Hotel World
Ratings7
Average rating3.3
15
Ratings7
Average rating3.3
BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense of love. Blending incisive wit with surprising compassion, Hotel World is a wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book. Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.
Reviews with the most likes.
To be very frank. Haven't been quite invested in this one.
Classic Ali Smith style, with a long chapter of Ulysses-like long stream of consciousness flow, but what comes down to is a bit of pointless, still the words amounted to some special feelings, and mostly those meaningful ones, yet not enough for me, and just some clever word games, but this time it fails a little. Consider it a very early work, it's fair.
This is by far the most challenging book I have ever read and its got nothing to do with the subject matter and everything to do with how its written. Entire chapters have no punctuation at all, there are no speech marks, words are deliberately missed out, or wrong words are used instead.
If I didn't have to read this as part of my module I'd never have gotten further than the first paragraph of chapter 1.
It took me forever to get through this one. I appreciated how well it was written, I just found myself plugging away at it. Only occasionally did the floor drop out and I fell into the story. Sadly, that happened so rarely. Usually, when I start counting pages it's right to the DNF pile for a book, but I loved Public Libraries so much... I kept giving Hotel World one more page, then one more page, then one more page.
I don't know how I made it through 35 pages of stream of consciousness POV from the sister, but I did, using the bookmark to read it line by line by line. Had that been the first chapter, I never would have gotten past that part. SOC is, for me, the hardest thing to read. I find it frustrating and have NEVER seen it done in a way that was beneficial to a plot, ever. It's more like watching an author do finger exercises, or a word dump or listening to the dreams of a bunch of people you don't care about. Without punctuation. So that even your brain can't take a breath.
Was it worth it? Probably not. I did not enjoy this one bit. I put it down and read other things instead. I got through it. That probably says more about me than this book.
