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3.54 AVERAGE
3.54 AVERAGE
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
So brilliant that none of my words will do it justice. I read it alone over two days on holiday in the desert. This is the perfect book for a solo getaway. Hotel du Lac will remain as one of my favorite reading experiences. If you tend to the introverted reader side of things Brookner’s main character is a kindred spirit.
This book was a lovely and atmospheric exploration of one woman's emotional world as she holidays at a quiet resort in the Alps. I disagreed in several places with its descriptions of relationships between women, but it was still enjoyable and interesting, as always, to see the world through the eyes of someone else as written by a skillful author.
3.5 stars is closer to the truth. Well-written, internal, but something about the writing style kept me at arm's length.
I had to finish this book in the hope of finding something that might explain how it won the Man Booker Prize. My hopes were dashed, my time wasted. An awful book: vapid, boring, poorly written, weirdly misogynistic and anachronistic.
Baffled that this could be published, let alone win a big award.
Baffled that this could be published, let alone win a big award.
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
We meet Edith at a pivotal moment in her life. A writer who delves in relationships, she has found it challenging to find her one. At the insistence of her friends, she travels to Hotel du Lac in the late fall just before the resort hotel is closing down. The people she meets who are also staying there are a backdrop to her sifting memories of the last period of her life and the decisions she made.
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
This book was in an Airbnb, covered in wrapping paper so I could not read the blurb. I decided to read it after seeing it won the Booker prize, hoping for a crisis while I had the time to have one.
I didn’t have a crisis, but I am deeply bemused. The story focussed on love, and how and why to access it, if at all. I suspect most of it went over my head because I am unfamiliar with the gender roles and norms of the 1980’s (unless it was set earlier? The set gave nothing away). I can’t tell if these norms are specific to the upper class, or just a figment of a sexist author’s imagination. Either way it was grating and unendingly frustrating. Particularly the shallow judgment and wallowing. Far too much of the book was occupied with judging other women's appearances.
The core character rejected both an opportunity to blend her identity and serve a traditional, mundane husband, and to enter a faux union with a man who would provide her the social status of marriage, while retaining her individualism or “centrality”. I’m not sure why she commits to David - perhaps the distance inherent in the relationship was what she wanted, enough space to retain herself while providing snippets of love and intimacy
Quotes:
"I have held this rather dim and trusting personality together for a considerable length of time, and although I have certainly bored others I was not to be allowed to bore myself."
"I drank my coffee and paced around and tried to absorb all the details, as people think writers do..."
"Well, something had been accomplished: people were beginning to have names. The here and now, the quotidian, was beginning to acquire substance."
"It is a great mistake... to confuse happiness with one particular situation, one particular person. Since I freed myself from all that I have discovered the secret of contentment... It is simply this. Without a huge emotional investment, one can do whatever one pleases. One can take decisions, change one's mind, alter one's plans. There is none of the anxiety of waiting to see if that one other person has everything she desires, if she is discontented, upset, restless, bored."
"... I think of her as my poor mother. As I grow older myself I perceive her sadness, her bewilderment that life had taken such a turn, her loneliness... She comforted herself, that harsh disappointed woman, by reading love stories, simply romances with happy endings... In her last months, she lay in bed, wearing the silk peignoir that my father bought her on their honeymoon in Venice, not caring, perhaps not noticing, that the lace was torn, the pale blue faded to grey, and when she raised her eyes from her book, her eyes too were faded from blue to grey, and full of dreams, longings, disenchantment. My mother's fantasies, which remained unchanged all her life, taught me about reality."
"The careful pretence of her days here, the almost successful tenor of this artificial and meaningless life which had been decreed for her own good by others who. had no real understanding of what her own good was, suddenly appeared to her in all their futility. Perhaps the champagne, the cake, the celebration, had eroded the barriers of her mind, trailing sly and unwelcome association, making a nonsense of those careful arrangements she had worked out for herself, banishing amusement, returning her to seriousness and to painful reflection, demaning an accounting."
"I am no longer young... this is my last change... It is high time I forgot my hopes, the hopes I was born with, and faced reality. I shall never have that for which I long with my inmost heart... It is too late. But there are all the comforts of what is called maturity: pleasant companionship, comfort, proper holidays. It is a reasonable prospect. And I was always a reasonable woman."
