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Hotel Crystal
At some Parisian lost-and-found, a mysterious manuscript scribbled onto stray bits of hotel stationary and postcards and stuffed into an abandoned briefcase comes into the hands of an “editor,” who claims to faithfully transcribe and assemble the random texts. On the face of it, these consist of fastidious descriptions of a series of hotel rooms in cities around the globe, but their world-weary writer, a certain “Olivier Rolin,” is also involved in a number of highly improbable international networks, populated by unsavory thugs and Mata Haris in distress. Author Olivier Rolin has dipped into his extensive travel notebooks to create this highly inventive novel that spoofs, among others, the decaying international espionage scene, the literary author publicity tour, and official French culture, all against a backdrop of the queasy alienation secreted by standard-issue hotel rooms across the globe.
216 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
131 people want to read
About the author
Olivier Rolin
54 books44 followersOlivier Rolin spent his childhood in Senegal. He then studied at the Louis-le-Grand high school and the Ecole Normale Superieure. He graduated in philosophy and literature.
He works as a freelancer of the French paper Libération and Le Nouvel Observateur. He was the companion of the singer Jane Birkin.
His work is inspired by May 68 and the proletarian Left, romantic adventures in Arabia, the writers Rimbaud and Conrad and his travels.
He received the "Prix Femina" for Port Sudan in 1994, the "Prix France Culture" for Tiger Paper in 2003 and the "price of Style" for The Meteorologist just now in 2014.
He's the brother of the also writer Jean Rolin
He works as a freelancer of the French paper Libération and Le Nouvel Observateur. He was the companion of the singer Jane Birkin.
His work is inspired by May 68 and the proletarian Left, romantic adventures in Arabia, the writers Rimbaud and Conrad and his travels.
He received the "Prix Femina" for Port Sudan in 1994, the "Prix France Culture" for Tiger Paper in 2003 and the "price of Style" for The Meteorologist just now in 2014.
He's the brother of the also writer Jean Rolin
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 10, 2011
This was a charmer for the first hundred pages or so, despite the premise being dodgier than a teenager’s attempt at changing the literary landscape as we know it by doing things done in the early days of Ancient Rome and going hey, look what I’ve invented!
A ‘found documents’ novel (no groaning please—House of Leaves, you liked that, didn’t you?), the text is comprised of chapters scribbled on various paperbacks left in hotel rooms. The content of these found scribbles comprises detailed descriptions of said hotel rooms and various anecdotes from the unknown author (who might be Olivier Ronin—ooh, clever!) about his life as (what seems) an international man of mystery.
Strangely, this book almost works. It coasts along on its charm and wit, each anecdote vaguely amusing or tongue-in-cheek, while the reader quietly hopes that a greater plot or revelation will emerge, helping him piece together the mystery behind these little excerpts. Not to ruin the surprise—the mystery isn’t pieced together. These are fragments and nothing more. Sure, linked together via literary tangents or recurring names, but still fragments.
The running ‘commentary’ in footnotes is the biggest failure here, attempting to graft on a second layer of textual analysis which doesn’t really make sense if we don’t know who compiled these excerpts and for what purpose. Ditto with the pointless index and constant author name-dropping. The verdict: if it’s in your local library, have a read. It's better than dry-swabbing your stool.
A ‘found documents’ novel (no groaning please—House of Leaves, you liked that, didn’t you?), the text is comprised of chapters scribbled on various paperbacks left in hotel rooms. The content of these found scribbles comprises detailed descriptions of said hotel rooms and various anecdotes from the unknown author (who might be Olivier Ronin—ooh, clever!) about his life as (what seems) an international man of mystery.
Strangely, this book almost works. It coasts along on its charm and wit, each anecdote vaguely amusing or tongue-in-cheek, while the reader quietly hopes that a greater plot or revelation will emerge, helping him piece together the mystery behind these little excerpts. Not to ruin the surprise—the mystery isn’t pieced together. These are fragments and nothing more. Sure, linked together via literary tangents or recurring names, but still fragments.
