Reviews of Hotel Du Lac
Book Review: Why the poor reviews?
Summary: 4 Stars
A beautifully written, realistic book, eschewing any triteness or literary cliches. Atmospheric to the max, with the description of the Swiss countryside almost a character. Intricate, thoughtful, never a wrong note. To me, a page-turner. Didn't want it to end.Book Review: wry, witty novel
Summary: 3 Stars
Edith Hope is a British spinster whose friends have packed her off to the Hotel Du Lac in Switzerland so that she can regroup after a horrible social disgrace, which is not immediately revealed to us. Ms Hope it turns out is a romance novelist, writing under a pseudonym. She spends her days at the Hotel working on her new novel, going for walks and taking tea with her colorful fellow guests and looking back at the chain of events which brought her to this place in her life.What develops is an extended meditation on the need for love and marriage and companionship. Ms Hope is all too passive in the face of these great issues. As she tells her agent:
''People love (the story of the tortoise and the hare), especially women. Now you will notice, Harold, that in my books it is the mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero, while the scornful temptress with whom he has had a stormy affair retreats baffled from the fray, never to return. The tortoise wins every time. This is a lie, of course. . . . In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Axiomatically. . . . Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game. The propaganda goes all the other way, but only because it is the tortoise who is in need of consolation. Like the meek who are going to inherit the earth.''
In the end, even if she doesn't necessarily get her man, she proves to be the tortoise emerging "victorious" once again.
This is a wry, witty novel, sort of a humorous update of an E.M. Forster tale. But it's an extremely slender story and the docility of it's central character is quite annoying. In the concluding scenes she is rescued by a sort of Deus Ex Machina twist rather than by any personal growth or enlightenment. But Ms Brookner is a terrific writer and the book is a brisk enjoyable read. I just find it hard to believe that this was the best British book of 1984.
Grade: C+
Book Review: Lacks machine guns, helicopters, and aliens
Summary: 3 Stars
Edith Hope, a moderately successful romance novelist and the mistress of David, is banished by her friends to the Hotel Du Lac, after deciding, on the day of the wedding, not to marry the momma's-boy Geoffrey. There, she meets and interacts with the elderly Mrs. Pusey and her childish and devoted daughter Jennifer, the elegant Monica, the deaf and wobbling Madame Bonneuil, and the wealthy and selfish Philip Neville. Through their company, Edith primarily addresses two questions: What kind of behavior most becomes a woman? What role should love have in a woman's life once she reaches a certain age?
HOTEL DU LAC is certainly a well written novel with the articulate Brookner clearly establishing all her female characters. But Philip Neville? I suppose it's not a spoiler to disclose that the coldly philosophical Neville only seems real in his relations with Jennifer.
HDL is a highly intelligent romance novel, albeit with an impossibly frail and mousey protagonist, who is, several times, described as looking like Virginia Wolfe. This novel is probably a guilty pleasure for smart and educated women but not much fun for guys like me, who prefer genre books featuring tough dames and crooked cops or brilliant soldiers outfoxing their ruthless and implacable enemies.
Rounded down to three stars.
Book Review: Strange book that seems to postulate that romance is nonsense
Summary: 3 Stars
This strange book is about a woman who commits a romantic transgression (she leaves her nice but boring beau at the altar in part because she is pining for her married lover) and is cast out by friends and neighbors. She lands at the Hotel du Lac, where, essentially, she is supposed to think about what she has done. Instead she meets characters of (muted) color, including a man who is rich and handsome enough and wants to marry her but doesn't love her. She is willing to settle, but then discovers him coming out of another guest's room -- and decides she isn't quite THAT willing to settle.
I sort of think the book is arguing that one lowers expectations, and that's fine -- that romance is nonsense. Whether or not I buy that, it seems a little lame as an artistic statement. And in fact, I don't think plot or moral (if you will) is the point of this book -- I think it's more about the observations -- gray bog on gray lake, elderly lady and spinster daughter in harem pants, elegant childless lady with accident-prone dog, et al.
I read a bunch of Brookner reviews in The Times, and suspect she continues to work through her own disappointments in her fiction. Can't decide if that makes her a desirable companion in a train or on a bar stool.
Book Review: Hotel du lack
Summary: 3 Stars
I ordered this book because it was the March selection for my book club. Ms. Brookner has a distinctive writing style and a rather clever sense of humour, but the story she tells is age-old and a bit worn -- despite the two major twists and turns she carefully builds up to. It's a story about a still-single, perhaps destined to be single forever, fiction writer who writes romance stories that are alluded to as being rather old-fashioned, just like their creator. Edith Hope is old-fashioned in the way that she cooks and waits upon her man, but he is married to another woman. Edith hopes (how clever Ms. Brookner) for something better, and the setting for this hope is the Hotel du Lac where other single women migrate before the bleak winter season settles into the Swiss landscape and their beings. This setting is where the age-old scenario of sarcastic, biting soundbites of cat fight and cutting glares is exchanged between women competing for the scarce male attention at the hotel. Even with Ms. Brookner's writing flair and unexpected turns in the story line, it lacks the oomph to make it anything more than diverting read. Actually, the book club discussion was much better than the book itself.