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Loading... Hotel Du Lac (original 1984; edition 1984)by Anita Brookner
Work InformationHotel du Lac by Anita Brookner (1984)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. This is an altogether fabulous book and I am shocked this was the first I'd heard of Anita Brookner! She has a way with description that makes your heart sing, and she described her characters so well- with a well-placed word or two- that you can see them and hear them. And laugh! This is a funny book, with many truths in evidence. Read it. I liked this book that is focused on a novel writer who makes an unusual, disturbing decision and is therefore pushed into going away for a month to allow people to be restored to their previous state, no longer overcome by their reaction to what they perceived as the horror of that decision. She goes to a bland, fine, old hotel in Switzerland where she encounters a number of people - none of whom are "ordinary folks." Anything more would introduce spoilers. I liked, but did not love, this book. I am baffled why it won the Booker Prize. I enjoyed this book tremendously. Brookner's prose is beautifully simple, clear and witty. The premise is one that has been used countless times since half way through the nineteenth century - the protagonist is exiled to a remote, out-of-season town as a result of some disgrace - but Brookner enlivens it with a kind of personal feminism that I found compelling. Edith Hope, the subject of this particular exile, finds that despite her intelligence and competence her options are severely curtailed by her gender. The author's sense of outrage at this is what makes the brutal characterisation of all the other characters in the novel not nasty but incisive. It's such a subtle, restrained book that any more discussion if it would do it a disservice, in my view. I highly recommend it. no reviews | add a review
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HTML:BOOKER PRIZE WINNER â?¢ When romance writer Edith Hopeâ??s life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, she flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to restore her to her senses. "Brookner's most absorbing novel ... wryly realistic ... graceful and attractive." â??Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive. In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Wh No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Reread as the novel was mentioned in Daniel Schreiber's [Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living]. Probably third read. The characters are so spot on and of their era, though I can't imagine them being exactly the same now. Life has changed so much in the past 38 years. Edith would now be in her late 70s too.
An easy read but deft writing. Brookner doesn't drop a stitch. None of her characters are straightforwardly likeable, but each is a perfect hue in the painting. If it were a crime novel it would not quite, but almost be a locked room crime. ( )