The running ‘commentary’ in footnotes is the biggest failure here, attempting to graft on a second layer of textual analysis which doesn’t really make sense if we don’t know who compiled these excerpts and for what purpose. Ditto with the pointless index and constant author name-dropping. The verdict: if it’s in your local library, have a read. It's better than dry-swabbing your stool.
October 1, 2020
I liked the idea of telling a story through reconstituted fragments of writing on various pieces of paper, themselves a part of that story. I do think in this way the novel was quite inventive, especially at the end.
I appreciated the references to Perec, Michaux and Lowry that indicate the direction the author wanted to take with this, and the cosmopolitanism of each room with the mystery of the protagonist.
However, I found myself spacing out very frequently at the exhaustive yet samey descriptions of the furniture and layouts in the rooms.
I appreciated the references to Perec, Michaux and Lowry that indicate the direction the author wanted to take with this, and the cosmopolitanism of each room with the mystery of the protagonist.
However, I found myself spacing out very frequently at the exhaustive yet samey descriptions of the furniture and layouts in the rooms.
October 7, 2020
In this novel, we trace the life of fictional (?) Olivier Rolin through the diary entries/ notes that he scribbles in various hotels rooms around the world.
I found this format quite inventive, for being in a hotel room in a foreign country evokes certain feelings of deep solitude — perhaps loneliness — but a sense of excitement and adventure that you can do anything in a strange land or possibly meet people to create experiences that you will talk about for years.
In this novel, Rolin fashions himself as a sort of a debonair James Bond. The protagonist grew up exploring Africa and is now someone presumably in his 40s or even 50s (but ages like fine wine). He has trysts and mad love affairs with heiresses, dances, mistresses of yakuzas etc. He is friends with the sons of a dictator. He knows a brilliant Czech engineer who can hijack space systems and operate the space rovers remotely. People call him up to get opinions on how they should set the global interest rates. He has breathtaking adventures in hotel rooms in exotic locations...
... but this person doesn’t exist. He can’t possibly be universally good looking, charming, seductive, brilliant, social, mischievous, knows erudite poetry, art and double crossing the CIA with weapons of mass destruction all at the same time, with women of every nationality dropping themselves at their feet (and having a convenient proclivity for extra marital affairs). This projection exists in our mind, and Rolin allows us to fantasise about the possibilities of life from the comfort of our couch.
Still... I would like to read a similar book but from a women’s perspective. Why is it that I’m a straight female but by virtue of consuming culture, am taught to put on the male gaze so easily and sexualise women’s bodies, but hardly know how to do so in such descriptive fashion for male bodies? Why is it OK for this Bond-like creature to seduce married women and mistresses which we applaud for its sex appeal; but if the genders were reversed we would think this woman was a hussy. Normalize the image of a beautiful woman discussing nuclear codes or rigging global interests over the phone while her lover is showering in the toilet. Or the image of a woman having many love interests in every city she visits while still clinging on to the love of her life— yet sex isn’t her only currency, but her brains, her social connections, her ingenuity and her guile. Her confidence would not be perceived as over-confidence or arrogance, but sexy. She would have balls and own it and not apologise for being viewed as a threat by her own kind. She will give a lecture on polyesters in the morning but converse about the Russian Writers and philosophy at night with a filmmaker. Give me a novel like this.
I found this format quite inventive, for being in a hotel room in a foreign country evokes certain feelings of deep solitude — perhaps loneliness — but a sense of excitement and adventure that you can do anything in a strange land or possibly meet people to create experiences that you will talk about for years.
In this novel, Rolin fashions himself as a sort of a debonair James Bond. The protagonist grew up exploring Africa and is now someone presumably in his 40s or even 50s (but ages like fine wine). He has trysts and mad love affairs with heiresses, dances, mistresses of yakuzas etc. He is friends with the sons of a dictator. He knows a brilliant Czech engineer who can hijack space systems and operate the space rovers remotely. People call him up to get opinions on how they should set the global interest rates. He has breathtaking adventures in hotel rooms in exotic locations...
