Anita Brookner

Hotel Du Lac

Sarah Erle

Nadine 

The perfect antidote to at terrible movie I started watching and abandoned last night. 
She has a wry turn of phrase and a just so way of observation on relationships and the inner machination of the mind her main character Edith. I love the choices and temptations she faces and nearly errs and then stays the course. And she gets the genteel Swiss hotels frequented by British of a certain class so well. And the lake shore and boat.

Trevor Berrett

A disturbing book that was at the same time a pleasure to read. We begin when Edith Hope commences her stay at the Hotel du Lac, a luxury hotel, prideful of the fact that it is the place people go when they need a deep rest. Brookner's prose perfectly encapsulates the mood as Edith stands before her window looking out on a grey day:

"Edith Hope, a writer of romantic fiction under a more thrusting name, remained standing at the window, as if an access of good will could pierce the mysterious opacity with which she had been presented, although she had been promised a tonic cheerfulness, a climate devoid of illusions, an utterly commonsensical, not to say pragmatic, set of circumstances--quiet hotel, excellent cuisine, long walks, lack of excitement, early nights--in which she could be counted upon to retrieve her serious and hard-working personality and to forget the unfortunate lapse which had led to this brief exile, in this apparently unpopulated place, at this slowly darkening time of the year, when she should have been at home."

Guests come to rest, often sent by their families because their families don't know what else to do with them. In a way, it feels like a sanitorium, though at the same time it is like a nice pension in Switzerland. Edith herself is attempting to recover from something, and her friends are glad to be rid of her. When Edith gets there, the season is beginning to end. There is a feeling of both of loneliness and security. 

I expected this to be a type of romance novel. The description on the back of my book is a bit misleading in this regard. However, I found a great exploration of love and its role in relationships. For years before coming to the hotel, Edith was involved with a married man. She knows that to him she is a diversion, someone to visit for relaxation. But since he has never said as much himself, she cannot bring herself to fully accept the fact either. She is honest with herself, but her philosophies have prevented her from changing. She sees herself on the periphery, and she knows that's where people expect her to be. At the hotel, she meets a cast of characters who are mostly out-of-season women who, like her, feel but fail to comprehend or accept their situation. The one man staying at the hotel approaches Edith with a different philosophy that Edith both wants and does not want. 

"Since I freed myself from all that I have discovered the secret of contentment. . . . It is simply this. Without a huge emotional investment, one can do whatever one pleases. One can take decisions, change one's mind, alter one's plans. There is none of the anxiety of waiting to see if that one other person has everything she desires, if she is discontented, upset restless, bored. One can be as pleasant or as ruthless as one wants. If one is prepared to do the one thing one is drilled out of doing from earliest childhood--simply please oneself--there is no reason why one should ever be unhappy again."

Edith recognizes the logic of this theory. She wants to free herself from what others see her as. But she recognizes contradictions. But the man has grown an interest in her. She wants what his philosophy offers but she knows she cannot have what she wants if he too espouses this philosophy. The book has many paradoxes and contradictions--one of its strengths.

I enjoyed the book from the beginning to end. Brookner's structure is excellent, and she can go backwards and forwards in time smoothly. She can also present the contradictions and their connections to feminism and post-modern theories. However, the book is not itself an exercise in these theories. It's a fairly straight-forward story that offers a lot of food about what's wrong and right with relationships.

Sophie Shrimpton

This book was in an Airbnb, covered in wrapping paper so I could not read the blurb. I decided to read it after seeing it won the Booker prize, hoping for a crisis while I had the time to have one.

I didn’t have a crisis, but I am deeply bemused. The story focussed on love, and how and why to access it, if at all. I suspect most of it went over my head because I am unfamiliar with the gender roles and norms of the 1980’s (unless it was set earlier? The set gave nothing away). I can’t tell if these norms are specific to the upper class, or just a figment of a sexist author’s imagination. Either way it was grating and unendingly frustrating. Particularly the shallow judgment and wallowing. Far too much of the book was occupied with judging other women's appearances.

The core character rejected both an opportunity to blend her identity and serve a traditional, mundane husband, and to enter a faux union with a man who would provide her the social status of marriage, while retaining her individualism or “centrality”. I’m not sure why she commits to David - perhaps the distance inherent in the relationship was what she wanted, enough space to retain herself while providing snippets of love and intimacy

Quotes:
"I have held this rather dim and trusting personality together for a considerable length of time, and although I have certainly bored others I was not to be allowed to bore myself."

"I drank my coffee and paced around and tried to absorb all the details, as people think writers do..."

"Well, something had been accomplished: people were beginning to have names. The here and now, the quotidian, was beginning to acquire substance."

"It is a great mistake... to confuse happiness with one particular situation, one particular person. Since I freed myself from all that I have discovered the secret of contentment... It is simply this. Without a huge emotional investment, one can do whatever one pleases. One can take decisions, change one's mind, alter one's plans. There is none of the anxiety of waiting to see if that one other person has everything she desires, if she is discontented, upset, restless, bored."

"... I think of her as my poor mother. As I grow older myself I perceive her sadness, her bewilderment that life had taken such a turn, her loneliness... She comforted herself, that harsh disappointed woman, by reading love stories, simply romances with happy endings... In her last months, she lay in bed, wearing the silk peignoir that my father bought her on their honeymoon in Venice, not caring, perhaps not noticing, that the lace was torn, the pale blue faded to grey, and when she raised her eyes from her book, her eyes too were faded from blue to grey, and full of dreams, longings, disenchantment. My mother's fantasies, which remained unchanged all her life, taught me about reality."

"The careful pretence of her days here, the almost successful tenor of this artificial and meaningless life which had been decreed for her own good by others who. had no real understanding of what her own good was, suddenly appeared to her in all their futility. Perhaps the champagne, the cake, the celebration, had eroded the barriers of her mind, trailing sly and unwelcome association, making a nonsense of those careful arrangements she had worked out for herself, banishing amusement, returning her to seriousness and to painful reflection, demaning an accounting."

"I am no longer young... this is my last change... It is high time I forgot my hopes, the hopes I was born with, and faced reality. I shall never have that for which I long with my inmost heart... It is too late. But there are all the comforts of what is called maturity: pleasant companionship, comfort, proper holidays. It is a reasonable prospect. And I was always a reasonable woman."

"He seemed to collect such uncomfortable and out of the way experiences, expecting from them nothing but the value of novelty and irony."

"It seemed to her then that she had finished with this room, or perhaps the room had finished with her. In any event, some sort of natural conclusion had been reached. Yet, just as it is in the nature of leavetaking to feel regret, she knew that this room, in which she had been entirely alone, would always awaken in her some memory of warmth whenever she summoned it to mind."

"She was about to enter a world which she had instinctively recognised as belonging to others, in which she had no claim, a world of, among other things, investments, roof repairs, visitors for the weekend. And shall we take your car or mine?"

Erica DeMatos

Meniah

Fasihah Abd Razak 🌺🐧

Madeleine Crowther

Melis

Sonia Grgas

Jacob Mishook

Nicole Vanderbilt

Sabrina Z

Liam Byrne 

Moray Lyle McIntosh

Ece Nur Masood

Nathan Griffin

Into the rarefied atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac timidly walks Edith Hope, romantic novelist and holder of modest dreams. Edith has refused to sacrifice her ideals and remains stubbornly single, until she meets Mr Neville.

Hotel du Lac

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Rachel Prudden

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