What is it about Austrian and German writers and Hotels?Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth chose the Hotel as the setting in which they accommodated their stories and characters. It seems to have also been a generational preference but not solely. The younger Fred Wander also published Hôtel Baalbek.Hotels live as sites of transit where the rites of passage are performed: crisscross of destinies, unexpected encounters, and crossroads of everyday lives. Like a Casino of Fate, Hotels are where one bets one’s future against an unidentified providence. With Mann and Zweig these places for the peripatetic are also, often, vestiges of alluring life styles with a dazzle that has been dimmed by history.This is not the case with Hotel Savoy. This is not a place of chance but of mischance.Published in 1924, the same year as The Magic Mountain, Joseph Roth takes us to a hotel that really existed (and still exists) in Lodz in modern Poland, although the city is not mentioned in the novel. It is just presented as close to the Russian border. Roth creates the Savoy with a view onto the prototypical. It is a microcosm of society, with its seven floors rising up in opposite direction to people’s social status. The lower floors have thick carpets, cushioned upholstery, elegant ladies who wear silk, maids with pristine white caps and alcohol, while in the top floors a tea bag is a coveted object. Clocks give more time for the richer, since according to the floor their dials are set, consecutively, ten minutes later. In this world of a hotel we meet a mottled mix of personalities. The hotel welcomes prisoners of war who walk back West, like banks of fish, and one of them is Gabriel our narrator. But we also have the Devil-like LiftBoy, who in his 60s, manipulates that “American” device that takes people up and down in this stratified hotel. There are also: a Dreamer of Lottery tickets, a Hairdresser named Christopher Columbus, a One-Eyed with a glass eye who wants to open the first Cinema in town, three men who look so alike and move together and do everything as one called the Drillinge, trades men called Herr Lustig & Herr Frölich, etc.And nobody can leave. The hotel is like a prison for even if the guests have all bright personalities they are known by the number of their rooms. They all have secrets and hidden reasons for their umbilical link to the hotel but they also all share in their hopes to abandon the place one day.And for this they expect another almost miraculous Homecoming and Redemption-- originating in the modern Eden (Amerika!!), and Gabriel, honouring his name, candidly assists the disappointing Saviour.Roth develops in a deeply beautiful language, with fine irony and subtle humour the themes of loneliness and companionship, of home returns and exile, of Hopes, of truncated destinies, of poverty and wealth, of love—the one based not on conquest but on gratitude, of death, of revolutions.....Roth’s Hotel Savoy is such a beautiful book because it comes tinted with a charm that transposes a bleak world into a resonant fairy tale. And may be he achieves this by the curious mixture of affection and dispassion with which his Gabriel tells us the story.Because even if the Savoy is in a city with constant gray rain, it is also a place where a donkey will attend a funeral.
'Ik kom om tien uur ’s ochtends bij Hotel Savoy aan. Ik had me voorgenomen een paar dagen of een week uit te rusten. In deze stad woont mijn familie -- mijn ouders waren Russische joden. Ik wil geld zien te krijgen om mijn weg naar het westen voort te zetten.Ik keer terug van drie jaar krijgsgevangenschap, heb in een Siberisch kamp gezeten en ben door Russische dorpen en steden getrokken, als arbeider, dagloner, nachtwaker, kruier en bakkersknecht.Ik draag een Russische kiel die iemand mij cadeau heeft gedaan, een korte broek die ik van een gestorven kameraad heb geërfd, en nog altijd bruikbare laarzen waarvan ik zelf niet meer weet hoe ik eraan gekomen ben.Voor het eerst na vijf jaar sta ik weer voor de poorten van Europa.Hotel Savoy met zijn zeven verdiepingen, zijn gulden wapen en een portier in livrei lijkt me Europeser dan alle andere hotels in het oosten. Het belooft water, zeep, closet met waterspoeling, een lift, kamermeisjes met witte kapjes, vriendelijk blinkende nachtspiegels als kostelijke surprises in bruin betimmerde kastjes, elektrische lampen die uit roze en groene kappen opbloeien als uit kelken, rinkelende bellen die aan één druk met de duim gehoorzamen, en met dons gevulde dekbedden die opbollen en met vreugde klaarstaan om het lichaam op te nemen.Ik ben blij dat ik weer een oud leven kan afstropen, zoals zo vaak in deze jaren. Ik zie de soldaat, de moordenaar, de bijna vermoorde, de verrezene, de geketende, de zwerver.'Zo begint 'Hotel Savoy', in de onnavolgbare stijl van Joseph Roth. Het hotel telt ruim 800 kamers en wordt, behalve door onzichtbare gegoeden, bewoond door de verdrukten van de samenleving - terugkerende soldaten, een circusartiest, een variétémeisje…. schooiers met weinig of geen geld die op de bovenste verdiepingen worden gehuisvest, waar ook de dienstmeisjes wonen en de ongezonde lucht van de waskamer heerst. 