... but this person doesn’t exist. He can’t possibly be universally good looking, charming, seductive, brilliant, social, mischievous, knows erudite poetry, art and double crossing the CIA with weapons of mass destruction all at the same time, with women of every nationality dropping themselves at their feet (and having a convenient proclivity for extra marital affairs). This projection exists in our mind, and Rolin allows us to fantasise about the possibilities of life from the comfort of our couch.
Still... I would like to read a similar book but from a women’s perspective. Why is it that I’m a straight female but by virtue of consuming culture, am taught to put on the male gaze so easily and sexualise women’s bodies, but hardly know how to do so in such descriptive fashion for male bodies? Why is it OK for this Bond-like creature to seduce married women and mistresses which we applaud for its sex appeal; but if the genders were reversed we would think this woman was a hussy. Normalize the image of a beautiful woman discussing nuclear codes or rigging global interests over the phone while her lover is showering in the toilet. Or the image of a woman having many love interests in every city she visits while still clinging on to the love of her life— yet sex isn’t her only currency, but her brains, her social connections, her ingenuity and her guile. Her confidence would not be perceived as over-confidence or arrogance, but sexy. She would have balls and own it and not apologise for being viewed as a threat by her own kind. She will give a lecture on polyesters in the morning but converse about the Russian Writers and philosophy at night with a filmmaker. Give me a novel like this.
March 11, 2023
Review : Olivier Rolin (1947) werkt als journalist voor Le Monde en Libération en publiceert sinds 1983 romans, essays, reisverhalen,en literaire portretten.Van Rolin verschenen bij Ijzer diverse prachtige vertalingen namelijk, Suite in het Crystal, De uitvinding van de wereld en De leeuwenjager en Manet.
Suite in het Crystal vertelt een verhaal in de rijke traditie van het manuscrit trouvé, maar de auteur maakt er geen traditionele roman van. Met een verbeten precisie laat hij zijn verdwenen auteur 42 hotelkamers over de hele wereld beschrijven, en loodst de lezer een universum van kitsch en bravoure binnen. Een schrijver laat een reiszak vol documenten achter in een stationsdepot en verdwijnt spoorloos. Per toeval vindt een vriendin van de auteur de tas en bezorgt hem aan een uitgever. De uitgever bundelt de tekstfragmenten in een boek. De personages: een geheimzinnige auteur, duistere spionnen, ontkroonde hoofden, een Turkse buikdanseres en vele, vele anderen. Eén doel: de redding van de mysterieuze Melanie Melbourne. Het resultaat: een mozaïek van complotten, ontvoeringen, spionageverhalen, amoureuze ontmoetingen en moorden.
Suite in het crystal is zeker geen boek voor liefhebbers van klassieke verhalen, wel een aanrader voor lezers die van literaire spelletjes houden. Rolin steekt de draak met de realistische beschrijvingen van Honoré de Balzac en Emile Zola, maar schreef in één moeite een vinnige parodie op de rocamboleske intriges en personages van spionageromans en stripverhalen. Maar boven alles is deze roman een eerbetoon aan Georges Perec, de peetvader van de Franse OULIPO-beweging (Ouvroir de la Littérature Potentielle), die ludieke experimenten tot literaire kunst probeert om te smeden.
Suite in het Crystal vertelt een verhaal in de rijke traditie van het manuscrit trouvé, maar de auteur maakt er geen traditionele roman van. Met een verbeten precisie laat hij zijn verdwenen auteur 42 hotelkamers over de hele wereld beschrijven, en loodst de lezer een universum van kitsch en bravoure binnen. Een schrijver laat een reiszak vol documenten achter in een stationsdepot en verdwijnt spoorloos. Per toeval vindt een vriendin van de auteur de tas en bezorgt hem aan een uitgever. De uitgever bundelt de tekstfragmenten in een boek. De personages: een geheimzinnige auteur, duistere spionnen, ontkroonde hoofden, een Turkse buikdanseres en vele, vele anderen. Eén doel: de redding van de mysterieuze Melanie Melbourne. Het resultaat: een mozaïek van complotten, ontvoeringen, spionageverhalen, amoureuze ontmoetingen en moorden.
