After jilting her fiancé at the altar, Miss Edith Hope, a middle-aged Englishwoman and writer of romance novels, takes a holiday at a hotel near Lake Geneva. What it’s about: Geneva, Switzerland, the 1980s. Brookner is a brilliant writer and I can’t wait to read more by her.In which I review Hotel du Lac, Anita Brookner’s 1984 novel about a romance novelist holidaying at a Swiss hotel, in exile from a failed relationship. Overall, I really loved this short novel, more and more as I think about it. It was surprising, frustrating, yet true to the character. I haven’t read a book with such style in a long time. Her diction can slow entry into the novel, but once I adjusted to the writing, I was invested. She uses advanced vocabulary (I had to look up over ten words!) and acrobatic sentences.
The hotel is a metaphor for the aging women who are on the cusp of their own winter.īrookner’s prose is not inviting. This book explores marriage from several angles: wife, widow, mother, mistress. The other characters in the novel are in similar situations. As we learn more of her background, I really felt for her in many ways, but at the same time I questioned her choices. Still, I was enraptured by the novel from page one.Įdith is a sympathetic, but off-putting heroine of this story. Consequently, the novel isn’t plot driven as much as a character study. The setting is the book in many ways, doing so much work to establish mood, theme, metaphor. This book is named after the setting of the book, not a character, situation, or theme. When analyzing a book, I think the title is the first clue to the author’s intention. As the novel progressed the reader learns what brought Edith to the hotel. At the hotel, Edith meets eccentric guests: a mother and daughter who spend all day shopping, a woman with an eating disorder and a dog, and the lone man, Mr. She arrives as the aging hotel is entering it’s off season, just after the tourists of summer have left but before it shuts down for a long winter.
Writer Edith Hope escapes her life in the UK and travels to the Hotel du Lac on the shores of Lake Geneva.
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