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Hotel du Lac
In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?" It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a pseudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to resore her to her senses.
But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive.
184 pages, Hardcover
First published September 6, 1984
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26275 people want to read
About the author
Anita Brookner
61 books667 followersAnita Brookner published her first novel, A Start In Life in 1981. Her most notable novel, her fourth, Hotel du Lac won the Man Booker Prize in 1984. Her novel, The Next Big Thing was longlisted (alongside John Banville's, Shroud) in 2002 for the Man Booker Prize. She published more than 25 works of fiction, notably: Strangers (2009) shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Fraud (1992) and, The Rules of Engagement (2003). She was also the first female to hold a Slade Professorship of Fine Arts at Cambridge University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,342 reviews
March 4, 2025
The White Lotus is this book on drugs
March 27, 2023
'I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together.'
Well….Perhaps these moderate and modest dreams (perhaps shared by quite a few of us readers, regardless of gender and whether in a romantic relationship or not?) permit to categorise Anita Brookner’s protagonist Edith Hope as a romantic.
Author of romantic novels Edith Hope (penname Vanessa Wilde) finds herself sent off by friends to an exclusive, old-fashioned Swiss hotel, so she can reflect on her sins and stay out of the picture of attention for a while after she has caused some scandal (nature of which is scrupulously kept from the reader until half-way the book). Ending up in the hotel off-season, the introverted, mousy and middle-aged Edith cannot avoid getting entangled into the small circle of a few other, mostly female guests still staying in the hotel, floating on the dull soporific waves of ennui and passivity, observing their staid, calmly rippling existence with her writer’s keen and sharp eye.
The women Edith encounters seem actors in their own life. The narcissistic Mrs. Pusey relies on her past glory and inherited wealth as a once venerated wife and now blossoming widow, filling the void with jabbering along on trivialities and buying expensive clothes; her daughter Jennifer seems no more than an devoted cuddle toy to and pale copy from her mother; madame de Bonneuil, an old aristocratic lady has been dumped in the hotel by her only son to have her out of the way of the bitchy daughter-in law; the diva-like Monica is threatened with divorce if not curing from an eating disorder in order to produce an heir. Just like Edith lets herself being dragged by the fancies of Mrs. Pusey and Monica, she half-heartedly submits to the advances made to her by the cynic Mr. Neville, seeing her as a fitting object in his cunning plans.
Fooled somewhat by the publication date of the novel, 1984, I was rather stupefied by the petty, moralistic attitude of society on single women and marriage Anita Brookner conjures up in her novel. Discussing the novel in the reading group I attend, the moderator told us that the novel is actually set in the fifties (I didn’t find any clue to that in the novel). Such dating in my opinion made Edith’s reflections on the position of women, work and marriage however sound more sensible (at times the preoccupancy with marriage made me wonder if I was caught up in a Jane Austen persiflage, however at the same time I was puzzled by the every so often serious tone of Edith’s musings). The ladies in my reading group who are a tad older than me assured me that Brookner’s portrayal of the position of women in the fifties would have been fairly realistic (also reminding me of the times women were forced to quit teaching in Catholic schools the moment they married).
At first, Edith gives the impression having at least superficially internalised her time and culture’s dominant view on the vocation of women. Gradually she realises her position as a writer however offers her the opportunity to make her own choices independently of what is presumed the decent thing to do.
Brookner’s elegant pen is dipped in dry wit, on her best moments reminiscent of that other novelist who started to write fiction later in life, Penelope Fitzgerald. The vista on the social microcosm nourished by and thriving in a the hotel context reminded me of the novella’s of Stefan Zweig and of Vicky Baum’s Grand Hotel which I read last year.
The novel comprises some brilliant moments and I tremendously liked the fine way in which Brookner laces her novel with literary allusions, like depicting one of the characters as a Chekhovian The Lady with the Little Dog (Monica and her lap dog Kiki). It was by stumbling upon a phrasing of no more than three words, Brookner’s exquisite subtlety shines: Waving not drowning – which is the reverse of the poem of Stevie Smith Fionnuala refers to in her review of Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. Unlike the poor man in the poem, Edith isn’t drowning in her situation like her friends who put her on the plane to Switzerland fear. Edith is waving, she is free and not drowning in self-pity.
Slow-paced and rather uneventful, Brookner’s novel to my taste lingers a bit too long on rather mundane affairs by boundless descriptions of refined garb and appearances – throughout the whole, slender novel the reader is perhaps once too often reminded how stifling, dull, grey and boring idle upper-class life in the hotel is. I am not sure if Brookner’s novel can be considered feminist. I was a little nonplussed by Brookner’s gender stereotyping and the novel certainly isn’t of the kind that professes a great belief in the idea of sisterhood. The appalling coquetry of some of the ladies irritated me, as well as the rather cliché-ridden depiction of it by Brookner. Such however is quite functional in the narrative, making some of the musings of Edith more relatable to the reader ("The company of their own sex, Edith reflected was what drove many women into marriage."). The novel could be read as a somewhat sardonic, satirical take on the typical Harlequin romance with a couple of nice plot twists and a finer and less predictable ending.
The copy I read contained a marvellously generous tribute to Brookner written by Julian Barnes (in 1984 his ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ lost out the Booker to ‘Hotel to Lac’) in which he remembers her as ‘a novelist of peerless wit and insight and one of the most distinguished art historians of recent times’ (Barnes’s essay can be read here).
(*** ½)
Well….Perhaps these moderate and modest dreams (perhaps shared by quite a few of us readers, regardless of gender and whether in a romantic relationship or not?) permit to categorise Anita Brookner’s protagonist Edith Hope as a romantic.
Author of romantic novels Edith Hope (penname Vanessa Wilde) finds herself sent off by friends to an exclusive, old-fashioned Swiss hotel, so she can reflect on her sins and stay out of the picture of attention for a while after she has caused some scandal (nature of which is scrupulously kept from the reader until half-way the book). Ending up in the hotel off-season, the introverted, mousy and middle-aged Edith cannot avoid getting entangled into the small circle of a few other, mostly female guests still staying in the hotel, floating on the dull soporific waves of ennui and passivity, observing their staid, calmly rippling existence with her writer’s keen and sharp eye.
The women Edith encounters seem actors in their own life. The narcissistic Mrs. Pusey relies on her past glory and inherited wealth as a once venerated wife and now blossoming widow, filling the void with jabbering along on trivialities and buying expensive clothes; her daughter Jennifer seems no more than an devoted cuddle toy to and pale copy from her mother; madame de Bonneuil, an old aristocratic lady has been dumped in the hotel by her only son to have her out of the way of the bitchy daughter-in law; the diva-like Monica is threatened with divorce if not curing from an eating disorder in order to produce an heir. Just like Edith lets herself being dragged by the fancies of Mrs. Pusey and Monica, she half-heartedly submits to the advances made to her by the cynic Mr. Neville, seeing her as a fitting object in his cunning plans.
Fooled somewhat by the publication date of the novel, 1984, I was rather stupefied by the petty, moralistic attitude of society on single women and marriage Anita Brookner conjures up in her novel. Discussing the novel in the reading group I attend, the moderator told us that the novel is actually set in the fifties (I didn’t find any clue to that in the novel). Such dating in my opinion made Edith’s reflections on the position of women, work and marriage however sound more sensible (at times the preoccupancy with marriage made me wonder if I was caught up in a Jane Austen persiflage, however at the same time I was puzzled by the every so often serious tone of Edith’s musings). The ladies in my reading group who are a tad older than me assured me that Brookner’s portrayal of the position of women in the fifties would have been fairly realistic (also reminding me of the times women were forced to quit teaching in Catholic schools the moment they married).
At first, Edith gives the impression having at least superficially internalised her time and culture’s dominant view on the vocation of women. Gradually she realises her position as a writer however offers her the opportunity to make her own choices independently of what is presumed the decent thing to do.
Brookner’s elegant pen is dipped in dry wit, on her best moments reminiscent of that other novelist who started to write fiction later in life, Penelope Fitzgerald. The vista on the social microcosm nourished by and thriving in a the hotel context reminded me of the novella’s of Stefan Zweig and of Vicky Baum’s Grand Hotel which I read last year.
The novel comprises some brilliant moments and I tremendously liked the fine way in which Brookner laces her novel with literary allusions, like depicting one of the characters as a Chekhovian The Lady with the Little Dog (Monica and her lap dog Kiki). It was by stumbling upon a phrasing of no more than three words, Brookner’s exquisite subtlety shines: Waving not drowning – which is the reverse of the poem of Stevie Smith Fionnuala refers to in her review of Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. Unlike the poor man in the poem, Edith isn’t drowning in her situation like her friends who put her on the plane to Switzerland fear. Edith is waving, she is free and not drowning in self-pity.
Slow-paced and rather uneventful, Brookner’s novel to my taste lingers a bit too long on rather mundane affairs by boundless descriptions of refined garb and appearances – throughout the whole, slender novel the reader is perhaps once too often reminded how stifling, dull, grey and boring idle upper-class life in the hotel is. I am not sure if Brookner’s novel can be considered feminist. I was a little nonplussed by Brookner’s gender stereotyping and the novel certainly isn’t of the kind that professes a great belief in the idea of sisterhood. The appalling coquetry of some of the ladies irritated me, as well as the rather cliché-ridden depiction of it by Brookner. Such however is quite functional in the narrative, making some of the musings of Edith more relatable to the reader ("The company of their own sex, Edith reflected was what drove many women into marriage."). The novel could be read as a somewhat sardonic, satirical take on the typical Harlequin romance with a couple of nice plot twists and a finer and less predictable ending.
The copy I read contained a marvellously generous tribute to Brookner written by Julian Barnes (in 1984 his ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ lost out the Booker to ‘Hotel to Lac’) in which he remembers her as ‘a novelist of peerless wit and insight and one of the most distinguished art historians of recent times’ (Barnes’s essay can be read here).
(*** ½)
March 26, 2023
Theoretically, Edith Hope, an English writer of romantic fiction who leads a vanilla existence and bears a resemblance to Virginia Woolfe, has retreated to an out-of-season hotel in Switzerland to work on her latest novel. In reality, she . So her friends have expeditiously packed her off to the Hotel du Lac to think things through.
