Eimear McBride

Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride is a novel comprised entirely of a woman's internal dialogue, on five different occasions, in five different hotel rooms, in five different cities. The extent to which a reader will like this book likely depends on how much that reader likes bringing to a novel versus how much they want the novel to have everything included and the reader just has to read and take it in.

I think there are multiple ways of understanding this short novel, from being a sequel of show more sorts to being entirely standalone. I am, at least for this first reading (I intend to read this book several times), viewing it as a standalone about a woman who is unknown to me. While I think the comments I've seen associating this with Dante, Beckett, and even Camus or Sartre are valid, I prefer at this point to take it in entirely on its own merit. That said, I do think those associations add to an understanding.

First off is the title. While we are in several hotel rooms in the course of the book, the title is singular. I take that to mean that the "strange hotel" is the human mind, in particular, this woman's mind. We tend to compartmentalize things, and since everything is actually connected, those separate compartments often aren't as separate as we'd like, so there is carry over from room to room. I find that looking at this novel from this perspective helps with how I am appreciating McBride's work.

I also have the habit of having almost continuous internal conversations, and each voice in my mind has a distinct perspective so the idea of arguing or feeling anger or disappointment with a part of my mind makes perfect sense to me. I could relate to much of what this woman was experiencing, the grappling with a past both appealing and unappealing, the question of whether the future really holds any positivity or just more of the same old same old.

One feeling I got from the various scenes in the novel is the sense that while she is aging from scene to scene, my guess being somewhere in the area of 15 years overall, she is sometimes unconscious of that age change. I'm not sure I am phrasing that well, but let me give an example from my own life. I know how old I am and have no delusion about being a young man any more. yet in many of my internal conversations it is almost as if I am still some younger age where some future is still laid out before me. That disconnect can often be disorienting when I come back out of my head and into my present. I sense some of this in the character, as she reflects both forward and backward in time yet seems to be the same age throughout as far as how she views her prospects.

I found the change in person from third person to first to also be telling, it helped me to feel that this is a story she has told and at the end we are now in her present. What lessons has she learned? What regrets does she have? And how much responsibility does she take for her life? These are all questions each of us face if we reflect on our lives, and we aren't always happy with our answers if we are honest with ourselves.

I understand that this novel won't appeal to many readers, which is fine. I think that readers who don't mind more questions than answers will find a lot here to like. I also think readers who can step away from a novel being "about" a character and also being "about" humanity will enjoy the novel much more. I would caution readers who want a definitive beginning, middle, and end that this might not suit them. It is the reader's work here to provide some semblance of an ending, or at least a conclusion.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

Joyce? Roth? Lawrence? They all kept popping into my mind as I was reading Eimar McBride's novel, THE LESSER BOHEMIANS. But then I'd wonder, Has she really read those guys, or does she maybe think all the sex in this book is something brand new with her? Well, whatever is true, this is a Joycean stream-of-consciousness marathon of seemingly unending sex in all its variations, both good and bad. And, to paraphrase an old nursery rhyme, When it's good it's very very good / But when it's bad it show more is HORRID.

Because, in this tale of first love and sexual awakening, the narrator, an 18 year-old Irish lass freshly arrived in London for acting school, falls hard for a handsome actor twenty years her senior, and we only gradually learn of dark sexual secrets, both in the narrator's past as well as in that of her older lover.

The club scene in 1990s London is graphically portrayed, and McBride shows us the seedy side in intimate detail too, particularly the inner city areas of Camden and Kentish Town, where much of the story takes place - cramped and cluttered 'bedsits' and community-living apartments crowded with too many occupants where casual sex and partner-changing seem to be the norm.

Because McBride's style is so unusual (normal grammatical rules regarding punctuation and dialogue are pretty much out the window), I would exhort readers to hang in there (I almost didn't), because once you get 40 to 50 pages in, you'll find you've gotten used to it, and the story picks up its pace by that time, the two principals having met. And after that it never really lets up. I found myself alternately charmed by the young narrator's first sexual encounters and, later, a bit repelled by what she allowed. Strangely however, all the sex aside, you realize that this is, above all else, a love story, albeit one filled with obstacles, kinky twists and turns, and multiple bumps in the road.

