Sep 27, 2016 03:10 PM
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In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?" It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a pseudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to resore her to her senses.
But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive.
"Distinctive, spellbinding.elegant but passionate, funny but oddly earnest. Novels like hers are why we read novels."-Christian Science Monitor
And there is more.
A very slow, mournful novel set in an end-of-season hotel which may - just may - be a metaphor or sumpin. Everything happens in slowmo - walks, meals, coffee, tea, cakes, clothes(pages of those), more walks, mothers, daughters, gloomy memories, walks, talks, a small dog, gauntness, autumnal colours, pallor, crepuscularity, more damned walks, more wretched meals, the god damned dog again, more clothes, and on p 143 this:
"my patience with this little comedy is wearing a bit thin"
It's a ghastly vision of humanity presented here to be sure, bitter and defeated. In this world we swim slowly in a social fishtank constantly judging and appraising each other's sexual, sartorial, social and financial status. The women relentlessly and mercilessly judge all other women they encounter, the men likewise. Our heroine says "the company of their own sex was what drove many women into marriage". Some kind of bleak view of women, I say. But generalisations like this pop up all over - "women hide their sadness, thought Edith. Their joy they like to show off to one another." Or "men like the feeling they have had to fight other men for possession [of women:]". Wow, this is so pre-feminist. It was written in the 80s but reads more like the 40s. And it won the Booker! What?! What?! I was expecting something acrid and memorable, but I got this wallow in antique stereotypes and fake psychological insight.And another one bites the dust. Another moping, myopic, single, disconsolate, unfulfilled, disenchanted woman shuffling the mortal coils resignedly and patiently waiting for until her numbers up.
Ok, but I am racking my brains: is there ANY book out there about a male spinster? Not a bachelor: that image implies a certain Sherlock Holmsean contentedness with the regularity of life, a smug sense of quiet self satisfaction that all is alright with the world, at precisely the moment when a woman ISN’T present. An open book, a crackling fire and the languid smoke sonorating from a veal coloured pipe induces images not of pity for the sad old codger, but endorsement of quality and order.
Take a spinster, Edith Hope, and the same singleness of purpose is translated into failed possibility, the non crystallisation of purpose, gross irregularities in the order of the cosmos and staleness.
Do men ever consider it a life unlived without the redemptive qualities of femme feng shui? And what makes women wither without a man? Discuss.
Edith Hope is a spinster. She has professional success, but.no man. So, she is empty inside. Go on:, laugh, cry, deride, acquiesce about it. True or false?
And she is apologetically staunch: Prince charming or none at all will do. Well, lady, at your age, you should be thinking about who can serve, instead.
A perfectly handsome, successful, erudite, considerate man proposes to her: he promises a life of shared interests, social standing, security, and his support and friendship ad nauseum. But, he doesn’t promise her love; he is too jaded for that. Have your dangereous liasions, he says, and I will have mine. But you will never hear about them or be embarrassed by them. In return she can, however, expect respect, consideration, financial security and friendship.
But, nooo. Edith can’t do that. Its all or nothing, right, ladies?
Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. Edith Hope is from La-La.
At in Last.
A quite book, beautifully so. The simple prose is deceiving-the book is not simple, but elegant and superbly crafted. The words wrap you like the mist that weaves in and out of the landscape. A story of an older woman on a vacation alone. Loved it.
Anyone who has ever contemplated or experienced the noisy quiet that happens when you are by yourself but surrounded by others who are all there together.