"He seemed to collect such uncomfortable and out of the way experiences, expecting from them nothing but the value of novelty and irony."
"It seemed to her then that she had finished with this room, or perhaps the room had finished with her. In any event, some sort of natural conclusion had been reached. Yet, just as it is in the nature of leavetaking to feel regret, she knew that this room, in which she had been entirely alone, would always awaken in her some memory of warmth whenever she summoned it to mind."
"She was about to enter a world which she had instinctively recognised as belonging to others, in which she had no claim, a world of, among other things, investments, roof repairs, visitors for the weekend. And shall we take your car or mine?"
I didn’t have a crisis, but I am deeply bemused. The story focussed on love, and how and why to access it, if at all. I suspect most of it went over my head because I am unfamiliar with the gender roles and norms of the 1980’s (unless it was set earlier? The set gave nothing away). I can’t tell if these norms are specific to the upper class, or just a figment of a sexist author’s imagination. Either way it was grating and unendingly frustrating. Particularly the shallow judgment and wallowing. Far too much of the book was occupied with judging other women's appearances.
The core character rejected both an opportunity to blend her identity and serve a traditional, mundane husband, and to enter a faux union with a man who would provide her the social status of marriage, while retaining her individualism or “centrality”. I’m not sure why she commits to David - perhaps the distance inherent in the relationship was what she wanted, enough space to retain herself while providing snippets of love and intimacy
Quotes:
"I have held this rather dim and trusting personality together for a considerable length of time, and although I have certainly bored others I was not to be allowed to bore myself."
"I drank my coffee and paced around and tried to absorb all the details, as people think writers do..."
"Well, something had been accomplished: people were beginning to have names. The here and now, the quotidian, was beginning to acquire substance."
"It is a great mistake... to confuse happiness with one particular situation, one particular person. Since I freed myself from all that I have discovered the secret of contentment... It is simply this. Without a huge emotional investment, one can do whatever one pleases. One can take decisions, change one's mind, alter one's plans. There is none of the anxiety of waiting to see if that one other person has everything she desires, if she is discontented, upset, restless, bored."
"... I think of her as my poor mother. As I grow older myself I perceive her sadness, her bewilderment that life had taken such a turn, her loneliness... She comforted herself, that harsh disappointed woman, by reading love stories, simply romances with happy endings... In her last months, she lay in bed, wearing the silk peignoir that my father bought her on their honeymoon in Venice, not caring, perhaps not noticing, that the lace was torn, the pale blue faded to grey, and when she raised her eyes from her book, her eyes too were faded from blue to grey, and full of dreams, longings, disenchantment. My mother's fantasies, which remained unchanged all her life, taught me about reality."
"The careful pretence of her days here, the almost successful tenor of this artificial and meaningless life which had been decreed for her own good by others who. had no real understanding of what her own good was, suddenly appeared to her in all their futility. Perhaps the champagne, the cake, the celebration, had eroded the barriers of her mind, trailing sly and unwelcome association, making a nonsense of those careful arrangements she had worked out for herself, banishing amusement, returning her to seriousness and to painful reflection, demaning an accounting."
"I am no longer young... this is my last change... It is high time I forgot my hopes, the hopes I was born with, and faced reality. I shall never have that for which I long with my inmost heart... It is too late. But there are all the comforts of what is called maturity: pleasant companionship, comfort, proper holidays. It is a reasonable prospect. And I was always a reasonable woman."
"He seemed to collect such uncomfortable and out of the way experiences, expecting from them nothing but the value of novelty and irony."
"It seemed to her then that she had finished with this room, or perhaps the room had finished with her. In any event, some sort of natural conclusion had been reached. Yet, just as it is in the nature of leavetaking to feel regret, she knew that this room, in which she had been entirely alone, would always awaken in her some memory of warmth whenever she summoned it to mind."
"She was about to enter a world which she had instinctively recognised as belonging to others, in which she had no claim, a world of, among other things, investments, roof repairs, visitors for the weekend. And shall we take your car or mine?"