Suite in het crystal is zeker geen boek voor liefhebbers van klassieke verhalen, wel een aanrader voor lezers die van literaire spelletjes houden. Rolin steekt de draak met de realistische beschrijvingen van Honoré de Balzac en Emile Zola, maar schreef in één moeite een vinnige parodie op de rocamboleske intriges en personages van spionageromans en stripverhalen. Maar boven alles is deze roman een eerbetoon aan Georges Perec, de peetvader van de Franse OULIPO-beweging (Ouvroir de la Littérature Potentielle), die ludieke experimenten tot literaire kunst probeert om te smeden.
February 27, 2019
Not tasteless enough to be satirical, too gratuitous to be uncompromising about its aesthetics.
December 4, 2021
Prémisse super mais…pour un non-francophone, des descriptions des chambres d’hôtel sont trop longues et ennuyeuses et le fil d’une histoire qui les transverse est trop court…
February 22, 2022
The gimmick is interesting for about 100 pages. Then it just gets repetitive.
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June 29, 2008Here's how the book is structured: there are 43 short chapters (averaging 1000 words in length), each titled with a room number, the name of the hotel, and the city in which the hotel is located. Each chapter begins with a plain description of the room, which, after a page or so, leads into a fragment of a spy story, disconnected in time and place from the other chapters.
The narrative is ostensibly a collection of writings on scraps of paper, postcards, and scribblings over the printed text of other books; arranged by editors; and presented to the reader with comments by the editors (and also by the author, but I think those comments are supposed to be part of the original fragments). Of course, the book doesn't really look like this. It's just regular text, so you have to imagine the words written across other books, which doesn't do much for me, but it's an idea with potential.
Next, the narrative functions equally well as a gratuitous adventure story and a study in boredom leading to delusion (you can easily imagine the narrator to be a dull academic and writer traveling the world and inventing a more interesting life for himself, a life full of sex and murder). Now that I've summarized it like that, I realize that this shouldn't be my kind of book at all, because I never enjoy adventure novels and I usually don't like stories where the sole purpose is to portray delusion, because such delusions tend to be one-dimensionally sad. But somehow this book, existing in a place of perfect harmony between those two types of stories, is enjoyable. Sure, it's some kind of delusion, either the narrator's or my own, but it's not all-consuming, it flits in and out, and therefore it's really fun to read. It's not serious at all.
Or maybe part of the book is serious, but only the descriptions of the rooms. Those require careful reading and imagination, and they suggest that the capitalist logic of hospitality is uniform and predictable, but also contains minute flaws, as if to show that humans make and occupy these rooms, as if anything else ever could. It's more interesting and ambiguous than any of the intrigues that the narrator claims to be involved in. Space is what matters. But the spaces repeat themselves, in form, in color, in tackiness!
Two different books are essentially smashed together to create at least two more possible books. There might be a meta-narrative (starring a delusional narrator) but there might not. I was reading James Wood in The New Yorker the other day, writing about those so-called unreliable narrators, and how so many of them are reliably unreliable...which is to say, they leave enough clues, open enough rifts in their own narratives, to allow the reader to decode the superficial narrative and determine what "really" happened. Perhaps it would be better to say "what happened at the base of the fiction."
But not in Hotel Crystal! This narrator, I believe, is unreliably unreliable, just as the narrator in Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods is. You can't decode Hotel Crysal because beneath the code is another code and beneath that is the first code again. And I think that this brings us to the novel's problem. There's nothing in Hotel Crystal. After reading other reviews of the book, I felt destined to solve the mystery that the other reviewers claimed wasn't even there, but I, too, have found nothing in the middle of this book. The good news is that the novel literally asks for someone else to complete it. Please let me know if somebody does.
