A review by laurawright1000
Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

4.0

I'm giving this 4 stars for the quality of the writing, which is absolutely controlled and precise. At the beginning of the book this seemed like it would mean the book was revelatory - I expected the author to be able to write something completely revealing of human nature. But the subject matter is....frustrating. The protagonist is an author who loves a married man, believes in the rather rubbishy mass fiction she writes and who has been exiled by her critical friends after she fails to marry a worthy man. Abroad she meets a variety of people and is proposed to by another man who suggests their marriage of convenience. This she agrees to before discovering that she cannot put up with him sleeping with other women. But the book was was written and presumably set in the late 20th Century not the beginning, and it feels old fashioned and stifled. The descriptions of people are minutely observed and funny, but the heroine is hugely passive and frustrating and the book ultimately adds up to very little. I'm going to read one more Brookner to see if I like it more but she's not on my list of favourite authors with this book.