Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner
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Book Reviews of Hotel Du Lac
Book Review: A so-so book about a bourgeois writer.
Summary: 2 Stars
An english writer of romance novels takes an excursion to a Swiss Hotel in order to "settle down" after committing an unspeakably embarrassing act back home. The characters of the novel are the people she meets at the hotel. Much is said about clothing, manners, and other bourgeois topics. Each character, except for our mediating exiled main character, is essentially a flat character that promotes a certain way of life - one a free-lover, another a chronic shopper, etc. This book about ideas is mildly interesting, but fails to achieve a structural beauty which, in my mind, makes a great bookBook Review: Nothin' happenin' at the Hotel du Lac
Summary: 2 Stars
This is yet another excercise in semi-autobiographical snoring by an otherwise capable writer.Why do they DO this? Yeah, yeah, the writer's life is a lonely one, full of self-doubt, sackcloth and ashes.
Our hero, Edith, is in a self-imposed exile at some stuffy old hotel, doing penance for an errant love affair. She takes long walks, broods, takes more long walks, broods some more. Meanwhile, the only diversion for the hapless reader is a collection of societal parasites killing time at the same hotel.
Give this one a wide berth.
Book Review: Boring, more boring, most boring
Summary: 2 Stars
This is the most painfully boring book I have ever read. I grant that it is well written but it makes my teeth ache, it is so boring. I cannot believe the praise plus the Booker prize, but trust me, it is beyond any interest that anybody could have.Book Review: Insipid Love
Summary: 1 Stars
The plot is unconvincing and lacking in depth. The heroine, Edith Hope, takes a break in a respectable lakeside Swiss hotel, escaping for a while from the immediate consequences of a social indiscretion which she recently committed at home in England. The story concerns her relationships with people who are only acquaintances: her fellow guests in the Hotel du Lac and at home her neighbour and her housekeeper. In often flowery vocabulary, we are introduced to these acquaintances and their foibles: people who have unhealthy relationships with their mothers, daughters, dogs, food and money. The heroine's relationships with these acquaintances amount to little more than disparate and somewhat trivial ancedotes, which are unsatisfactory in the sense that they are peripheral or even irrelevant to the main theme, the true love of the heroine. Her character is languid. It is hard to believe that anyone (even the heroine, who is a writer of romantic fiction) could have mere acquaintances talk them into marriage with a man acknowledged from the outset to be a mother centered bore, while subsequently considering marrying another where both acknowledge from the outset that they do not love each other. Lost in these unlikely banalities is the potential story of her love for the man of whom she is mistress. Ironically, the indiscretion, for which the heroine is banished to the Hotel du Lac, is perhaps her only principled and courageous act.Book Review: Hotel du Lack!
Summary: 1 Stars
The anti-heroine of the book, Edith, describes her hotel room as drab. She might as well have been describing the whole novel. There are no redeeming qualities here. There is not a single lovable character in the entire story. These are our choices: Mrs. Pusey and her daughter, both of them so divine that probably do not need to ever go to the bathroom, Monica and her obnoxious dog, the caricature of Mme. de Bonneuil, the hotelier and his airs of grandeur, and slimy Mr. Neville. We also hear about Penelope, who happens to be Edith's neighbor and best friend, and we can only feel sorry for Edith. Of course, that sorrow lasts for about 2 seconds, because Edith is a vocational doormat. The descriptions of place are stuffy, and the sky is gray all the time! The ending is depressing, because nothing happens to Edith. She does not become a better, stronger person after her vacation. She stays the same way, being a passive, boring pushover. What I want to know is what the judges of the Booker prize were thinking! Maybe the competition that year was even more terrible.