Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner
|
List Price: Our Price: $5.65 You Save: $8.30 (59%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Hotel Du Lac
Book Review: Not bad, but don't rush out to buy this.
Summary: 3 Stars
I bought this book after reading several Amazon reviews; I was intrigued that the same book had generated both overwhelmingly positive and aggressively negative responses. Well... it didn't do much for me. I agree with the reviewers who say the characters are flat and one-dimensional (I didn't really care what became of them), and Brookner's prose can be long-winded at times. As a fan of contemporary British fiction, I can think of several authors whose novels I would recommend over this one: Hilary Mantel, Helen Dunmore, Kate Atkinson, Mary Wesley, Margaret Drabble, the list goes on. Hotel du Lac is not a terrible book, but don't make it a priority.Book Review: I read the book at the back of Hotel Du Lac
Summary: 3 Stars
All I can say is that the book is not a true image of the hotel nor the place, (Vevey Switzerland) itself. But this was passed as a fiction so scratch that out and give this award-winning novel a break. I just saw on Amazon that there's a used book for $0.47, go click on that and keep this book as part of your collection.
Could have been a 2-star, but I have a penchant for reading books such as Tojours Provence and Bella Tuscany in the exact places that they were described in the book. So sentimental me....huhuhu
Book Review: Slow moving read
Summary: 3 Stars
It was a bit of a disappointing read to me. Slow in places. Lacking in color. In the end I didn't feel that I really knew who Edith Hope was. Strange irony in her last name as there seemed to be very little hope in this book. Sadness prevails.Book Review: Anita Brookner's Hotel is Gray and Drab
Summary: 2 Stars
No better way to start a novel --Hotel du Lac-- than using color, but grey? Surely, that color is a dead giveaway that the novel will be about the grayness of life: "From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey."
Except for the abuse of the use of the preposition `as' in opening sentences, the prose is even, rhythmic, and in general well written; though some mannerisms --which should be set aside in benefit of the story-- mar the narration. And it had to be well written since the theme of the book is about the melancholy life of an unhappy writer and her writing, unhappy both in her ruminations of life and in her loveless life.
To expect that having an affair is a way of gaining sympathy for the protagonist is disingenuous. But that is what the novel is about. Edith Hope, the writer of romantic fiction, turns out to be a "grey" melancholy character that is inaptly surnamed Hope, for she has none.
With the Hotel du Lac (in Switzerland) as backdrop, Edith Hope observes the characters that populate the hotel in the after season period. In meeting an assortment of pathetic beings she finds little rest and solace in their companionship, for they all are pathetic souls; quite the contrary, they increase her own loneliness.
What gives the surreal tension to the writing is the narrator's obsession with the color grey in its different variations: oyster-coloured satin, grey solitude, the man in grey, oyster-coloured eyes, veal-coloured room, grey mist, measureless grey expanse, and other similar descriptions.
In the end, she writes a message announcing her return to London: "Coming home." But on second thought, and being a writer who respects words and veracity, she rewrites: "Returning."
Anita Brookner has been described as an heir of Jane Austen, and that she writes in the same style. Without a doubt Ms. Brookner is a fine writer, but the claims to resemblance to Jane Austen are not only exaggerated, but also ill-founded: Jane Austen would never have written about foreign pathetic characters as observed by a hopeless character.
The only writing guide I consult to write my articles is Mary Duffy' s Toolbox for Writers, which amazon.com sells.
Book Review: Apprentice work...
Summary: 2 Stars
Hotel du Lac, Brookner's fourth novel, reminds one very much of Henry James, Katherine Mansfield and, most of all, that mistress in ironic observation, Jane Austen. Her prose style could be a delight, and is at best refreshingly limpid.
Yet by the time I came to the end of this short novel, I had felt Brookner was writing a novel based on style with very little substance. The barren plot cringes, the characters are stock and two-dimensional, and the protagonist concerns herself with trivialities and broods and broods...about nothing really worth at all. The deus ex machina is perhaps the most unbelievable--a protagonist who falls into the same trap *twice* over the course of the book is simply not credible enough. In the end romance novelist Edith Hope elicits very little sympathy; whereas one comes out of an Austen or James novel feeling older and wiser, one feels here that Brookner is extending her tentacles very tentatively at something supposedly profound, without reaching it at all. One star for the style, and another for making me finish the book, which is quite a feat.