The Hotel is a snooty institution, selective of its clientele and tastefully austere. And as such it is unencumbered by the vulgarity of piped music, scatter cushions and fabulous furnishings. The du Lac prides itself on not being one of the herd; its service is impeccable, its discretion assured.
Edith, as is true of all writers, is an inveterate people watcher and secretly invents lives for the rich strangers who frequent the hotel. In due course, she is summoned into their cosseted worlds and used as a sounding board to reinforce their social standing: a person required to listen and not speak.
This is a stylishly-written book; one to admire for its elegant prose and for Brookner's insightful and wryly amusing examination of the human condition. For my taste though, the story was largely uneventful and Edith's willing compliance did become frustrating after a while.
As well as wanting to fit in with these self-obsessed socialites, the fictional author yearns for true love. Not the sweaty "take me, baby, take me" kind of love; more the walking arm-in-arm on a beach variety.
Affable Edith, though, puts great faith in being the tortoise that triumphs in a world of hares.
In summary, this book is beautifully written, but a little too civilised for this reader. It's a comfy cardigan of a book, but I don't do comfy cardigans; I wanted Adam Ant's hussar tunic with the gold braiding.
6/5 for the well-crafted prose and the ab-fab characters.
2/5 for the going-nowhere story.
The Hotel is a snooty institution, selective of its clientele and tastefully austere. And as such it is unencumbered by the vulgarity of piped music, scatter cushions and fabulous furnishings. The du Lac prides itself on not being one of the herd; its service is impeccable, its discretion assured.
Edith, as is true of all writers, is an inveterate people watcher and secretly invents lives for the rich strangers who frequent the hotel. In due course, she is summoned into their cosseted worlds and used as a sounding board to reinforce their social standing: a person required to listen and not speak.
This is a stylishly-written book; one to admire for its elegant prose and for Brookner's insightful and wryly amusing examination of the human condition. For my taste though, the story was largely uneventful and Edith's willing compliance did become frustrating after a while.
As well as wanting to fit in with these self-obsessed socialites, the fictional author yearns for true love. Not the sweaty "take me, baby, take me" kind of love; more the walking arm-in-arm on a beach variety.
Affable Edith, though, puts great faith in being the tortoise that triumphs in a world of hares.
In summary, this book is beautifully written, but a little too civilised for this reader. It's a comfy cardigan of a book, but I don't do comfy cardigans; I wanted Adam Ant's hussar tunic with the gold braiding.
6/5 for the well-crafted prose and the ab-fab characters.
2/5 for the going-nowhere story.
December 29, 2019
”Her friend and neighbour, Penelope Milne, who, tight-lipped, was prepared to forgive her only on condition that she disappeared for a decent length of time and came back older, wiser, and properly apologetic. For I am not to be allowed my lapse, as if I were an artless girl, she thought; and why should I be? I am a serious woman who should know better and am judged by my friends to be past the age of indiscretion; several people have remarked upon my physical resemblance to Virginia Woolf; I am a householder, a ratepayer, a good plain cook, and a deliverer of typescripts well before the deadline; I sign anything that is put in front of me; I never telephone my publisher; and I make no claims for my particular sort of writing, although I understand that it is doing quite well.”
Edith Hope was supposed to get married, but at the 11th hour decided that it would be a grave mistake. Not the getting married part, but the getting married to the man who quite possibly might stupefy her to death.
As crushing as being lonely can be, doubling down by being married to a person who doesn’t make your heart beat faster when you hear their footsteps only adds another layer of unhappiness that can lead to rocks in pockets and an immersion in the closest river.
But now that she has proven herself unstable, she obviously needs some time for self reflection (as if she doesn’t do that enough all the time), hopefully to return repentant for all the trouble she put her friends through with this rather unexpected lapse of judgment.
See what they don’t know
is
that
she has a lover.
He is unavailable except for short lustful encounters and too brief moments of domesticity that are so wonderful that she starts to envision what she wants. ”My idea of happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening, every evening.”
Is that too much to ask? Is that really just too much to hope for?
She has been dispatched to the Hotel du Lac in Switzerland. I’d say she was fleeing, but that isn’t quite right. It has been strongly suggested by her friends and acquaintances that she requires some time to come to different decisions.
Frankly, I’d say she needs different friends and acquaintances.
At least maybe in this plush hotel in the offseason, she can find some unusual characters who will add flesh to her characters in a novel.
Like this lovely, melancholy woman:
”Naturally, she sulks. She eats cakes as others might go slumming. But she is very sad because she longs for a child and I don’t think she will ever have one. She is so beautiful, so thin, so over-bred. Her pelvis is like a wishbone!”
Or how about the infuriating Philip Neville, who challenges everything she believes seemingly for his own amusement:
”He conducts himself altogether gracefully. He is well turned out, she thought, surveying the panama hat and the linen jacket. He is even good-looking: an eighteenth-century face, fine, reticent, full-lipped, with a faint bluish gleam of beard just visible beneath the healthy skin. A heartless man, I think. Furiously intelligent. Suitable.”
Suitable?
Edith is still writing every chance she gets. After all, she has never missed a deadline. It is something she can control, and escaping into her writing is therapeutic, though a singular endeavor by design. Even so, she has not emerged from her “lapse in judgment” unscathed. ”She felt a weariness that seemed to preclude any enthusiasm, any initiative, any relaxation. Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid, but the choice of a book presented some difficulties, since when she was writing she could only read something she had read before, and in her exhausted state, a febrile agitation, invisible to the naked eye, tended to distance even the very familiar.”
If I am too exhausted or too stressed to read, I am in worst shape than what most people could really understand. I could see Edith patting my hand with the proper amount of sympathy, serving me some hot tea, and some of her plain cooking while we chatted amiably under a lattice garden shade.
Anita Brookner won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac in 1984. She published her first novel at the age of 53, so there is hope for all us late blooming writers. She writes about loneliness and unattainable love with characters who have difficulty fitting into normal society. Interestingly enough, she never married, but stayed home and took care of her aging parents. I think she knew of what she wrote. I’ve seen the criticism leveled at her accusing her of writing the same book over and over again with very similar themes. I’ve only read one book by her, so I can’t really comment on that criticism except to say that sometimes there is comfort in picking up a writer and knowing exactly what the basic themes of the plot will be. Since I identify with characters like Edith Hope, I can certainly see myself returning to the world of Anita Brookner, while steaming the glass of the mirror she holds up for me.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Edith Hope was supposed to get married, but at the 11th hour decided that it would be a grave mistake. Not the getting married part, but the getting married to the man who quite possibly might stupefy her to death.
As crushing as being lonely can be, doubling down by being married to a person who doesn’t make your heart beat faster when you hear their footsteps only adds another layer of unhappiness that can lead to rocks in pockets and an immersion in the closest river.
But now that she has proven herself unstable, she obviously needs some time for self reflection (as if she doesn’t do that enough all the time), hopefully to return repentant for all the trouble she put her friends through with this rather unexpected lapse of judgment.
See what they don’t know
is
that
she has a lover.
He is unavailable except for short lustful encounters and too brief moments of domesticity that are so wonderful that she starts to envision what she wants. ”My idea of happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening, every evening.”
Is that too much to ask? Is that really just too much to hope for?
She has been dispatched to the Hotel du Lac in Switzerland. I’d say she was fleeing, but that isn’t quite right. It has been strongly suggested by her friends and acquaintances that she requires some time to come to different decisions.
Frankly, I’d say she needs different friends and acquaintances.
At least maybe in this plush hotel in the offseason, she can find some unusual characters who will add flesh to her characters in a novel.
Like this lovely, melancholy woman:
”Naturally, she sulks. She eats cakes as others might go slumming. But she is very sad because she longs for a child and I don’t think she will ever have one. She is so beautiful, so thin, so over-bred. Her pelvis is like a wishbone!”
Or how about the infuriating Philip Neville, who challenges everything she believes seemingly for his own amusement:
”He conducts himself altogether gracefully. He is well turned out, she thought, surveying the panama hat and the linen jacket. He is even good-looking: an eighteenth-century face, fine, reticent, full-lipped, with a faint bluish gleam of beard just visible beneath the healthy skin. A heartless man, I think. Furiously intelligent. Suitable.”
Suitable?
Edith is still writing every chance she gets. After all, she has never missed a deadline. It is something she can control, and escaping into her writing is therapeutic, though a singular endeavor by design. Even so, she has not emerged from her “lapse in judgment” unscathed. ”She felt a weariness that seemed to preclude any enthusiasm, any initiative, any relaxation. Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid, but the choice of a book presented some difficulties, since when she was writing she could only read something she had read before, and in her exhausted state, a febrile agitation, invisible to the naked eye, tended to distance even the very familiar.”
If I am too exhausted or too stressed to read, I am in worst shape than what most people could really understand. I could see Edith patting my hand with the proper amount of sympathy, serving me some hot tea, and some of her plain cooking while we chatted amiably under a lattice garden shade.
Anita Brookner won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac in 1984. She published her first novel at the age of 53, so there is hope for all us late blooming writers. She writes about loneliness and unattainable love with characters who have difficulty fitting into normal society. Interestingly enough, she never married, but stayed home and took care of her aging parents. I think she knew of what she wrote. I’ve seen the criticism leveled at her accusing her of writing the same book over and over again with very similar themes. I’ve only read one book by her, so I can’t really comment on that criticism except to say that sometimes there is comfort in picking up a writer and knowing exactly what the basic themes of the plot will be. Since I identify with characters like Edith Hope, I can certainly see myself returning to the world of Anita Brookner, while steaming the glass of the mirror she holds up for me.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
November 14, 2010
A very slow, mournful novel set in an end-of-season hotel which may - just may - be a metaphor or sumpin. Everything happens in slowmo - walks, meals, coffee, tea, cakes, clothes (pages of those), more walks, mothers, daughters, gloomy memories, walks, talks, a small dog, gauntness, autumnal colours, pallor, crepuscularity, more damned walks, more wretched meals, the god damned dog again, more clothes, and on p 143 this:
"my patience with this little comedy is wearing a bit thin"
It's a ghastly vision of humanity presented here to be sure, bitter and defeated. In this world we swim slowly in a social fishtank constantly judging and appraising each other's sexual, sartorial, social and financial status. The women relentlessly and mercilessly judge all other women they encounter, the men likewise. Our heroine says "the company of their own sex was what drove many women into marriage". Some kind of bleak view of women, I say. But generalisations like this pop up all over - "women hide their sadness, thought Edith. Their joy they like to show off to one another." Or "men like the feeling they have had to fight other men for possession [of women:]". Wow, this is so pre-feminist. It was written in the 80s but reads more like the 40s. And it won the Booker! What?! What??!! I was expecting something acrid and memorable, but I got this wallow in antique stereotypes and fake psychological insight. Typical sentence:
This banal and inappropriate excursion seemed to her almost perverse in its lack of attractions; she had supposed that they might be going on another walk.