I should not enjoy this book at all. I should consider it a fraud. But what a marvelous fraud!
The narrative is ostensibly a collection of writings on scraps of paper, postcards, and scribblings over the printed text of other books; arranged by editors; and presented to the reader with comments by the editors (and also by the author, but I think those comments are supposed to be part of the original fragments). Of course, the book doesn't really look like this. It's just regular text, so you have to imagine the words written across other books, which doesn't do much for me, but it's an idea with potential.
Next, the narrative functions equally well as a gratuitous adventure story and a study in boredom leading to delusion (you can easily imagine the narrator to be a dull academic and writer traveling the world and inventing a more interesting life for himself, a life full of sex and murder). Now that I've summarized it like that, I realize that this shouldn't be my kind of book at all, because I never enjoy adventure novels and I usually don't like stories where the sole purpose is to portray delusion, because such delusions tend to be one-dimensionally sad. But somehow this book, existing in a place of perfect harmony between those two types of stories, is enjoyable. Sure, it's some kind of delusion, either the narrator's or my own, but it's not all-consuming, it flits in and out, and therefore it's really fun to read. It's not serious at all.
Or maybe part of the book is serious, but only the descriptions of the rooms. Those require careful reading and imagination, and they suggest that the capitalist logic of hospitality is uniform and predictable, but also contains minute flaws, as if to show that humans make and occupy these rooms, as if anything else ever could. It's more interesting and ambiguous than any of the intrigues that the narrator claims to be involved in. Space is what matters. But the spaces repeat themselves, in form, in color, in tackiness!
Two different books are essentially smashed together to create at least two more possible books. There might be a meta-narrative (starring a delusional narrator) but there might not. I was reading James Wood in The New Yorker the other day, writing about those so-called unreliable narrators, and how so many of them are reliably unreliable...which is to say, they leave enough clues, open enough rifts in their own narratives, to allow the reader to decode the superficial narrative and determine what "really" happened. Perhaps it would be better to say "what happened at the base of the fiction."
But not in Hotel Crystal! This narrator, I believe, is unreliably unreliable, just as the narrator in Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods is. You can't decode Hotel Crysal because beneath the code is another code and beneath that is the first code again. And I think that this brings us to the novel's problem. There's nothing in Hotel Crystal. After reading other reviews of the book, I felt destined to solve the mystery that the other reviewers claimed wasn't even there, but I, too, have found nothing in the middle of this book. The good news is that the novel literally asks for someone else to complete it. Please let me know if somebody does.
I should not enjoy this book at all. I should consider it a fraud. But what a marvelous fraud!
February 17, 2010
What did i learn from this book? It's VERY difficult to stay focussed on detailed descriptions of the interior of a hotel room and to take all the detail in. Sometimes i had to re-read and re-read bits because i was glazing over. It's an interesting idea but it's not an easy read. And the 'fictional' parts are often ridiculous. Nonetheless it wasn't a waste of time to read it, it was just not as enjoyable as many other books i've read.
July 17, 2014
On its face a catalog of meticulous architectural descriptions of different hotel rooms across the world, Rolin does something pretty sublime in building a suspenseful narrative, not to mention a great deal of oblique character development with the voice that emerges underneath. Basically a hyper-speed Robbe-Grillet-like concept pulled off with haunting flourish. I don’t think I’ll forget the way this book felt.
August 1, 2015
Normalde betimlemelerin kisa olmasindan pek hoslanmam ama bu kitapta uzun uzun her odanin tasvirinin yapilmasi ve bunu yaparken de gereksiz tonlarca sey sayilmasi olayi takip etmenizi zorlastiriyor ve bir yerden sonra bunaliyorsunuz. Ikea katalogu okumaktan cok da farkli degildi benim icin o yuzden sevemedim.
December 7, 2010
A bit too experimental for my tastes -- a novelist's manuscript found after his death describes hotel rooms in which he's stayed during a variety of far-fetched and mundane activities.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews