Hotel du Lac

Romance novelist Edith Hope has escaped from her life at a quiet Swiss hotel at the end of its season. Her life in London consists chiefly of making others happy – her publisher by writing not-quite-bestseller romances, and her friends by making up numbers at dinner parties and saying what’s expected of her. She is more isolated than ever in her retreat, and to occupy her mind she analyzes her fellow guests almost as if they are characters in one of her books. The only eligible male guest attaches himself to her and he seems to offer a permanent escape from the difficulties she left behind.

This novel appears to be a response to Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women. Brookner uses this phrase twice in the novel, and this seems deliberate. show more Pym’s Mildred Lathbury ends her loneliness through marriage to an anthropologist, to whom she can be useful. Brookner’s Edith Hope makes a different choice, rejecting marriage to a man she doesn’t love and who doesn’t love her to continue as mistress to a man she loves who will never leave his wife for her. She has realized just in time that marriage to such a man will not end her loneliness. It would be interesting to pair these novels in a reading group and see where the discussion goes. show less

Reading this novel was my introduction to the world of Anita Brookner. Having started with Hotel du Lac, her Booker prize-winning novel, I moved on to others including Providence and Incidents in the Rue Laugier and Look at Me. But it was experiencing her distinctive prose style and characters with complicated emotional lives that drew me in. Hotel is written mostly in the form of musings of the protagonist and has very little overt activity. But her life is changing, partly at the suggestion of her friends and partly through her own meditations on her situation. The developments of these small changes, of her reactions to loneliness and the stigma of being unattached, are the stuff that moves a reader to think about her condition as a show more woman and a human being. Her choices lead to a reinvigorated self-reliance that may be difficult, but it is being true to herself. Anita Brookner's novels are short but they pack a powerful punch. show less

'Hotel du Lac' won the Booker Prize in 1984 and is set in an out of season luxury hotel situated on Lake Geneva. Edith Hope, the autobiographical heroine, writes commercially successful, formulaic romances. Edith’s fictional heroines always get their men, but their success does not reflect her own life.

Edith is well-educated and amusing, but rather plain, “a mild-looking, slightly bony woman in a long cardigan, distant, inoffensive, quite nice eyes, rather large hands and feet, meek neck.” She’s had lovers but remains independent, has her own flat and earns her own money. She writes the same kind of predictable novels and refuses to change them to suit contemporary taste.

Edith’s friends think she has a pitiful existence, they show more can’t imagine she has a secret lover and so try to improve her life. She’s quite content with her quiet independence but nevertheless, accepts a proposal of marriage from the kind if dull Geoffrey Long, who is still grieving for his recently deceased mother. However, en route to the Registry Office she suddenly changes her mind and cruelly jilts Long. She voluntarily travels to Switzerland, not as a punishment but as a place for reflection.

Once in Switzerland the story centres around six hotel guests, five English and one French, five women and one man. Staying alongside Edith there is the old, widowed and lonely Countess Bonneuil who has been exiled to the hotel because her son's wife won't have her in their villa across the lake. Self-indulgent Iris Pusey ostentatiously displays the wealth she inherited from her late husband. She overwhelms her adult daughter Jennifer with affection, keeping her fixed in a childlike dependence. Beautiful, elegant, upper-class Monica is a terrible snob who despises everyone who’s “in trade.” Monica suffers from bulimia and if she can’t produce a male heir after this stay at the hotel, her husband will divorce her. She is desperate for a child if only to avoid the ignominy of being a divorcee.

Philip Neville, the prosperous owner of a successful electronics company, " is worldly and attractive but is divorced from his ex-wife, who ran off with her younger lover. Neville proposes to Edith but what he wants he frankly admits is someone to entertain for him and who will not embarrass him, a loveless yet comfortable marriage in which they would both be free to take lovers as long as they did it discreetly. Edith soon realises that she is faced with a choice, between love with the often absent and unattainable married man back in London or a wealthy but loveless life with Neville. But which will she chose?

Brookner doesn't reveal why Edith has been banished to Switzerland until roughly two thirds through the book and when she does its quite amusing but this is about the only touch of humour throughout. This is a thoughtful, introspective and character driven piece of writing, where nothing really happens and all the characters are damaged in some way or other. The book looks at what it means to be a woman in what is still a male dominated world particularly in publishing and there are numerous similarities between Edith and and Virginia Wolff. This book is a long way from my usual choice of reading material but I picked it up solely because of its Booker win, and although well written it was a little slow for my tastes. show less

A magnificent book. This won the 1984 Booker Prize.

Playing on feminist themes and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Edith Hope goes to Switzerland not to heal her body, but to hide away awhile after damaging her reputation. She goes in the offseason. The summer tourists have left, the clouds more often obscure the sun, leaving everything gray and hazy. The hotel on the lake is half empty, with a smaller underused staff. There are guests. They tend toward wealth and loneliness, widows and unmarried women, with a few men from a nearby conference. But what does Hope care. She's an author, a writer of "romantic fiction", who just needs to pass the time and get some writing done. She has landed in a cozy isolation. So, of course, she gets show more involved with the other guests.