"my patience with this little comedy is wearing a bit thin"
It's a ghastly vision of humanity presented here to be sure, bitter and defeated. In this world we swim slowly in a social fishtank constantly judging and appraising each other's sexual, sartorial, social and financial status. The women relentlessly and mercilessly judge all other women they encounter, the men likewise. Our heroine says "the company of their own sex was what drove many women into marriage". Some kind of bleak view of women, I say. But generalisations like this pop up all over - "women hide their sadness, thought Edith. Their joy they like to show off to one another." Or "men like the feeling they have had to fight other men for possession [of women:]". Wow, this is so pre-feminist. It was written in the 80s but reads more like the 40s. And it won the Booker! What?! What??!! I was expecting something acrid and memorable, but I got this wallow in antique stereotypes and fake psychological insight. Typical sentence:
This banal and inappropriate excursion seemed to her almost perverse in its lack of attractions; she had supposed that they might be going on another walk.
November 16, 2025
This is the eighth novel I have read by Anita Brookner. I find her novels an intriguing, slow, calming read. This one, Hotel du Lac, won the Booker Prize in 1984. I read this as a buddy-read with Ebba Simone and I appreciate her insights and comments along the way.
Brookner’s novels are about loneliness and solitude, especially about older women, although a few are about lonely older men.
The story opens with a bit of mystery. The main character is Edith, a middle-aged woman who is a well-known author. She is staying by herself in an old-fashioned Swiss grand hotel on Lake Lucerne. We learn that she is in a kind of self-imposed exile after causing some type of scandal back home in London. Her best/only female friend back home and her publisher urged her to leave for a time 'while things blow over.’
We learn the answer to this mystery about half-way through the book. If you can’t wait, here it is And we wonder how much of a ‘friend’ her only friend is. She seems pushy and manipulative and her opinion about Edith’s books is that “…she only wrote about those pleasures that life had denied her.” And maybe that statement applies to Anita Brookner as well.
It’s end of season at the hotel and there are only a few guests left, almost all women. All of these characters are pretty obnoxious in one way or another but she gets dragged into interacting with them at lunch and dinner and it becomes almost a daily chore for her to go eat.
She has promised her publisher that she will work on her next novel, but she’s in such inner turmoil that she makes little progress. She doesn’t know what to do with herself and spends a lot of time walking alone along the lake. She writes love letters to a man back home – but does she send them or not? There’s another mystery.
Suddenly an older, wealthy, cultured man comes on the scene as a new guest. They start spending time together and within a week or so he proposes a ‘marriage of convenience’ to her. He says, more or less,
Will she take him up on his offer? It’s a real challenge for Edith because “…the question of what behavior most becomes a woman, [is] the question around which she had written most of her novels.” Even her maid has something to say about Edith. The maid tells Edith’s best friend “In a dream half the time, making up those stories of hers. I wonder if she knows what it’s all about.”
As a novelist, Brookner (1928-2016) was an amazinging late bloomer, publishing her first novel when she was 53! She was a professor of art history at various British universities including Cambridge.
Her sometimes-bleak stories of loneliness are apparently autobiographical. Wikipedia tells us: Brookner never married but took care of her parents as they aged. Brookner commented in one interview that she had received several proposals of marriage, but rejected all of them, concluding that men were "people with their own agenda, who think you might be fitted in if they lop off certain parts. You can see them coming a mile off." She said in a Paris Review interview: "I have said that I am one of the loneliest women in London."
I’ve enjoyed many other novels by Anita Brookner and below are links to my reviews of them. The two I enjoyed most were Hotel du Lac and Making Things Better. (I gave those two novels a rating of 5; all the others, 4.)
The Bay of Angels
A Friend from England
Look at Me
Making Things Better
Altered States
A Private View
The Debut
Visitors
Dolly
Undue Influence
February 10, 2023
'If your capacity for bad behaviour were being properly used, you would not be moping around in that cardigan.'
Oh, if he only knew! Edith Hope and her dowdy cardigan know about bad behaviour well enough. I won't spill the beans, but it's precisely because of her bad behaviour that she's been sequestered at the snooty Swiss Hotel du Lac, until society at large can recover from their shock or distain and unknot their panties or whatever they need to do. (This 1984 Booker winner feels like it's time-warped back to prissy 50s England, but I'm not sure exactly when it's set.)
Edith languishes at the Hotel du Lac, where not much of anything happens and she doesn't get the telephone call she's waiting for. Being the writer she is, she people watches, and there are some interesting specimens (like the ghastly Mrs. Pusey and her daughter Jennifer), but even that grows old after a time.
I have to say that it was growing a little old for me, too. The seemingly endless descriptions of surroundings and people. The deadness of the place. A plot so rooted that we barely move two steps out of the muted dining room.
That's not to say it's a bad book. It's quiet, it's contemplative. It ponders (a lot) about what goes on between men and women, and who "wins" in the end. And what does "winning" look like? For Mrs. Pusey, it's having the infantile adoration of her grown daughter, and the financial ability to make countless shopping trips for expensive nightgowns. For Edith, it's love and companionship.
Edith is a romance novelist who happens to believe in what she writes, which may well mean she will be alone forever - because, darling in the cardigan, the world just doesn't work like that. People do what they want, or what is easiest for them, sneaking out of hotel rooms in the wee hours with a discreet hush of a closed door. Her belief and her hope make her a bit of an idealist, and maybe she won't get what she wants but there's always the possibility, which makes life worth living.
Oh, if he only knew! Edith Hope and her dowdy cardigan know about bad behaviour well enough. I won't spill the beans, but it's precisely because of her bad behaviour that she's been sequestered at the snooty Swiss Hotel du Lac, until society at large can recover from their shock or distain and unknot their panties or whatever they need to do. (This 1984 Booker winner feels like it's time-warped back to prissy 50s England, but I'm not sure exactly when it's set.)
Edith languishes at the Hotel du Lac, where not much of anything happens and she doesn't get the telephone call she's waiting for. Being the writer she is, she people watches, and there are some interesting specimens (like the ghastly Mrs. Pusey and her daughter Jennifer), but even that grows old after a time.
I have to say that it was growing a little old for me, too. The seemingly endless descriptions of surroundings and people. The deadness of the place. A plot so rooted that we barely move two steps out of the muted dining room.
That's not to say it's a bad book. It's quiet, it's contemplative. It ponders (a lot) about what goes on between men and women, and who "wins" in the end. And what does "winning" look like? For Mrs. Pusey, it's having the infantile adoration of her grown daughter, and the financial ability to make countless shopping trips for expensive nightgowns. For Edith, it's love and companionship.
Edith is a romance novelist who happens to believe in what she writes, which may well mean she will be alone forever - because, darling in the cardigan, the world just doesn't work like that. People do what they want, or what is easiest for them, sneaking out of hotel rooms in the wee hours with a discreet hush of a closed door. Her belief and her hope make her a bit of an idealist, and maybe she won't get what she wants but there's always the possibility, which makes life worth living.
December 13, 2023
The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.
-Plato
Love has brought her to Hotel du Lac, where the mountain dissolves into the mist; where the soul yearns to depart for unknown shores.
Edith Hope, a writer of romantic fiction has come to stay at the hotel to forget her love.
But can one live without love? Can one think or act or speak or write or even dream in the absence of love?
Does one need more love? Or less?
What is love? Sitting in a garden, reading, writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person you love will come home to you in the evening. Every evening.
Edith is a romantic. She likes solitude. She is secretive, self-effacing and apologetic. In her own words, she is ‘not fascinating enough’. She is polite even to the rude.
People like to confide in her while at the same time are indifferent towards her.
It is a great mistake to confuse happiness with one particular situation, one particular person
Staying at the hotel and getting acquainted with new friends was a good idea. But what about all the things she hasn't yet said to the one man she loves.
Should she forget her hopes? Should she face reality? Or should she hold on to her dreams and wishes?
-Plato
Love has brought her to Hotel du Lac, where the mountain dissolves into the mist; where the soul yearns to depart for unknown shores.
Edith Hope, a writer of romantic fiction has come to stay at the hotel to forget her love.
But can one live without love? Can one think or act or speak or write or even dream in the absence of love?
Does one need more love? Or less?
What is love? Sitting in a garden, reading, writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person you love will come home to you in the evening. Every evening.
Edith is a romantic. She likes solitude. She is secretive, self-effacing and apologetic. In her own words, she is ‘not fascinating enough’. She is polite even to the rude.
People like to confide in her while at the same time are indifferent towards her.
It is a great mistake to confuse happiness with one particular situation, one particular person
Staying at the hotel and getting acquainted with new friends was a good idea. But what about all the things she hasn't yet said to the one man she loves.
Should she forget her hopes? Should she face reality? Or should she hold on to her dreams and wishes?
February 9, 2020
This book, I'm going in two directions with this one. On the one hand, at times boring me, on the other hand, an interesting story, with interesting observations on persons, environment and the theme love by a sadly portraited woman, who imo is strong in the end of the book.
April 10, 2017
I knew I was going to like this book the minute I read Edith's description of her hotel room, decorated as it is in shades of overcooked veal. There are so many moments of humor in these pages, but it is quiet, blink-and-you-might-miss-it humor.
"People feel at home with low moral standards. It is scruples that put them off."
"The company of their own sex, Edith reflected was what drove many women into marriage."
