Hotel de Dream
by Emma Tennant
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Fiction. Literature. It is barely surprising that the lodgers at the Westringham have busy dream lives: it is a place from which anyone would want to escape. But the kaleidoscope begins to turn: the dreams begin to defy their dreamers. They start to merge...Tags
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A nice fast read, highly entertaining, but not very moving--at all--which I kind of require to give five stars unless it is the Best Thing Ever (e.g. Joe Keenan's Blue Heaven, consistently hilarious and not remotely touching).
It managed the neat trick of being almost entirely composed of dreams, which, let's face it, are the dullest part of any novel--but because the point of it was the dreams, and the dreams intersected and collided and changed the other dreams, it became very interesting indeed.
Felt more like surrealism (e.g. Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet) than fantasy par usual ... there was no explanation for why any of this would be happening, it just was.
Nicely written, unusual, and brisk.
It managed the neat trick of being almost entirely composed of dreams, which, let's face it, are the dullest part of any novel--but because the point of it was the dreams, and the dreams intersected and collided and changed the other dreams, it became very interesting indeed.
Felt more like surrealism (e.g. Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet) than fantasy par usual ... there was no explanation for why any of this would be happening, it just was.
Nicely written, unusual, and brisk.
Ultimately too repetitive for me, and though it's dreamy it is a dreamscape that evokes picasso's Guernica and the unsavory side of the human psyche, revolution, poverty and the imagination as much as the euphoric side.
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Author Information
58+ Works 1,996 Members
Emma Tennant was born in London, England on October 20, 1937. Before becoming an author and editor, she worked as a journalist for Queen magazine and Vogue. Her first novel, The Color of Rain, was written under the pseudonym of Catherine Aydy in 1963. The novels written under her own name included The Time of the Crack, The Last of the Country show more House Murders, Hotel de Dream, The Bad Sister, Alice Fell, Queen of Stones, Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde, Faustine, Pemberley, and An Unequal Marriage. She also wrote several memoirs including Strangers: A Family Romance, Girlitude: A Memoir of the 50s and 60s, Burnt Diaries, and Waiting for Princess Margaret. She founded and edited the literary journal Bananas and was the editor the Viking series Lives of Modern Women. She died from posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer's disease, on January 21, 2017 at the age of 79. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Members
- 57
- Popularity
- 528,973
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.31)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 1
