Review: Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

The winner of the Booker Prize in 1984 Hotel du Lac stands up just as well now as it did when it was first released. Set during the 1950s Edith Hope is a disgraced romance novelist who is forced to exile herself from England following a scandal. She finds herself in a hotel in Europe where each of the guests has their own reasons for wanting to retreat from the world. When the charismatic Mr Neville offers Edith the chance to escape from the humiliation of her recent scandal, however, it forces her to ask some important questions--chiefly are there worse things that being unmarried and, perhaps, lonely.

Short and beautifully written, the author captures the tensions of the era and raises questions about a woman's role in 1950s England, her lack of agency and the double standards for wealthy men. Not only is wealthy Mr Neville allowed to behave badly, but the same behaviour from an employee at the hotel raises alarm bells through the supposedly genteel community. Everyone in the group is concerned with appearances and how they are perceived and at the end of the month when they are all due to return to their homes, each of the guests has learned precisely nothing, except perhaps for Edith.

Overall, I found this to be an insightful read and as I turned the pages I found myself feeling increasingly thankful that I was not an upper middle class woman in England in the 1950s. The questions of personal freedom remain entirely relevant in an era when lives can be so heavily scrutinised on social media and there is social pressure to look and behave in a certain way online. Brookner's prose is calm and quietly allows the reader to make up their own minds about Edith and to speculate on her future.

Recommended.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more

Who Else Writes Like V.C. Andrews?

Image
Are there any other authors out there who write similar novels to V.C. Andrews? This is a question I see asked frequently in excellent fan run V.C. Andrews Facebook groups like Attic Secrets and The Dolls Club. In times gone by, The Complete V.C. Andrews webpage (which is no more, but the best bits are archived by Lorraine at the Attic Secrets blog,) had a comprehensive list. Today, I thought I would put forward a few of my own thoughts and recommendations. (Note: This will focus mainly on the series and novels written by the actual V.C. Andrews and not ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman, who has a distinctive writing style of his own.) The Classics This is probably the best place to start, as it is likely that some of these novels influenced V.C. Andrews herself. Andrews was a fan of Charles Dickens, mentioning the author in the prologue of her most famous novel Flowers in the Attic. I have yet to read all of Dickens novels (I've read about half,) but I can feel a slight V.C. Andrews vi
Read more