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A review by vwang3
I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita
5.0
About 150 pages in, I almost put down the book and gave up. The book is "experimental," as many reviewers have noted, and at first that meant no coherence, slogging, a lot of dense passages of text and lingo and minutia that I skimmed with a feeling of obligation.
But I picked the book back up (mostly because I had to finish the book for my senior project), and I came at it differently: not expecting a novel, a plotline, a protagonist to root for, but rather just wanting to enjoy the experience. To learn about a period of Asian and American history that I had little to no knowledge of, to experience these brief vignettes of human emotion and passion. And the rest of the book was marvelous.
The first thing to note: Yamashita can write. The number of different voices, styles, literary modes that she blows through over the course of this book is astonishing, and they all feel extraordinarily authentic. She moves between the slang of the 60s; the dryness of an FBI dossier; the overwrought, sentimental tones of a white-savior sob story; and just beautiful, beautiful lyricism with such ease.
The characters are on stage only briefly but still manage to come alive. In these pages there is romance, politics, and so much history. You will leave this book feeling so much more educated and aware of a much neglected people and time period, and even if the leftist politics of the characters is utterly foreign and even off-putting to you, it is still thrilling to read about it.
And the ending of the book is just breathtaking. One reviewer on the back says he read the last 12 pages over and over, like an ancestor had written them, and that's exactly how I felt, too.
But I picked the book back up (mostly because I had to finish the book for my senior project), and I came at it differently: not expecting a novel, a plotline, a protagonist to root for, but rather just wanting to enjoy the experience. To learn about a period of Asian and American history that I had little to no knowledge of, to experience these brief vignettes of human emotion and passion. And the rest of the book was marvelous.
The first thing to note: Yamashita can write. The number of different voices, styles, literary modes that she blows through over the course of this book is astonishing, and they all feel extraordinarily authentic. She moves between the slang of the 60s; the dryness of an FBI dossier; the overwrought, sentimental tones of a white-savior sob story; and just beautiful, beautiful lyricism with such ease.
The characters are on stage only briefly but still manage to come alive. In these pages there is romance, politics, and so much history. You will leave this book feeling so much more educated and aware of a much neglected people and time period, and even if the leftist politics of the characters is utterly foreign and even off-putting to you, it is still thrilling to read about it.
And the ending of the book is just breathtaking. One reviewer on the back says he read the last 12 pages over and over, like an ancestor had written them, and that's exactly how I felt, too.