Compelling? Yup. Page-turning? Yup. (In fact there are few chapter breaks where one could normally stop, so I just kept reading and reading, even well past my normal bedtime.) Over-the-top sex? Yup again, and, while I didn't really find that off-putting, it did seem at times maybe just a little too much, not quite believable. But then there is an element here too - right alongside the sexual awakening - of sexual obsession. Does it seem like I'm dwelling a little too much on the sex stuff? Maybe, but I don't think so. And, as the story progresses, we learn more and more about the previous lives of the two lovers, things that serve to make them both seem more human, and to explain why they act the way they do.

Next-to-bottom line: if reading about sex makes you uncomfortable, then you won't like this book. Bottom line: that said, this is one helluva good story. Eimar McBride is very likely a name you'll be hearing a lot about. Her first novel, A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING, got a lot of print. I haven't read that one - yet. This one? Very highly recommended. (four and a half stars)

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

That just was life.

Usually when people talk about ‘stream-of-consciousness’ writing, they mean little more than that there are a lot of run-on sentences and not many full stops. Eimear McBride is one of the very few writers to have really wrestled the English language into a new form to tell her story. Here there are many full stops, but they occur in the middle of. During. Splitting thoughts and. Off shearing different slices of idea. Sentences fracture, glance against one another and show more refract in different directions. The effect is kaleidoscopic, suggesting by turns the clouded thought process of disease, the raw edginess of compulsion, or the mangled simultaneity of regular daily anxieties.

Crumbs on the carpets and insects bite my back I don't care for. Nicer is not what I am after. Fuck me softly fuck me quick is all the same once done to me. And washing in their rusted baths and flushing brown with limescale loos amid the digs of four a.m. before I put my knickers on. Say stay the night but I am gone. Down back stairs fag glued lip sore on and wait for, get the night bus home.

Within the coarse immediacy, McBride scatters these little nuggets of poetry: amid the digs of four a.m. There are many flashes of Irish, and creative English coinages (she describes ‘high sky and snackish air’). Multiple voices intersect within paragraphs, even sentences. And McBride uses these effects quite deliberately in the service of her story, which concerns childhood abuse, family trauma, addictive compulsions, sexual self-destructiveness. The overall effect is something like James Joyce meets Sarah Kane.

He hurt my arms. You open your legs. I. I've haven't stopped thinking about you for a moment he says. Shame I didn't think of you at all. Do it. Not until. What? You hurt me. He pull by the hair. How you like it? Does that hurt? No. Then what? I want. Words drown like water. Make me know what you mean. What? When you miss me. What words are when. Get. Jesus. Over. He goes somewhere else inside. Does that hurt? Yes. A lot. A lot and relieves me for a while.

Usually I avoid books about these subjects, and I especially resent being made to relive the worst moments of someone's trauma when I feel it's mainly a form of therapy for the author. It's not like that here. Though the book deals with some very upsetting issues, it never asks for sympathy. The narrator of Girl is not a victim: she makes her own choices, even if we often find them difficult to understand. Sometimes, despite the dense prose, she can be ruthlessly direct (‘Hurt me. Until I am outside pain,’ she says at one point; and elsewhere, ‘The answer to every single question is Fuck’). And the central relationship she has with her sick brother is as raw, as real, as anything you'll read.

I won't pretend this is a light read; it's pretty gruelling. But you put it down convinced that you've read something great. show less

I can't, in good faith, recommend this book to anyone. It's an odd, acquired taste of a book that I loved inordinately and since it would forever taint my opinion of you, were you to read the book and dislike it, please leave it be.

Eimear McBride tells the story of a young Irish woman during her first year of drama school in London. Eily's thrust into the vibrant world of London and of drama school from her quiet life and it takes an effort for her to find her feet, both in finding friends show more at the school and in learning the ropes of independent life. One evening, she meets an actor twice her age in a pub and they begin a tentative relationship, which grows into an intense love affair between two broken and flawed people.

McBride tells the story from inside of Eily's head, and her stream-of-consciousness abandons grammatical norms, leaving the writing a challenge to follow. There are no quotation marks, and conversations take place over a single paragraph, with no indication of who is talking. This should have been annoying, instead it make the act of reading The Lesser Bohemians an immersive experience. This was not a book I could pick up and put down during a busy day. I needed to read it when I could set aside a block of uninterrupted time, during which I would enter so completely into Eily's world that I felt unmoored when I had to put the book down. I'm sorry to have finished it, but I'm eager to read anything else McBride writes, including her grocery lists, probably. show less