Hotel World
Registered by BookGroupMan of Criccieth, Wales United Kingdom on 10/26/2005
This Book is Currently in the Wild!
This Book is Currently in the Wild!
1 journaler for this copy...
99p with The Telegraph
(1/06/06)
Finished on New Year's Day, but I sneaked it into my 2005 reading list - how sad!
Review to follow prior to release
(1/06/06)
Finished on New Year's Day, but I sneaked it into my 2005 reading list - how sad!
Review to follow prior to release
For those of you who like to travel on a clearly way-marked & well tarmac-ed literary road, this is probably not the book for you! Ali Smith takes us on quite a bumpy off-road journey with jarring language, and confusing twists & turns...erm, I mean plot construction in my overstretched metaphor!
The blurb hints at some explanation of the death of a girl (Sara Wilby) in a characterless hotel chain dumb waiter. But the story doesn’t fully explain the accident, rather we get to hear – in separate but linked sections - the distinctive voices of Sara and 4 other females somehow connected with her, the eponymous ‘Global Hotel’, or both.
A couple of the stories are hard to follow, Sara’s sister for example ‘talks’ like a 15 year-old and like there are no pauses between sentences & going over the same things again & again & then jumping off in random directions…it’s all quite melancholy as most characters are sad, damaged, and/or clinically depressed. But you can’t deny that it’s a challenging ‘literary’ novel. Coincidentally I read last week about Ali Smith winning the Whitbread prize for best novel, and her personal history & relationships; there was some hint of psychological problems in the past and it mentioned her long term female partner. This makes some of the themes and the raw emotions a bit more understandable.
The blurb hints at some explanation of the death of a girl (Sara Wilby) in a characterless hotel chain dumb waiter. But the story doesn’t fully explain the accident, rather we get to hear – in separate but linked sections - the distinctive voices of Sara and 4 other females somehow connected with her, the eponymous ‘Global Hotel’, or both.
A couple of the stories are hard to follow, Sara’s sister for example ‘talks’ like a 15 year-old and like there are no pauses between sentences & going over the same things again & again & then jumping off in random directions…it’s all quite melancholy as most characters are sad, damaged, and/or clinically depressed. But you can’t deny that it’s a challenging ‘literary’ novel. Coincidentally I read last week about Ali Smith winning the Whitbread prize for best novel, and her personal history & relationships; there was some hint of psychological problems in the past and it mentioned her long term female partner. This makes some of the themes and the raw emotions a bit more understandable.