The first 100 pages or so of the novel, Edith is more of a narrator of the characters in the hotel. There are hints of a mistake she has made, ending in her retreat (either a rejuvenation or a running away) in this fine but non-flashy hotel in Switzerland. The hotel itself is a character, as are the people working and staying there. She muses on them and as she gets to know them, has to change some of her opinions.
In the second half, more is known of her back story while her present day moves forward. Without spoiling anything that happens, I want to say that I find I am far more empathetic to a woman in literature who is alone but self-possessed over a woman who lets life be decided for her. I enjoyed the character of Edith very much!!
"People feel at home with low moral standards. It is scruples that put them off."
"The company of their own sex, Edith reflected was what drove many women into marriage."
The first 100 pages or so of the novel, Edith is more of a narrator of the characters in the hotel. There are hints of a mistake she has made, ending in her retreat (either a rejuvenation or a running away) in this fine but non-flashy hotel in Switzerland. The hotel itself is a character, as are the people working and staying there. She muses on them and as she gets to know them, has to change some of her opinions.
In the second half, more is known of her back story while her present day moves forward. Without spoiling anything that happens, I want to say that I find I am far more empathetic to a woman in literature who is alone but self-possessed over a woman who lets life be decided for her. I enjoyed the character of Edith very much!!
April 3, 2019
A novel that is minimalist in every way. Reads like watching a cloud pass. Every word meticulously placed. Much like this review.
February 9, 2023
‘He was a man of few words,’ we are told, of one of the inhabitants of this novel's eponymous guest house, ‘but those few words were judiciously selected, weighed for quality, and delivered with expertise.’ You feel this must be the highest praise coming from Anita Brookner. She doesn't say all that much – the book is not overburdened with plot or incident – but what she does say is so well expressed that you feel a sentence-by-sentence pleasure in reading it, regardless of what is (or isn't) happening.
And it's no coincidence that this man of few words is a man, since Edith, the central character, contrasts him immediately with the women she has been associating with, who are full of ‘happy expressions, and a great deal of delightfully inconsequential information’. Behind the book's stately plotlessness there is a constant, and rather deadly, investigation into gender roles and expectations, how they are performed, and how they can be internalised.
And Edith should know, since it was a moment of social disgrace connected to marriage that led to her flight from England to the Hotel du Lac, somewhere on Lake Geneva, apparently in the vicinity of Lausanne, where she is soaking up ‘the melancholy of exile’. Most of the other guests seem to be British, too. (In fiction, Switzerland tends not to be inhabited by the Swiss, but by travellers, spies, tourists, outcasts and drifters.) The temporal setting is also a little vague. The book came out in 1984, but it feels as though it could be happening anything up to thirty years earlier than that – it exists in a kind of eternally class-conscious British present.
A hotel is a good, insular setting for a book without much plot, because you don't really need much. You just plonk a few interesting characters in it, and wait for them to interact. They can't get away, after all. Brookner exploits the pressure-cooker atmosphere to its fullest, along with the indistinctness of the weather, and the prevailing lassitude of a hotel at the end of the season. In this environment, everything contributes to Edith's spiralling thoughts about what has happened to her and what will become of her – which, like her career (she is a writer of romantic fiction) ultimately circles back to the subject of what women want, and what men want from them. Her own fantasy is simple enough:
And yeah, you'd have to say that does sound pretty idyllic. But to get there, certain behaviours have to be adopted. Edith is very judgemental of the women she meets at the hotel. and if she is much more approving of the few men, there seems to be something unearned about this. Perhaps she almost realises it. ‘I have been too harsh on women,’ she thinks at one point, ‘because I understand them better than I understand men.’ Don't expect the book to end in a shoot-out or anything, but there is an emotional resolution, which I found very satisfying.
The joy of Brookner's prose is in its precision and efficiency. One character is said to ‘have absented herself once more behind her docile face’. Another is condemned with the devastating phrase: ‘And then she saw, in a flash, but for all time, the totality of his mouse-like seemliness.’ You read more for these exquisite constructions than for any dramatic set-pieces or confrontations. ‘The sensation of being entertained by words,’ Edith reflects, ‘was one which she encountered all too rarely.’ Well, quite – which is why a book like this is such a treat.
And it's no coincidence that this man of few words is a man, since Edith, the central character, contrasts him immediately with the women she has been associating with, who are full of ‘happy expressions, and a great deal of delightfully inconsequential information’. Behind the book's stately plotlessness there is a constant, and rather deadly, investigation into gender roles and expectations, how they are performed, and how they can be internalised.
The company of their own sex, Edith reflected, was what drove many women into marriage.
And Edith should know, since it was a moment of social disgrace connected to marriage that led to her flight from England to the Hotel du Lac, somewhere on Lake Geneva, apparently in the vicinity of Lausanne, where she is soaking up ‘the melancholy of exile’. Most of the other guests seem to be British, too. (In fiction, Switzerland tends not to be inhabited by the Swiss, but by travellers, spies, tourists, outcasts and drifters.) The temporal setting is also a little vague. The book came out in 1984, but it feels as though it could be happening anything up to thirty years earlier than that – it exists in a kind of eternally class-conscious British present.
A hotel is a good, insular setting for a book without much plot, because you don't really need much. You just plonk a few interesting characters in it, and wait for them to interact. They can't get away, after all. Brookner exploits the pressure-cooker atmosphere to its fullest, along with the indistinctness of the weather, and the prevailing lassitude of a hotel at the end of the season. In this environment, everything contributes to Edith's spiralling thoughts about what has happened to her and what will become of her – which, like her career (she is a writer of romantic fiction) ultimately circles back to the subject of what women want, and what men want from them. Her own fantasy is simple enough:
‘My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.’
And yeah, you'd have to say that does sound pretty idyllic. But to get there, certain behaviours have to be adopted. Edith is very judgemental of the women she meets at the hotel. and if she is much more approving of the few men, there seems to be something unearned about this. Perhaps she almost realises it. ‘I have been too harsh on women,’ she thinks at one point, ‘because I understand them better than I understand men.’ Don't expect the book to end in a shoot-out or anything, but there is an emotional resolution, which I found very satisfying.
The joy of Brookner's prose is in its precision and efficiency. One character is said to ‘have absented herself once more behind her docile face’. Another is condemned with the devastating phrase: ‘And then she saw, in a flash, but for all time, the totality of his mouse-like seemliness.’ You read more for these exquisite constructions than for any dramatic set-pieces or confrontations. ‘The sensation of being entertained by words,’ Edith reflects, ‘was one which she encountered all too rarely.’ Well, quite – which is why a book like this is such a treat.
January 31, 2022
There is an abundance of beauty in Anita Brookner's prose. I want to be a tenant that resides in her elegantly furnished sentences for a while. I already have packed several of my nicest cardigans and other belongings and a fountain pen ready to sign a limited lease and to move right in. But I do not want to live in Edith's house in London or at Hotel du Lac.
My great friend Jim Fonseca put Anita Brookner on my radar. She is one of his favourite writers (Top 10). Such beautiful and elegant prose is rare. Only "April in Spain" by John Banville comes to my mind. And "The Employees". And the latter is poetry in prose.
Caution: Spoilers!
Something has happened back in London and Edith Hope's best friend Penelope Milne makes Edith therefore leave and go to Switzerland: "Penelope drove fast [to the airport], and kept her eyes grimly ahead as if escorting a prisoner from dock to a maximum security wing."
Edith is a writer, like Anita Brookner. She is a "writer of romantic fiction under a more thrusting name." Edith Hope is a romantic at heart and there is someone whom she loves. She owns a little house with a garden in London. She is in her forties. (She is only a few years older than Jennifer Pusey whom she assumes to be 39 years old. A quite precise guess. We will encounter the Puseys at Hotel du Lac.)
Edith's last name is "Hope". Her friend Penelope wants her to forget her hopes. Edith literally says so at the beginning of chapter 9. Penelope wants Edith to get married to someone she does neither love nor like nor is attracted to nor has anything in common with. This means she would probably also lose "Hope" literally (her last name). "It is a reasonable project," Edith ponders. "Pardon?", Ebba wonders.
This novel has a 50's feel to it. I tried to collect some clues to confirm the time period.
Edith Hope is an excellent observer. She does not have kin expect her "father's crazy vegetarian cousin". She leads a lonely life. She has few friends and her best friend Penelope is not a good friend in my opinion. I think she gets along well with her agent and her publisher.
I will share a quote which reveals a bit of the personalities/friendship of Edith and Penelope.
Edith is overhearing a conversation between Mrs. Dempster, her cleaning lady, and her best friend Penelope Milne while Edith is in her garden and they are inside:
" 'In a dream half of the time,' observed Mrs Dempster, 'making up those stories of hers. I sometimes wonder if [Edith] knows what it's all about.'
Penelope laughed and Edith, seeing this through the open kitchen door, wondered if she might be allowed in to share the joke.
'My dear, I'm the one with all the stories,' she was in time to hear Penelope say. 'I wonder why she doesn't put me in a book.'
I have, thought Edith. You did not recognize yourself."
Don't get me started on Mr Neville or the Puseys.
As usual, I am having theories about the ending/what will happen thereafter.
And I'd like to read another novel by Anita Brookner this year.
My great friend Jim Fonseca put Anita Brookner on my radar. She is one of his favourite writers (Top 10). Such beautiful and elegant prose is rare. Only "April in Spain" by John Banville comes to my mind. And "The Employees". And the latter is poetry in prose.
Caution: Spoilers!
Something has happened back in London and Edith Hope's best friend Penelope Milne makes Edith therefore leave and go to Switzerland: "Penelope drove fast [to the airport], and kept her eyes grimly ahead as if escorting a prisoner from dock to a maximum security wing."
Edith is a writer, like Anita Brookner. She is a "writer of romantic fiction under a more thrusting name." Edith Hope is a romantic at heart and there is someone whom she loves. She owns a little house with a garden in London. She is in her forties. (She is only a few years older than Jennifer Pusey whom she assumes to be 39 years old. A quite precise guess. We will encounter the Puseys at Hotel du Lac.)
Edith's last name is "Hope". Her friend Penelope wants her to forget her hopes. Edith literally says so at the beginning of chapter 9. Penelope wants Edith to get married to someone she does neither love nor like nor is attracted to nor has anything in common with. This means she would probably also lose "Hope" literally (her last name). "It is a reasonable project," Edith ponders. "Pardon?", Ebba wonders.
This novel has a 50's feel to it. I tried to collect some clues to confirm the time period.
Edith Hope is an excellent observer. She does not have kin expect her "father's crazy vegetarian cousin". She leads a lonely life. She has few friends and her best friend Penelope is not a good friend in my opinion. I think she gets along well with her agent and her publisher.
I will share a quote which reveals a bit of the personalities/friendship of Edith and Penelope.
Edith is overhearing a conversation between Mrs. Dempster, her cleaning lady, and her best friend Penelope Milne while Edith is in her garden and they are inside:
" 'In a dream half of the time,' observed Mrs Dempster, 'making up those stories of hers. I sometimes wonder if [Edith] knows what it's all about.'
Penelope laughed and Edith, seeing this through the open kitchen door, wondered if she might be allowed in to share the joke.
'My dear, I'm the one with all the stories,' she was in time to hear Penelope say. 'I wonder why she doesn't put me in a book.'
I have, thought Edith. You did not recognize yourself."
Don't get me started on Mr Neville or the Puseys.
As usual, I am having theories about the ending/what will happen thereafter.
And I'd like to read another novel by Anita Brookner this year.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 4, 2016
This review contains spoilers.
1984 Booker Prize Winner.
Edith Hope, a successful romance writer, has made some mistakes, two of them actually; she is having an affair with a married man, and she walked out on her wedding to another man at the last minute. So her friends suggest that she take a change of scenery, another way of saying, get out of town for awhile. So she gets away to Switzerland, and the luxurious Hotel du Lac. But it's later in the story when the reader is told the reason for her trip.
For some, this novel is slow to start, there is just not a lot of action. But Brookner is slowly building the foundation for her characters and the story. Her detailed descriptions of everything; the characters, the hotel, her own history and feelings. It's very much in the style of Henry James, I think, just shorter sentences and paragraphs than the great man was famous for.
What Edith finds when she gets to the hotel is a group of very eccentric inmates. But this group helps her find the bearings for her own life's course, helps her decide between love and security, because at this point in her life she knows she can't have both. This story is her journey through the icebergs of her life and the Hotel du Lac. And the writing is excellent, as you would expect in a Booker Prize winner, and it has to be in a novel structured like this, it's simply the difference between success and failure.
4 solid stars.
1984 Booker Prize Winner.
Edith Hope, a successful romance writer, has made some mistakes, two of them actually; she is having an affair with a married man, and she walked out on her wedding to another man at the last minute. So her friends suggest that she take a change of scenery, another way of saying, get out of town for awhile. So she gets away to Switzerland, and the luxurious Hotel du Lac. But it's later in the story when the reader is told the reason for her trip.
For some, this novel is slow to start, there is just not a lot of action. But Brookner is slowly building the foundation for her characters and the story. Her detailed descriptions of everything; the characters, the hotel, her own history and feelings. It's very much in the style of Henry James, I think, just shorter sentences and paragraphs than the great man was famous for.
What Edith finds when she gets to the hotel is a group of very eccentric inmates. But this group helps her find the bearings for her own life's course, helps her decide between love and security, because at this point in her life she knows she can't have both. This story is her journey through the icebergs of her life and the Hotel du Lac. And the writing is excellent, as you would expect in a Booker Prize winner, and it has to be in a novel structured like this, it's simply the difference between success and failure.
4 solid stars.
March 1, 2021
She bequeathed to me her own cloud of unknowing. She comforted herself, that harsh disappointed woman, by reading love stories, simple romances with happy endings. Perhaps that is why I write them.
My first Brookner and initial impressions are what a great stylist she is: her sentences have a kind of Austenesque balance and elegance, unflamboyant and undramatic, but meticulous and measured and often infused with a dry wit which is almost, but not quite, cruel: 'Mrs Pusey, that pinnacle of feminine chic, that arbiter of taste, that relentless seeker after luxury goods, that charmer of multitudes, is seventy-nine!'
The setting of this, the eponymous Hotel du Lac, reminded me of the boarding hotels we find in 1930s-50s novels, especially Elizabeth Taylor's Claremont (Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont) where a small group take up residence together and whose interactions comprise much of the substance of the book. And Brookner is not averse to making use of pathetic fallacy, using a landscape palette of greys and rain with only the occasional burst of sunshine to indicate Edith's mood. Similes of anaesthetic recur contributing to an atmosphere of deadening, suffocation and repression, and much emphasis is given to clothing and physical appearance - Mrs Pusey's celebratory blue lace dress, Mme de Bonneuil's veils which scatter random sequins, Jennifer's too-tight white trousers and pink harem pants, Monica's 'beautiful' but malnourished bulimic body, Edith's own long cardigans.
But this isn't a book set in the 1950s or earlier, it's more or less contemporary with its published date of 1984, though one of the few indicators is a mention by Edith's publisher of how 'the romantic market is beginning to change. It's sex for the young woman executive now, the Cosmopolitan reader, the girl with the executive briefcase.' And Edith herself seems like a throwback: she writes happy-ever-after romances not cynically but as forms of wish-fulfillment in which she stubbornly believes (and it's significant that her current book remains unfinished at the hotel).
At the heart of the book is Edith herself: Edith Hope in real life, 'Vanessa Wilde' in her alter ego pen-name, drawing on her belief that she looks like Virginia Woolf but taking VW's sister's name for her fantasy persona. It's a complex portrait of a certain type of womanhood, and one shaped by her cultural setting as well as her narrow and slightly dysfunctional relationship with her deceased parents. Edith oscillates between that 'hope' and 'wildness' to the point that, at some places, I struggled to understand how she holds together these various aspects of her personality: though maybe the key is that idea of 'romantic' love in which she believes and which she perpetuates through her novels?
The pacing is a little slow in the first half of the book but then it becomes increasingly tense in emotional terms and utterly gripping. It becomes noticeable that three women - Edith, Jennifer and Monica - are all in their late thirties and become a series of options for feminine being. Edith - and Brookner, I suspect - admits to having some sympathy with feminism but thinks it goes too far. Don't expect big dramatic changes, that seems not to be Brookner's style - but Edith does make a choice, however compromised, and who are we to judge her?
So an interesting, if bleak, novel that charts a life that is lonely, unfulfilled, disappointed, clinging on to romantic illusion even in the face of disillusion, but one which is told in a robust, self-aware tone. And it leaves me wondering whether settling to love, knowing that one is not loved in return, is an act of supreme bravery and self-assertion, or a meek and weak posture of desperation and martyrdom - I still can't decide.
November 7, 2025
I absolutely loved this book. It touched my heart in unexpected ways. Brookner’s writing is sublime and evocative. Her words flowed over me and made me stop- so many sentences I had to reread. It’s not often I finish a book and just want to go back to the beginning and start over. This book is so perfectly executed.
Edith Hope, 39 years old, has been “exiled” by her friends to the Hotel du Lac in Switzerland. What has Edith done to cause such a treatment? Edith is single and she writes romance novels. She arrives at the hotel at the end of the season, so the hotel is mostly empty, except for women. The setting is crucial as the hotel is fairly isolated and the guests feel compelled to converse with each other. All of the women, including Edith, seem disheartened- They are just putting in their time. Into their midst arrives Mr. Neville, who manages to shake things up.
Like its location, it is a calm, tranquil story where not much seems to happen, yet so much is happening internally. Edith is forced to reflect on what brought her to Hotel du Lac and how she will move forward.
This book is an examination of a woman of a certain age who is unmarried and alone. Is it better to settle or remain alone?
“ It seemed to her then that she had finished with this room, or perhaps that 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 leave taking 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. It’s silent, faded dignity would perhaps come to symbolize the last shred of her own dignity, before that too crumbled in the face of panic, or bravado, or just cold common sense.”
I could not help cheering for Edith. I really can’t do this wonderful book justice with my words. For me, it was perfect.
Has earned a spot on my favourites shelf.
Published: 1984
Edith Hope, 39 years old, has been “exiled” by her friends to the Hotel du Lac in Switzerland. What has Edith done to cause such a treatment? Edith is single and she writes romance novels. She arrives at the hotel at the end of the season, so the hotel is mostly empty, except for women. The setting is crucial as the hotel is fairly isolated and the guests feel compelled to converse with each other. All of the women, including Edith, seem disheartened- They are just putting in their time. Into their midst arrives Mr. Neville, who manages to shake things up.
Like its location, it is a calm, tranquil story where not much seems to happen, yet so much is happening internally. Edith is forced to reflect on what brought her to Hotel du Lac and how she will move forward.
This book is an examination of a woman of a certain age who is unmarried and alone. Is it better to settle or remain alone?
“ It seemed to her then that she had finished with this room, or perhaps that 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 leave taking 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. It’s silent, faded dignity would perhaps come to symbolize the last shred of her own dignity, before that too crumbled in the face of panic, or bravado, or just cold common sense.”
I could not help cheering for Edith. I really can’t do this wonderful book justice with my words. For me, it was perfect.
Has earned a spot on my favourites shelf.
Published: 1984
March 20, 2012
And another one bites the dust. Another moping, myopic, single, disconsolate, unfulfilled, disenchanted woman shuffling the mortal coils resignedly and patiently waiting for until her numbers up.
Ok, but I am racking my brains: is there ANY book out there about a male spinster? Not a bachelor: that image implies a certain Sherlock Holmsean contentedness with the regularity of life, a smug sense of quiet self satisfaction that all is alright with the world, at precisely the moment when a woman ISN’T present. An open book, a crackling fire and the languid smoke sonorating from a veal coloured pipe induces images not of pity for the sad old codger, but endorsement of quality and order.
Take a spinster, Edith Hope, and the same singleness of purpose is translated into failed possibility, the non crystallisation of purpose, gross irregularities in the order of the cosmos and staleness.
Do men ever consider it a life unlived without the redemptive qualities of femme feng shui? And what makes women wither without a man? Discuss.
Edith Hope is a spinster. She has professional success, but....no man. So, she is empty inside. Go on:, laugh, cry, deride, acquiesce about it. True or false?
And she is apologetically staunch: Prince charming or none at all will do. Well, lady, at your age, you should be thinking about who can serve, instead.
A perfectly handsome, successful, erudite, considerate man proposes to her: he promises a life of shared interests, social standing, security, and his support and friendship ad nauseum. But, he doesn’t promise her love; he is too jaded for that. Have your dangereous liasions, he says, and I will have mine. But you will never hear about them or be embarrassed by them. In return she can, however, expect respect, consideration, financial security and friendship.
But, nooo. Edith can’t do that. Its all or nothing, right, ladies?
Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. Edith Hope is from La-La.
Ok, but I am racking my brains: is there ANY book out there about a male spinster? Not a bachelor: that image implies a certain Sherlock Holmsean contentedness with the regularity of life, a smug sense of quiet self satisfaction that all is alright with the world, at precisely the moment when a woman ISN’T present. An open book, a crackling fire and the languid smoke sonorating from a veal coloured pipe induces images not of pity for the sad old codger, but endorsement of quality and order.
Take a spinster, Edith Hope, and the same singleness of purpose is translated into failed possibility, the non crystallisation of purpose, gross irregularities in the order of the cosmos and staleness.
Do men ever consider it a life unlived without the redemptive qualities of femme feng shui? And what makes women wither without a man? Discuss.
Edith Hope is a spinster. She has professional success, but....no man. So, she is empty inside. Go on:, laugh, cry, deride, acquiesce about it. True or false?
And she is apologetically staunch: Prince charming or none at all will do. Well, lady, at your age, you should be thinking about who can serve, instead.
A perfectly handsome, successful, erudite, considerate man proposes to her: he promises a life of shared interests, social standing, security, and his support and friendship ad nauseum. But, he doesn’t promise her love; he is too jaded for that. Have your dangereous liasions, he says, and I will have mine. But you will never hear about them or be embarrassed by them. In return she can, however, expect respect, consideration, financial security and friendship.
But, nooo. Edith can’t do that. Its all or nothing, right, ladies?
Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. Edith Hope is from La-La.
December 7, 2016
I didn't hate this book by any means, but that is not a good start to a review.
You know those moments where you see someone that you're sure you know, but you can't figure out where you know them from? And eventually you give up trying to figure it out because it's not worth the effort anymore—that's how I felt toward this book. It seemed like there was something familiar that, if I worked hard enough, I could work to uncover. And I might possibly be rewarded with an insight that would bump this rating up a star or two. But it just didn't feel worth the effort.
Part of that malaise came from the listlessness of our main character, Edith. She spends the book shut away at this Swiss hotel, the Hotel du Lac, after some event has forced her into reclusion. She wanders by the lake, sips tea in the quiet hotel lounge, takes a lot of baths, and works on her romances novels (which she writes anonymously). That's pretty much all that happens. And even by the end I'm not completely convinced that Edith cares enough about anything, so why should I?
Anyway, like I said at the beginning, I didn't hate this book. It was just o.k. I'm glad it was only 184 pages because any more and I would've probably started to dislike it.
You know those moments where you see someone that you're sure you know, but you can't figure out where you know them from? And eventually you give up trying to figure it out because it's not worth the effort anymore—that's how I felt toward this book. It seemed like there was something familiar that, if I worked hard enough, I could work to uncover. And I might possibly be rewarded with an insight that would bump this rating up a star or two. But it just didn't feel worth the effort.
Part of that malaise came from the listlessness of our main character, Edith. She spends the book shut away at this Swiss hotel, the Hotel du Lac, after some event has forced her into reclusion. She wanders by the lake, sips tea in the quiet hotel lounge, takes a lot of baths, and works on her romances novels (which she writes anonymously). That's pretty much all that happens. And even by the end I'm not completely convinced that Edith cares enough about anything, so why should I?
Anyway, like I said at the beginning, I didn't hate this book. It was just o.k. I'm glad it was only 184 pages because any more and I would've probably started to dislike it.
February 14, 2022
Although I have read recently Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, set in the 1960s, I keep associating novels set in hotels with the thirties and the Germanic writers such as Roth, Mann and Zweig. While reading Hotel du Lac, though, whenever I run into a “modern” element such as colour TV, it would astonish me. But what is most different is that in those earlier hotel novels, the hotel comes across as a place of flux, where the guests are at open crossroads in their lives. With Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, I felt the guests were sort of locked up or cast away, as indeed the protagonist is. Another baffling aspect was that I never understood Edith – her sort of “coming of age” (didn’t her friends sent her away so that she would, finally, become an adult?) seemed to me to be aborted. No growth seemed to me to have come out of her temporary exile.
I enjoyed Brookner’s writing, in her slightly satirical and cynical detachment. My attention was also caught by other minor themes that crop up, such as the whether the conscious practice of egotism is a form of liberation. As her Edith is a writer, we also get to hear a fair amount on the profession and practice of writing and its relationship to life, to living. Are writers more sensitive and perceptive? Do they steal and betray identities and codify people into literary characters? Are they entertainers – a sophisticated kind of social clowns?
Expectedly, I tuned in to all the art references. Anita Brookner was a solid art historian, a pupil of the infamous Anthony Blunt at the Courtauld Institute. The one reference that stood out for me and led me to wiki around, was the mention that Mr Neville looked like the portrait of the Duke of Wellington that had been stolen in the National Gallery. And so, this was Goya’s portrait, stolen in 1961, episode that has jumped onto the screen and the film will be released soon.
Or when Edith remembers a visit to the KHM in Vienna when she was young and her father stopped longingly before a picture of men lying splayed in a cornfield under a hot sun…
But the best tableau of the book is not Bruegel’s scene but how Edith stood her husband-to-be as he waited for her at the Registry Office.
May 25, 2007
A quite book, beautifully so. The simple prose is deceiving--the book is not simple, but elegant and superbly crafted. The words wrap you like the mist that weaves in and out of the landscape. A story of an older woman on a vacation alone. Loved it.
Anyone who has ever contemplated or experienced the noisy quiet that happens when you are by yourself but surrounded by others who are all there together.
Please read it.
Anyone who has ever contemplated or experienced the noisy quiet that happens when you are by yourself but surrounded by others who are all there together.
Please read it.
May 8, 2009
This book cut WAY too close to the bone for me. I can't decide if I want to read everything she's ever written or banish her forever.
June 29, 2025
I sincerely wish I could muster up more enthusiasm for this book than I feel.
It struck me as a cross between Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark, but lacking that je ne sais quoi that distinguishes each of them. (I couldn’t resist - Brookner scatters French phrases throughout the book with abandon. Luckily for me, I read this on Kindle and was able to translate as I went along.)
Edith, an English woman in her late 30s, is the author of romance novels. She is bundled off to a small Swiss hotel by friends after committing some unpardonable social sin, in hopes that she will see the error of her ways and be able to salvage something of her life upon her return.
It is out of season at the venerable hotel and the few guests are primarily women, each of whom provides some sort of foil against which Edith evaluates herself. She shares her reflections on these people in letters she writes to her married lover.
The nature of Edith’s misbehavior is not revealed until about 2/3 of the way through the book, and provides an inflection point in the course of Edith’s mandatory penance of self-discovery. It is also the most entertaining section of the book.
I guess my problem with this book matches the weather at the Hotel du Lac. It is far too muted. Brookner’s prose is first rate, but for the most part Edith and her cohorts at the hotel lack some internal driving force that might have engaged me more. I have no problem with authors who keep a cool distance from their subject. The subject just needs to be less, well, dull. Barbara Pym’s spinsters are far more interesting, and Muriel Spark’s women are endlessly fascinating.
This book won the Booker in 1984, and apparently there was a great deal of disagreement with the choice - many felt that J G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun was for more worthy. I haven’t read that, so I can’t make a direct comparison, but this book seems to fall short of the standard.
It struck me as a cross between Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark, but lacking that je ne sais quoi that distinguishes each of them. (I couldn’t resist - Brookner scatters French phrases throughout the book with abandon. Luckily for me, I read this on Kindle and was able to translate as I went along.)
Edith, an English woman in her late 30s, is the author of romance novels. She is bundled off to a small Swiss hotel by friends after committing some unpardonable social sin, in hopes that she will see the error of her ways and be able to salvage something of her life upon her return.
It is out of season at the venerable hotel and the few guests are primarily women, each of whom provides some sort of foil against which Edith evaluates herself. She shares her reflections on these people in letters she writes to her married lover.
The nature of Edith’s misbehavior is not revealed until about 2/3 of the way through the book, and provides an inflection point in the course of Edith’s mandatory penance of self-discovery. It is also the most entertaining section of the book.
I guess my problem with this book matches the weather at the Hotel du Lac. It is far too muted. Brookner’s prose is first rate, but for the most part Edith and her cohorts at the hotel lack some internal driving force that might have engaged me more. I have no problem with authors who keep a cool distance from their subject. The subject just needs to be less, well, dull. Barbara Pym’s spinsters are far more interesting, and Muriel Spark’s women are endlessly fascinating.
This book won the Booker in 1984, and apparently there was a great deal of disagreement with the choice - many felt that J G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun was for more worthy. I haven’t read that, so I can’t make a direct comparison, but this book seems to fall short of the standard.
July 7, 2020
OK, so this won the Booker in 1984, but honestly it didn’t do much for me. Basically, it is a story about a bunch of unsatisfied, discontent women and how they cope with each other and men. Should you wait and marry only that man you really fall for? This is the central question of the book—a question posed by zillions of books before.
What is somewhat different here is the setting--a small, quiet, discrete but respectable hotel on Lac Léman near Geneva, Switzerland. Edith Hope, a British author of women’s romance novels, has by her closest friend been told to take a vacation, disappear for a while. Edith has made a fool of herself, has embarrassed both herself and her friends—!
To add a modern twist, to make the book more palatable for contemporary taste, a feminist slant and eating disorders are added.
Characters are cardboard figures. They are easily categorized as types. Look at Edith’s surname--Hope! This says it all!
That which occurs is predictable. I guessed what Edith had done and was right. We are told halfway through. I guessed what would follow. My guess was right here too. I guessed correctly how Edith would respond, albeit it took her a while to wake up!
