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Loading... The Glass Hotel: A novel (edition 2021)by Emily St. John Mandel (Author)
Work InformationThe Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
  
No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) RaynaPolsky | Apr 23, 2024 |  Vincent, the closest here to a main character, moves from poverty into the “kingdom of money”, in which one city or country looks much like another because the wealth creates a uniform appearance. She moves from a life on land to a life on sea, as a cook on one of those massive shipping vessels, touching land only every nine months. She moves from life to a ghostly world, appearing to her brother thousands of miles away, slipping easily away. Jonathan Alkaitis hires Vincent to play his wife. He runs a Madoff style Ponzi scheme. Finally arrested and jailed when it collapses, he moves between prison and a “counterlife” in which he escaped to Dubai before discovery. This counterlife, as well as a ghostly life in which some of his dead defrauded investors appear to him in the prison yard, increasingly take over his reality from the “real” one of his prison cell. Leon Prevant, shipping executive and pandemic flu victim in Station Eleven, becomes in the parallel universe of The Glass Hotel, Leon Prevant, shipping executive and defrauded investor. In one version of reality he dies in a pandemic, in another, the pandemic never happens. In one version of reality he never meets Jonathan Alkaitis, in another, he gives Alkaitis his life savings and spends his retirement years in an RV working odd menial jobs, discovering the “shadow country” he only glimpsed out of the corner of his eye as a corporate executive, always looking away. It goes further - one of Alkaitis’ assistants thinks about fleeing but doesn’t, while another does and creates an alternate life in Mexico under an alternate name. Why did one of them flee and one stay to accept his fate? Or better said, one of his possible fates, instead of another? Many different kinds of lives are possible for us, and the boundaries between them may be thinner than we think. Just look. (  ) lelandleslie | Feb 24, 2024 | Such a strange and dreamy book. I lost steam in the middle and turned my attention elsewhere but when I returned I zoomed through and that is giving me pause when it comes to the ratings. I had a hard time connecting the dots at first and was waiting for the true plot to emerge but eventually I realized that this wasn’t really about the plot so much as it was about atmosphere and feelings. When I finished I immediately returned to the beginning a reread some pages and that wrapped things up nicely for me. Looking forward to watching a recorded session with the author from when she did a virtual event with my local bookstore. Purchased because I really enjoyed Station Eleven. ( ) hmonkeyreads | Jan 25, 2024 | ) fmclellan | Jan 23, 2024 |  ) technodiabla | Jan 7, 2024 |
It’s a beguiling conceit: the global financial crisis as a ghost story. As one of Alkaitis’s employees reflects of a swindled investor: “It wasn’t that she was about to lose everything, it was that she had already lost everything and just didn’t know it yet.” But Mandel’s abiding literary fascination is even more elemental: isn’t every moment – coiled with possibilities – its own ghost story? Isn’t every life a counterlife?... All contemporary novels are now pre-pandemic novels – Covid-19 has scored a line across our culture – but what Mandel captures is the last blissful gasp of complacency, a knowing portrait of the end of unknowing. It’s the world we inhabited mere weeks ago, and it still feels so tantalisingly close; our ache for it still too raw to be described as nostalgia. “Do you find yourself sort of secretly hoping that civilisation collapses ... Just so that something will happen?” a friend asks Vincent. Oh, for the freedom of that kind of reckless yearning. The Glass Hotel isn't dystopian fiction; rather it's "straight" literary fiction, gorgeous and haunting, about the porous boundaries between past and present, the rich and the poor, and the realms of the living and the dead.... This all-encompassing awareness of the mutability of life grows more pronounced as The Glass Hotel reaches its eerie sea change of an ending. In dramatizing so ingeniously how precarious and changeable everything is, Mandel's novel is topical in a way she couldn't have foreseen when she was writing it. The question of what people keep when they lose everything clearly intrigues Mandel.... By some miracle, although it’s hard to determine what it’s about, The Glass Hotel is never dull. The pleasure, which in the case of The Glass Hotel is abundant, lies in the patterns themselves, not in anything they mean. This novel invites you to inhabit it without striving or urging; it’s a place to be, always fiction’s most welcome effect. Mandel is a consummate, almost profligate world builder. One superbly developed setting gives way to the next, as her attention winds from character to character, resting long enough to explore the peculiar mechanics of each life before slipping over to the next.... The disappointment of leaving one story is immediately quelled by our fascination in the next.....what binds the novel is its focus on the human capacity for self-delusion, particularly with regards to our own innocence. Rare, fortunately, is the moral idiot who can boast, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” The complex, troubled people who inhabit Mandel’s novel are vexed and haunted by their failings, driven to create ever more pleasant reflections of themselves in the glass. This latest novel from the author of the hugely successful Station Eleven forgoes a postapocalyptic vision for something far scarier—the bottomless insecurity of contemporary life.... Highly recommended; with superb writing and an intricately connected plot that ticks along like clockwork, Mandel offers an unnerving critique of the twinned modern plagues of income inequality and cynical opportunism. [ Belongs to Publisher SeriesKeltainen kirjasto (540) Has as a reference guide/companionAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"[A] novel of money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise in which a woman disappears from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, dragging countless fortunes with it"-- No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing AuthorEmily St. John Mandel is a LibraryThing Author, an author who lists their personal library on LibraryThing. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.81)
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