Hotel World

Five people who happen to be in the Global Hotel one night, including the ghost of a hotel maid who's plunged to her death in "the, the. The lift for dishes, very small room waiting suspended above a shaft of nothing, I forget the word, it has its own name." It's playful with language, funny, tragic, all about love and life and death, and so compassionate toward ordinary, everyday people without ever becoming sentimental.

"Remember you must live.
Remember you most love.
Remainder you mist leaf."

I honestly have no idea why I chose to read this book. It was described as "experimental" - simply another word for "pretentious," I thought - and I really do not care for stream of consciousness. Or so I thought, before I found myself swept up into Hotel World.

If the first chapter were a painting, it would be one of those swirly Impressionist things. The narrator is the ghost of Sara Whilby, a teenage chambermaid who died in a bizarre accident. She longs for any sort of sensation, even a stone in a shoe, and finds herself forgetting simple words like "toast." Most memorably, she has a conversation with her decomposing body about her death. While I thought the beginning was perfect, I was gradually less interested in the chapters that show more followed. The thread connecting the five women is a little too delicate at times, and I was not really gripped again until I read the grief-stricken soliloquy from Clara, Sara's younger sister.

While I liked Hotel World, I know for sure not everybody will. This is the kind of book where the most important event has already occurred, so if you keep reading in the hope that something major will happen, you are going to be disappointed. Ali Smith is also a very playful writer, so if you like, say, punctuation marks, this book will drive you nuts. But I am very happy that I stepped outside my reading comfort zone for once! show less

Maybe I was reading this in the wrong conditions, but it didn't grab me quite as much as the other novels by Ali Smith that I've read. There are a lot of good things in it, as you would expect: the opening conceit of the ghost trying to retain a grip on the physical world and having an argument with her own decaying body; the hotel chain as a metaphor for impersonal capitalist society; the homeless woman looking into illuminated windows and seeing snapshots of other people's lives; the tantalising reflections on the arbitrariness of loss and death, and a lot of very clever, witty language. But there also seemed to be long stretches where the prose was just coasting along and didn't quite have that grab-you-by-the-lapels quality that show more Smith's writing usually has. This is probably one that I will need to re-read before I can really make my mind up about it. show less

It's about a young woman, who works as a housecleaner in a hotel, and dies in a freak accident falling through the dumbwaiter. Part of the book is told by her ghost, and I liked that part, it was very creatively done to think about how a person would think and feel after death. But then the book is turned over to four other characters in turn, and none of them really worked for me. I later looked it up and found out that the book is supposed to be about the 5 stages of grief. Honestly, I thought if that was the case it should have been more obvious to me, and I shouldn't have had to look in up on line.

This book is distilled insanity. It's told from the more or less stream-of-consciousness points of view of five women whose lives intersect in a certain hotel: a dead teenager trying to remember her past, her sister working through her grief, a self-absorbed journalist, a bed-ridden invalid, and a barely coherent homeless woman. I wish I could explain the plot, but there really isn't one - just snapshots of life that happen to overlap a bit. That said, it was kind of a fun read in places. The ghost's manic descriptions were fun, the journalist's ignorance was amusing, and some of the writing style was novel. Plus, it was short enough that I never felt overtaxed by any one character - save the sister, whose entire chapter contained no show more punctuation. That was exhausting to read. show less

While I appreciate Ali Smith's experimentation, I'm not a fan of the quotidian rhythm of her narrators. Whether they are waiting at the airport, or sitting around on their home computer, or flopping on the bed of a sleazy hotel room, I find myself waiting for something interesting to happen far too frequently. Many will find much appeal in Smith's wry and pointed, thought-provoking comments on society, but you can't escape the droll pace and lingering taste of inconsequential dread of the mundane that it leaves in your mouth. At least, that is my feeling after listening to a third audiobook by this author. Curiously, the best audiobook reader I've heard was Ali Smith herself.

The best parts of this book was the brooding on the topic of show more death and the unique perspectives. They added some variety, but you will never find a conventional thrill in one of her books. More likely, you will stumble through with the sensibility you have during those dreams, where you're in a public place, nothing is happening, but you are suddenly overcome with incomprehensible anxiety, or you're suddenly naked and dead - one or the other. Obviously, Ali Smith has garnered popularity and success through her slanted view of modern people and their foibles.

I find myself slightly drawn to her other titles, if only for the ease of listening they offer. I know what to expect by now. Some call this literary fiction. It seems to me more fiction of everyday life. A supernatural twist here and there isn't going to change these laundry lists into anything remotely resembling a spectacle. show less

Hotel World is a fairly accessible non-traditional novel, deploying various techniques of modernist fiction without ever completely overwhelming the reader or collapsing into empty formalism. Its six distinct parts, with their six distinct literary voices, each offer a distinct take on the phenomenology of memory and experience. More than introducing us to their different protagonists, or to their different perspectives on the same situation, each part introduces us to a different way in which we engage with and make sense of the world around us.

However, I was never really gripped by the novel's actual story, and this lack of emotional connection ultimately kept the book from being something greater for me. I really like what Smith was show more up to in this novel -- I just wasn't ever all that swept away by how she did it. show less