So, with the plot terribly predictable and the characters two-dimensional, how was the writing? There is a bit of dry humor. The author does capture the feel of summer resorts prettily placed in the countryside. There is a clarity, a succinctness to the pose that’s good.
Anna Massey narrates the audiobook. Her narration is fine, but not remarkable, not special. She uses different intonations for different characters. Her reading tempo is not consistent. At the start there are sections read too fast. Three stars for the narration.
The book is OK but nothing special. Sorry dear friends who liked this and suggested it to me. I have to be frank. Vivez la différence! Right? Whether to marry or not has been a topic of books for ages. Should one be satisfied with less than the best? Do you need to feel passion? I married for love and don’t regret it. Maybe the book is boring to me because I know where I stand. As a result, I had too little to think about. The writing isn’t bad, but it didn’t blow me away.
What is delivered is a “sad little comedy”. Kirkus summed up the book with these words. I agree.
What is somewhat different here is the setting--a small, quiet, discrete but respectable hotel on Lac Léman near Geneva, Switzerland. Edith Hope, a British author of women’s romance novels, has by her closest friend been told to take a vacation, disappear for a while. Edith has made a fool of herself, has embarrassed both herself and her friends—!
To add a modern twist, to make the book more palatable for contemporary taste, a feminist slant and eating disorders are added.
Characters are cardboard figures. They are easily categorized as types. Look at Edith’s surname--Hope! This says it all!
That which occurs is predictable. I guessed what Edith had done and was right. We are told halfway through. I guessed what would follow. My guess was right here too. I guessed correctly how Edith would respond, albeit it took her a while to wake up!
So, with the plot terribly predictable and the characters two-dimensional, how was the writing? There is a bit of dry humor. The author does capture the feel of summer resorts prettily placed in the countryside. There is a clarity, a succinctness to the pose that’s good.
Anna Massey narrates the audiobook. Her narration is fine, but not remarkable, not special. She uses different intonations for different characters. Her reading tempo is not consistent. At the start there are sections read too fast. Three stars for the narration.
The book is OK but nothing special. Sorry dear friends who liked this and suggested it to me. I have to be frank. Vivez la différence! Right? Whether to marry or not has been a topic of books for ages. Should one be satisfied with less than the best? Do you need to feel passion? I married for love and don’t regret it. Maybe the book is boring to me because I know where I stand. As a result, I had too little to think about. The writing isn’t bad, but it didn’t blow me away.
What is delivered is a “sad little comedy”. Kirkus summed up the book with these words. I agree.
June 26, 2017
Edith Hope may be a moderately successful romance novelist, but her own love life is a shambles. After leaving a poor chap at the altar back in London, she goes on a sabbatical to a Swiss hotel to take stock of her life and spend some time working. Instead, she ends up absorbed in the lives of her fellow guests, especially elderly Mrs. Pusey and her daughter, and attracts an unwanted suitor. The choice before Edith is between safety and passion, and right up until the last few pages it’s unclear which path she’ll choose.
Brookner has some lovely turns of phrase (“her daily task of fantasy and obfuscation”; “Most of my life seems to go on at a subterranean level”) but the quiet story is unlikely to stay with me. The style reminded me most of Penelope Fitzgerald and Barbara Pym, with touches of Continental writers like Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig.
Brookner has some lovely turns of phrase (“her daily task of fantasy and obfuscation”; “Most of my life seems to go on at a subterranean level”) but the quiet story is unlikely to stay with me. The style reminded me most of Penelope Fitzgerald and Barbara Pym, with touches of Continental writers like Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig.
February 6, 2024
Expecting a sedate reading experience for Christmas, I instead came out simmering with hostility at all the characters, and as a result, at the author.
As others have pointed out, the book, published in 1984, feels like a period piece in almost every regard. Bored English women mope around a hotel in Switzerland, wringing their hands about their romantic prospects, their children, or their fertility. Edith Hope (ridiculous name) is a writer of romantic novels in which the mousy girl wins out over the femme fatale. She herself is mousy, needless to say. She’s come away to get over an affair, and is soon being chatted up by suave, insulting Mr Neville.
Where to start? Well, perhaps with Mr Neville, one of those lovely literary men who like to tell women what they need. This whole part reminded me of the early scenes in Rebecca, except that Max de Winter is most often wrong and Mr Neville actually seems to be right about Edith quite a bit of the time. Cliché’s abound: he insults her mumsy cardigan, and Edith literally lets down her hair at one point.
”Who comes here?” She asked.
“People like us.”
…Then sensation of being entertained by words was one which she encountered all too rarely. People expect writers to entertain them, she reflected.
I must have missed the entertaining bit.
Though Mr. Neville is English, throughout I had a vision of a Hollywood actor from back in the day drawling, “you know what you need? You need a good spanking, and I’m the man to give it to you.”
Adding to the vertigo sense of anachronism: there are characters called Edith and Harold. The Edith and Harold I knew would have been 70 in 1984, not 40.
Edith kind of wants to live her life on her own terms but doesn’t have any sympathy for feminists. Nor does anyone else in 1984 apparently. All the women sit around and worry about men. None of them seem to have anything else going on in their lives at all.
All the way through I kept shaking my head and saying “nineteen eighty-FOUR!”
Several people seem to find Brookner a great stylist. In my view, she's a capable writer, but there's nothing particularly striking on the page.
But most mystifying at all is the blurb from the Times on my back cover saying “It is a smashing love story. It is very romantic.” To which I can only reply, “are you mad?!?!” I have no idea which “love story” is being referred to by this, I only know this is a boring, glacial, off-putting, bleak story of women mouldering when they could be out doing something, anything, they might even meet a man along the way, but if not, so much the better.
As others have pointed out, the book, published in 1984, feels like a period piece in almost every regard. Bored English women mope around a hotel in Switzerland, wringing their hands about their romantic prospects, their children, or their fertility. Edith Hope (ridiculous name) is a writer of romantic novels in which the mousy girl wins out over the femme fatale. She herself is mousy, needless to say. She’s come away to get over an affair, and is soon being chatted up by suave, insulting Mr Neville.
Where to start? Well, perhaps with Mr Neville, one of those lovely literary men who like to tell women what they need. This whole part reminded me of the early scenes in Rebecca, except that Max de Winter is most often wrong and Mr Neville actually seems to be right about Edith quite a bit of the time. Cliché’s abound: he insults her mumsy cardigan, and Edith literally lets down her hair at one point.
”Who comes here?” She asked.
“People like us.”
…Then sensation of being entertained by words was one which she encountered all too rarely. People expect writers to entertain them, she reflected.
I must have missed the entertaining bit.
Though Mr. Neville is English, throughout I had a vision of a Hollywood actor from back in the day drawling, “you know what you need? You need a good spanking, and I’m the man to give it to you.”
Adding to the vertigo sense of anachronism: there are characters called Edith and Harold. The Edith and Harold I knew would have been 70 in 1984, not 40.
Edith kind of wants to live her life on her own terms but doesn’t have any sympathy for feminists. Nor does anyone else in 1984 apparently. All the women sit around and worry about men. None of them seem to have anything else going on in their lives at all.
All the way through I kept shaking my head and saying “nineteen eighty-FOUR!”
Several people seem to find Brookner a great stylist. In my view, she's a capable writer, but there's nothing particularly striking on the page.
But most mystifying at all is the blurb from the Times on my back cover saying “It is a smashing love story. It is very romantic.” To which I can only reply, “are you mad?!?!” I have no idea which “love story” is being referred to by this, I only know this is a boring, glacial, off-putting, bleak story of women mouldering when they could be out doing something, anything, they might even meet a man along the way, but if not, so much the better.
November 26, 2020
Edith Hope, a 40-year-old writer of romantic novels, is at a crossroads in her life. Smarting from a doomed affair with a married man, and another mysterious event, she is advised by friends to take a vacation in order to recover. Arriving at the Swiss Hotel du Lac in a state of confusion, she is unsure of what to do next. She becomes involved in the pursuits of other guests, such as the wealthy Mrs Pusey and her daughter Jennifer, and Monica, a woman struggling with an eating disorder. Edith can't help writing letters to David, her lover, even though she knows that she's getting much more out of their illicit relationship than he is. But during her stay at this quiet hotel, she is offered a glimpse of another existence, and she must quickly decide whether or not to take it.
From what I can gather, this novel was a surprise winner of the Booker Prize in 1984, beating efforts from the likes of J.G. Ballard and Julian Barnes. I have also heard that it is not Brookner's best work and I'm afraid I didn't get a whole lot out of it. My main problem is that I never really warmed to Edith as a character. She is so passive and during her hotel stay, she just seems to let things happen to her. The other guests enlist her in their daily activities and she rarely makes a decision by herself (though maybe she is still reeling from the profound choice she made back home - I am wary of revealing spoilers here). I suppose the story contains some insights about love and loneliness but I found it a rather dull experience, and I was glad to finish it.
From what I can gather, this novel was a surprise winner of the Booker Prize in 1984, beating efforts from the likes of J.G. Ballard and Julian Barnes. I have also heard that it is not Brookner's best work and I'm afraid I didn't get a whole lot out of it. My main problem is that I never really warmed to Edith as a character. She is so passive and during her hotel stay, she just seems to let things happen to her. The other guests enlist her in their daily activities and she rarely makes a decision by herself (though maybe she is still reeling from the profound choice she made back home - I am wary of revealing spoilers here). I suppose the story contains some insights about love and loneliness but I found it a rather dull experience, and I was glad to finish it.
May 11, 2021
Loved this one. It remains one of my very favourites by this author.
Brookner was a gifted teacher, but a serious recluse. This was very evident in the "dis - ease" that most of her characters displayed in her books.
Superb writing, but after a while, her characters showed no emotional progression.
Brookner was a gifted teacher, but a serious recluse. This was very evident in the "dis - ease" that most of her characters displayed in her books.
Superb writing, but after a while, her characters showed no emotional progression.
July 3, 2025
“...the boy carrying my bags nodded vestigially…”
Hotel du Lac is written so well its setting seems timeless. Is this 1984 when it’s published? Or 1934 or 1954 when the sex role stereotypes were more universally demanded? It wasn't clear to me, but really since for the class of people the author is describing, I guess it doesn’t really matter. Have the rules changed that much?
A Booker prize winning look at character or maybe just behavior. I found it rather misogynist. Mr. Neville, a nihilist, entirely selfish man is deemed eccentric and understandable, really, given the way life is. But the women all are fairly horrid – manipulative, self-obsessed, vain and meretricious, pathetic, self destructive, obeisant – none seem given any chance to be viewed through a longer, clearer lens.
But maybe that is the point.
I can’t help but remember a (true) story about an old woman in an Iranian mountain village who was about to be thrown out of the only home she had known for 40 years, a small hovel, because her husband had died and all property goes to the closest male relative, in this case a nephew who had chosen to displace her. She was looking at being homeless, as she had no rights to anything but the arbitrary decisions of a distant relative of her husband’s. She looked at her limited repertoire and chose shame. She went to the center of the village and began to scream, keening and wailing, tearing at her hijab, not eating, for days, making the whole village uncomfortable.
The nephew was called upon to relent. He did. Not for her, for the men of the village. To release those men from their discomfort.
When I read this I thought - when you have no power, no legal rights, few acceptable ways to manifest at all – you must use what is available, no matter how meager your options, no matter how sparse the tools in stock.
That’s what the women in the Hotel du Lac were doing. Choosing from the skills they found in their acceptable repertoire, disagreeable as those skills may appear to us.
The book is biting, engaging. Like the bag boy in the oh-so-proper Hotel du Lac nodding “vestigially”, an adverb so perfect it made me laugh out loud. Edith, our protagonist (who is, BTW "Not drowning, waving.” ) is hilarious and insightful. Her insights are veracious if unforgiving. I particularly enjoyed this exchange with her publisher about Cosmo girls:
“ ‘Harold,’ said Edith, ‘I simply do not know anyone who has a lifestyle. What does it mean? It implies that everything you own was bought at exactly the same time, about five years ago, at the most. And anyway, if she’s all that liberated why doesn’t she go down to the bar and pick someone up? I’m sure it’s entirely possible. It’s just that most women don’t do it. And why don’t they do it?’ she asked, with a sudden return of assurance. ‘It’s because they prefer the old myths, when it comes to the crunch. They want to believe that they are going to be discovered, looking their best, behind closed doors, just when they thought that all was lost, by a man who has battled across continents, abandoning whatever he may have had in his in-tray, to reclaim them…
‘Well, my dear you know best,' he said. ”.
This is my first book by this author. I bought it because it won the Booker prize. I want to believe she is secretly saying that it is time for women, of all ages, to battle across continents, keep whatever they choose from their in-trays, fight for what they love, and jettison, just chuck, what doesn’t nourish them.
And do it by themselves.
That’s what’s wonderful about fiction, and life, we get to choose the meaning, and if we're lucky, the ending.
Hotel du Lac is written so well its setting seems timeless. Is this 1984 when it’s published? Or 1934 or 1954 when the sex role stereotypes were more universally demanded? It wasn't clear to me, but really since for the class of people the author is describing, I guess it doesn’t really matter. Have the rules changed that much?
A Booker prize winning look at character or maybe just behavior. I found it rather misogynist. Mr. Neville, a nihilist, entirely selfish man is deemed eccentric and understandable, really, given the way life is. But the women all are fairly horrid – manipulative, self-obsessed, vain and meretricious, pathetic, self destructive, obeisant – none seem given any chance to be viewed through a longer, clearer lens.
But maybe that is the point.
I can’t help but remember a (true) story about an old woman in an Iranian mountain village who was about to be thrown out of the only home she had known for 40 years, a small hovel, because her husband had died and all property goes to the closest male relative, in this case a nephew who had chosen to displace her. She was looking at being homeless, as she had no rights to anything but the arbitrary decisions of a distant relative of her husband’s. She looked at her limited repertoire and chose shame. She went to the center of the village and began to scream, keening and wailing, tearing at her hijab, not eating, for days, making the whole village uncomfortable.
The nephew was called upon to relent. He did. Not for her, for the men of the village. To release those men from their discomfort.
When I read this I thought - when you have no power, no legal rights, few acceptable ways to manifest at all – you must use what is available, no matter how meager your options, no matter how sparse the tools in stock.
That’s what the women in the Hotel du Lac were doing. Choosing from the skills they found in their acceptable repertoire, disagreeable as those skills may appear to us.
The book is biting, engaging. Like the bag boy in the oh-so-proper Hotel du Lac nodding “vestigially”, an adverb so perfect it made me laugh out loud. Edith, our protagonist (who is, BTW "Not drowning, waving.” ) is hilarious and insightful. Her insights are veracious if unforgiving. I particularly enjoyed this exchange with her publisher about Cosmo girls:
“ ‘Harold,’ said Edith, ‘I simply do not know anyone who has a lifestyle. What does it mean? It implies that everything you own was bought at exactly the same time, about five years ago, at the most. And anyway, if she’s all that liberated why doesn’t she go down to the bar and pick someone up? I’m sure it’s entirely possible. It’s just that most women don’t do it. And why don’t they do it?’ she asked, with a sudden return of assurance. ‘It’s because they prefer the old myths, when it comes to the crunch. They want to believe that they are going to be discovered, looking their best, behind closed doors, just when they thought that all was lost, by a man who has battled across continents, abandoning whatever he may have had in his in-tray, to reclaim them…
‘Well, my dear you know best,' he said. ”.
This is my first book by this author. I bought it because it won the Booker prize. I want to believe she is secretly saying that it is time for women, of all ages, to battle across continents, keep whatever they choose from their in-trays, fight for what they love, and jettison, just chuck, what doesn’t nourish them.
And do it by themselves.
That’s what’s wonderful about fiction, and life, we get to choose the meaning, and if we're lucky, the ending.
December 16, 2023
This book opens with a romance writer begrudgingly boarding a plane to Switzerland to spend a few days in exile at the Hotel Du Lac. She will have plenty of time to have a "curious interlude in her life" where she can write her new novel, take long walks, speak to other interesting guests at the hotel, and just hit the reset button. Why is our main character taking this leave of absence from life? Well, it’s part of a social banishment enacted by her friends. They believe she needs to go on probation and grow a little, away from her life in London.
It’s a fun little curiosity. Edith checks into the hotel and begins to meld with certain personalities over a meal or tea. We find out that most of the guests are cruel or ill-tempered, and the author often uses these traits to sly comedic effects, albeit oftentimes in long, drawn-out diatribes of small talk. There is a certain perceptiveness to the prose. Nothing is really described in great detail. It is often the witticisms that round out character traits and small intricacies that bring the hotel to life.
Edith eventually meets someone who is interested in her, and after a few days, he proposes. We are plucked from the hearty conversations and thrown into another unique situation that Edith did not expect. Will she say yes to the marriage proposal with stipulations attached, or are there other past circumstances that will come into play and give her yield?
🎵| Soundtrack |🎵
❖ Vaults - Lifespan
❖ Xylø - Afterlife
❖ The Bad Dreamers – Who You Run To
❖ The Midnight - Jason
❖ Halsey – Without Me
⭐ | Rating | ⭐
❖ 4 out of 5 ❖
It’s a fun little curiosity. Edith checks into the hotel and begins to meld with certain personalities over a meal or tea. We find out that most of the guests are cruel or ill-tempered, and the author often uses these traits to sly comedic effects, albeit oftentimes in long, drawn-out diatribes of small talk. There is a certain perceptiveness to the prose. Nothing is really described in great detail. It is often the witticisms that round out character traits and small intricacies that bring the hotel to life.
Edith eventually meets someone who is interested in her, and after a few days, he proposes. We are plucked from the hearty conversations and thrown into another unique situation that Edith did not expect. Will she say yes to the marriage proposal with stipulations attached, or are there other past circumstances that will come into play and give her yield?
🎵| Soundtrack |🎵
❖ Vaults - Lifespan
❖ Xylø - Afterlife
❖ The Bad Dreamers – Who You Run To
❖ The Midnight - Jason
❖ Halsey – Without Me
⭐ | Rating | ⭐
❖ 4 out of 5 ❖
May 30, 2023
3.5 rounded down to 3.
There's a formidable gentleness associated with how Brookner unravels her main character, Edith, a writer, who is on a holiday, after having not really been herself. But the problem is, vacations don't really transmogrify people. No matter where we go, we take ourselves with us. People change people. For better of worse. No amount of beach walking, mountain climbing, day drinking, mindless shopping fills the void. You get a better picture sure, you have heightened respect for the otherness of existence surely, but people come along and unjustifiably hold the power to change us, for all of our existence.
No doubt Brookner's writing is stunning and illuminating, but there's a flatness that seeps into the narrative pretty early on that remains as such till the end. It's a question of tone and repetition. Brookner writes ethereally, remarkably about these people in long paragraphs but I wish these unravelled before me through their actions, their thoughts, their exchanges. Of course you understand people by observation, but people reveal themselves through their actions too and their way of thinking. Significant relationships get established and broken in the book without the reader having been given anything to hold on to, which was a bit disappointing. It's like the action took place elsewhere and not on the page and the reader only had the second hand account of what transpired.
But what a find nonetheless, Brookner, as a writer has been...
There's a formidable gentleness associated with how Brookner unravels her main character, Edith, a writer, who is on a holiday, after having not really been herself. But the problem is, vacations don't really transmogrify people. No matter where we go, we take ourselves with us. People change people. For better of worse. No amount of beach walking, mountain climbing, day drinking, mindless shopping fills the void. You get a better picture sure, you have heightened respect for the otherness of existence surely, but people come along and unjustifiably hold the power to change us, for all of our existence.
No doubt Brookner's writing is stunning and illuminating, but there's a flatness that seeps into the narrative pretty early on that remains as such till the end. It's a question of tone and repetition. Brookner writes ethereally, remarkably about these people in long paragraphs but I wish these unravelled before me through their actions, their thoughts, their exchanges. Of course you understand people by observation, but people reveal themselves through their actions too and their way of thinking. Significant relationships get established and broken in the book without the reader having been given anything to hold on to, which was a bit disappointing. It's like the action took place elsewhere and not on the page and the reader only had the second hand account of what transpired.
But what a find nonetheless, Brookner, as a writer has been...
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