When asked to sex up her books for the liberated women readers, Edith tells her editor that's not what they want. "...they prefer the old myths, when it comes to the crunch. They want to believe that they are going to be discovered, looking their best, behind closed doors, just when they thought all was lost, by a man who has battled across continents, abandoning whatever he may have had in his in-tray, to reclaim them."

Edith makes friends with a widow and her grown unmarried daughter, and with another gorgeous bird-like woman, alone with her dog, who gossips about the widow. She develops a connection with a deaf elderly woman, left here alone by her son. And she meets a man in gray who takes an interest in her. He may have battled across continents. Edith will get involved in all the hotel's vanity, listening, learning about rivalries and caressed personal histories. Meanwhile she writes long letters to her married lover. Her book progress is lingering.

She does think a lot about writing. In one fun line she thinks, "The sensation of being entertained by words was one she encountered all too rarely. People expect writers to entertain _them_, she reflected. They consider that writers should be gratified simply by performing their task to the audience's satisfaction. Like sycophants at court in the Middle Ages, dwarves, jongleurs. And what about _us_? Nobody thinks about entertaining _us_.”

There a many different themes built in this book, on love, stories, social performance, meaning, selfishness and happiness. It's all heightened by the luxurious atmosphere, forcing the language to rise, and made playful by Edith's wry perspectives and interactions, and Brookner's. Brookner is, I think, I highly underappreciated author. She can manage all this stuff - the themes, humor, language and story tension - and the combination of it all makes this book really shine. It's something of a classic, by far Brookner's most famous book, and it deserves that attention.

I've read one other Brookner, A Closed Eye, which is an excellent novel doing many complicated things, and bringing in the readers emotions and thinking, and mixing these together. This book sits on a higher level because it combines these skills with the heightened language and playfulness suitable to the book's atmosphere. It makes this book far more vibrant.

Recommended to everyone, especially those looking for underappreciated authoresses.

2025
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So much to reflect on with this Booker Prize winning novel. Edith, a romance novelist, is hiding out at the Hotel Du Lac in Switzerland until the furor over her earlier rash decision has quieted down. The hotel is populated with the most eccentric characters and Edith is fascinated by the women she meets. The novel questions whether Edith, a shy, mild-mannered woman, needs to loosen up a bit and be more assertive in order to find love and fulfillment. The novel's resolution was just perfect and wholly satisfying (Brookner leaves Edith's future up in the air). I loved the smart writing here but I couldn't quite place the time. In my mind, Brookner was describing say the 1930's, yet there are references to 1980's fashions. No doubt the show more author deliberately wants to leave an impression of timelessness. And indeed the Hotel Du Lac does feel like a throwback to an earlier time and succeeds because of its thought-provoking modern feminist sensibilities. show less

Whenever I read a certain kind of woman's novel where the protagonist is either middle-aged, tired and/or disgraced, I tend to worry about, what I call, "The Awakening" effect where a woman may find, when there are no other options available to her, that there's only one way out of a bad situation.
Hotel Du Lac, written nearly 100 years after Chopin's "The Awakening" and set in the 1980's proves to be a document as to how far women have come.
Romance writer, Edith Hope, has been advised by her friends to get out of town, regroup and think about the dreadful thing she's done. Exile at Hotel Du Lac at first repulses Edith and also perhaps the reader. Edith describes everything in her room the color of cooked veal, a misty shroud show more encompasses the lake and surrounding mountains. Edith and the reader are trapped! Although the story unfolds at a snails pace and some may even toss it aside one should look at Edith's story more as a character study of those also staying at the hotel. The other women at Du Lac are also in some type of exile and in them Edith reflects on who she is and who she might become if she chooses to remain on the path she's been traveling. She may find it necessary to fall into line with old school thought or she may discover she has options.
Hotel Du Lac in September and Edith, both dignified, solid and out of season are empowering and well worth a quick read. show less

Anita Brookner's Booker-Prize winning novel is a deft and lyrical work, a moving exploration of loneliness, love, and human relationships. Edith Hope, a English writer of romance novels, has been banished to an isolated hotel in Switzerland after a love affair gone wrong leads her to commit a drastic social transgression. The slow unfolding of her story and the reasons behind her banishment keep the reader mesmerized as Brookner weaves a delicately intoxicating spell in Edith's interactions with the often bizarre hotel guests, including the wealthy and selfish Mrs. Pusey, her over-shadowed daughter Jennifer, and the charming and unscrupulous Mr. Neville. Intending only a quiet stay there, Edith is slowly drawn into their lives - from show more Jennifer, whose brilliant vibrance at once attract and repels Edith, to Mr. Neville, who courts her and would use his wealth to persuade her, who understands her and yet would use her to his advantage, to the dominating and ineffective Mrs. Pusey. In long walks, dilatory conversations, and her meetings with and reboundings on these people, Edith is revealed more and more to be a woman of incredible depth and intensity, facing a turning point in her life, and her story, told in Brookner's clear prose and spiced with subtle irony, humor, and tragedy, is like sinking luxuriously into cool water. Anita Brookner perfectly captures the longing and workings of the human heart and the quiet desperation and yet contentment that comes with the enroachment of middle age. In setting and story(woman meets and is pursued by a wealthy stranger in a hotel) it reminds me of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, and the tone and details(much is made of leaves, and walks) is very reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. A quietly vivid, modern masterpiece, and not to be missed.

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