The fall occurs at dawn.Albert CamusIf I had not read MJ’s excellent review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), I would never have purchased this book as firstly, I had never heard of the author and secondly, this didn’t sound like my type of book at all. That’s the “problem” with Goodreads; there is too much choice and I seem to be continuously stumbling across new authors. All one can possibly do in my case is to compare my purchase with a rather prized sweet in the sweet shop and to buy it on a whim. A bit of a hit and miss scenario. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Luckily I chose wisely this time.Well I started reading this novel last night and I was completely frustrated with the first twenty-five pages. I was not enjoying it at all. It seemed all too vague in content and I was about to abandon it when I decided to give it another try. I don’t know if it was seeing the incredible beauty of the sun setting over the Pyrenean mountain range or what but I somehow seemed to see this book in a different light. I had seen the light and that’s for sure.I’ve always loved the quote below by William Faulkner and it sprang to mind when I began to re-read this book. Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the most. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.Yes I did initially think this book was bad and I had indeed been sorely tempted to throw it out of the window but what a dreadful mistake that would have been.How can I even attempt to write this review? I feel I need to though because such beauty, sorrow and poignancy are portrayed in this multi-layered book and everyone needs to know about it.I was nevertheless taken aback with the first paragraph:Woooooooo-hooooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into dark into light what a plunge what a glide thud crash what a drop what a rush what a swoop what a fright what a mad hushed skirl what a smash mush mash-up broken and gashed what a heart in my mouth what an end.What a life.What a time.What I felt. Then. Gone.Now this doesn’t sound very thrilling but persevere because you, the reader, are going to have the time of your life!Well once again I encounter that remarkable "wretched stream-of-consciousness" that I'm not really a great lover of (Virginia Woolf immediately springing to mind) but somehow it worked very well here. I must confess that I felt like a voyeur travelling in a somewhat sleepy fashion at times through the book but it is an enthralling work.The plot, if you can call it such, is based on five woman, who are either based/visiting the Global Hotel or outside and literally too. Nineteen year old Sara Wilby has just started work at the Global Hotel as a chambermaid and dies in a rather unfortunate way there. Her dead teenage narrator is “floating around” and slowly losing her earthly ties. She is forgetting vocabulary and wants to find out how she fell before it is all too late. She knows this “thing” fell to the ground and killed her and as a result she attempts to have conversations with Sara down in the grave. There are six sections in the book covering various time periods and four other women are gradually drawn into the equation and their lives are all examined in detail: Clare, Sara’s sister, who cries a lot and wants to find out how this accident happened; Else, a vagrant really, who lives outside the hotel but gets invited in for the night by the receptionist Lise and Penny, a journalist who’s on the outlook for a scoop.All of the sections overlap and Ali Smith has done such a wonderful job here.Drat, I really hate it when I love a work so much because then I cannot get the natural flow of the wording. I had the same problem with Lawrence Durrell and The Alexandria Quartet, my favourite book.Nevertheless, I gave it my best shot!Do read this book. No wonder it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction 2001.