'In deze uithoek nemen alle dimensies af, dat komt door de grijze stoom van de waskeuken die je ogen omfloerst, afstanden verkleint, de uur doet opzwellen. Het is moeilijk wennen aan deze lucht die aldoor heftig in beroering is, contouren vervaagt, vochtig en warm ruikt, de mensen in onwezenlijke kluwens verandert.'Van deze en andere kleine luiden vertelt Roth de kleine levens, de kleine verhalen. Zijn observatievermogen is feilloos: hij laat ons zien, ruiken, horen, en schetst zo, zonder overbodig commentaar of beschouwende uitweidingen, een aangrijpend beeld van de tijd, een 'duistere, geestige parabel van Europa op de rand van fascisme en oorlog' zoals het achterplat vermeldt. Geschreven in 1924 (Roths eerste roman na het onvoltooide 'Das Spinnennetz' uit 1923), verbrand in 1933. Van Joseph Roths boeken word je niet vrolijk, maar wat een geschenk is het zo'n schrijver te mogen lezen.
What do You think about Hotel Savoy (2003)?
A soldier is on his way home after being confined to a Russian prison camp during the Great War. He fetches up in an Eastern European town in the Hotel Savoy, his first taste of civilized Europe in ages. At first it seems like a return to the pre-war verities: a soft mattress, maids with starched collars, a certain settled way of life that had gone on for ages. But he soon realises that, if the hotel is a microcosm of Europe, it is a microcosm of a Europe that has changed in a fundamental way, and can never return to its past glories. Much like Thomas Mann, Roth tells a story that resonates on the literal and the allegorical level, with various characters and events standing in for the larger currents that would continue to wash over postwar Europe for the next decade, eventually plunging the continent and ultimately much of the world back into war. Unlike Mann, Roth conveys a gritty, lived-in feel, full of odours, stains and earthy humour, very far away from the middle-class anguish of Mann's protagonists. In that sense, his works are closer to the rambunctious, garrulous yarns of Bohumil Hrabal, which are not without their own dark side, perhaps not quite as dark and bitter as the underpinnings of Roth's vision, however farcical or absurd individual scenes may be. Like Bulgakov, Roth has a flair for group and crowd scenes for picking out the most telling moments and images to illuminate his history-haunted narrative.
—Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
This is a lesson in why one should never judge a book before one has actually completed it. The number of stars I give to a book describes my own experience of it, how attached to it I am likely to be, rather than the merit of the book itself (may sound strange, but I'm only keeping a record of what I read for my own amusement). Admittedly, I picked up the book at the wrong time. Had I done so at any other time, it would have been five stars. Roth is a brilliant writer and this is an excellent book - far reaching in its insight, great in the very concise way it uses language. I bought it expecting an entertaining summertime read, something along the lines of 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'. This book was so much more. There are few books that adequately capture the uncertainty of the immediate post-war period, successfully conveying that sense of a world where everything is subject to change. I feel richer for having read this book.PS. Read the Hesperus Press edition - with a translation by Jonathan Katz
—Razia Khan
Gostei bastante do livro, tem um ritmo muito bem compassado, com descrições excelentes e segmentos dos quais se destaca o seguinte:"As pessoas levavam uma vida miserável. Foram elas que prepararam o seu destino mas elas pensam que é obra de Deus. Deixaram-se aprisionar em tradições, os seus corações ficaram atados a milhares de fios, fios entrelaçados pelas suas próprias vidas. Em todos os caminhos das suas vidas deparavam com as tabuletas de proibição do seu Deus, da sua Polícia, do seu rei, da sua classe social. Aqui não eram autorizadas a seguir viagem, ali, a permanecer. E depois de estrebucharem assim durante meia dúzia de décadas, desnorteadas e perturbadas, morrem numa cama, deixando aos que se seguem a miséria que viveram."
—Bernardo Crastes