A Gavalda könyv után alig tudtam mást olvasni, elkezdem egy-két regényt, de annyira gyengének és súlytalannak tűntek az előző után, hogy félredobtam őket. Aztán valami megérzéstől vezérelve nyúltam ez után az ezer éve a polcomon heverő cukormázpink színű könyv után, mert csak. Hatodik érzék. Igen, több szempontból az. Ugyanis halottakat látunk, halottakat hallunk ennek a könyvnek a legelső lapjain. Az első fejezet annyira bizarr és zavarba ejtő, hogy gondolkodtam, hogy folytassam-e vagy ne. De annyira más is volt, mint amivel eddig találkoztam egy könyvben, hogy inkább olvastam tovább. És ahogy egyre beljebb kerültem a regénybe, beljebb ennek az 5 nőnek a kis történeteibe, úgy lett egyre érdekfeszítőbb az egész. Nem csak a lassan, a különböző emberek szemszögeiből összefolyó történet, hanem maga a hangulat is egyre érdekesebb, erősebb, egyre melankolikusabb, egyre keserédesebb, egyre valódibb lesz. A könyv csúcspontja számomra az ötödik fejezet volt, melyben a halott lány húga gondolatait olvashatjuk a gyászáról, a hiányról, az élet halál által körbeölelt apró részleteinek fontossá válásáról. Számomra nagyon megkapó volt a mindkét testvér történetében megjelenő por. Az írónő annyira kifejezően írt erről a hétköznapi dolgok leghétköznapibb, általában bosszúságot okozó jelenségéről, mely egyben az élet és a halál szimbóluma is, hogy az csodálatra méltó. Igazi művészet.A poron kívül megjelenik még egy rakás hétköznapi dolog a halál fényében (vagy árnyékában), attól fontossá és naggyá válva. A szavakkal és mondatokkal játszadozva, gyönyörűen és fájdalmasan életigenlően ír Ali Smith a halálról, annyira, hogy azt hiszem katartikus élmény volt ez most nekem és biztos vagyok benne, hogy ott lesz az idei top 10-emben ez a regény. Ez a ránézésre jelentéktelen, szar kis könyv olyan irodalmat rejt, amit minden vájtfülű szépirodalom-fan keres, ezt garantálom. Úgyhogy hatodik érzék volt ennek a könyvnek a kiválasztása abból a szempontból is, hogy simán felér a Gavalda könyvvel, simán.
What do You think about Hotel World (2002)?
I honestly have no idea why I chose to read this book. It was described as "experimental" - simply another word for "pretentious," I thought - and I really do not care for stream of consciousness. Or so I thought, before I found myself swept up into Hotel World.If the first chapter were a painting, it would be one of those swirly Impressionist things. The narrator is the ghost of Sara Whilby, a teenage chambermaid who died in a bizarre accident. She longs for any sort of sensation, even a stone in a shoe, and finds herself forgetting simple words like "toast." Most memorably, she has a conversation with her decomposing body about her death. While I thought the beginning was perfect, I was gradually less interested in the chapters that followed. The thread connecting the five women is a little too delicate at times, and I was not really gripped again until I read the grief-stricken soliloquy from Clara, Sara's younger sister.While I liked Hotel World, I know for sure not everybody will. This is the kind of book where the most important event has already occurred, so if you keep reading in the hope that something major will happen, you are going to be disappointed. Ali Smith is also a very playful writer, so if you like, say, punctuation marks, this book will drive you nuts. But I am very happy that I stepped outside my reading comfort zone for once!
—Sophie Murray
A good, but nowhere near as good as her others, novel from one of my favourite authors Ali Smith. This is probably her most depressing novel, I mean, one of the narrators is literally a dead person. All the action takes place around a hotel, The Global Hotel. Even from the name of the hotel you can tell that this novel is full of metaphor for the human condition. Usually I like that sort of this but this one didn't do it for me. I'm kinda disappointed but I can't be mad at Ali. She's a brilliant modernist writer, probably the best still writing today.
—Barry Pierce
Five women’s lives become interconnected in a hotel somewhere in England. One of the women just happens to be a ghost of a woman who died in the hotel’s dumb waiter. It is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that takes some getting used to, but if you can get past that, you can enjoy it since it is just like you would think if you wrote down your own thoughts.The book starts off great. The first chapter was the ghost of the woman who had just died in the dumb waiter. Her memory was fading quickly along with her senses. She was forgetting what it was like to taste and smell as those sense disappeared. She was trying to remember who she was, how she died and why. It was very interesting and I wish the book would have stuck with her.The next chapter moves onto a homeless girl that sat outside the hotel everyday. She is barely discussed before moving onto the next woman working at the front counter of the hotel. When the women’s stories started to interconnect, I had hope that the book was going to start coming together in an interesting way.Then it veered off course with the introduction of the sister of the dead woman. The entire chapter is all one sentence. Page after page of big run-on sentences with ampersands symbols separating the thoughts, but not successfully. It was so hard to follow, and when I could follow it, it wasn’t interesting. I was hoping the last chapter would bring the entire book together, even though I had already lost interest.Sadly, it did not. It didn’t bring any of the character together, but talked about how people are really connected to one another. Then, why didn’t it show that with the book I had just read?
—Coni Warren
