In a Hotel Garden

by Gabriel Josipovici

In a Hotel Garden is a provocative work by the English novelist once described by Sir Frank Kermode as “an admirable and rare example of the writer-critic.” It is a captivating novella, written almost entirely in dialogue. In a Hotel Garden unfolds character and meaning with a lovely, meditative tension. The narrator Ben relates to his friends his enthralling encounter with a Jewish woman in the Dolomite Alps. The tale of her compulsive visit to a hotel garden in Siena––where her grandmother fell in love with a man soon to be a victim of the Holocaust––illuminates Ben’s half-lived life, and raises the question of how we can ever come to terms with the destruction of the European Jews in our century. The Independent in England (where this novel first appeared) said, “Its [the novel’s] enigmas are those of life itself, and Josipovici sets them before us with clarity, tact and compassion.”

Genres: Fiction, Literature

144 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1993

About the author

Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 of Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine parents. He lived in Egypt from 1945 to 1956, when he came to Britain. He read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating with a First in 1961. From 1963 to 1998 he taught at the University of Sussex. He is the author of seventeen novels, three volumes of short stories, eight critical works, and numerous stage and radio plays, and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His plays have been performed throughout Britain and on radio in Britain, France and Germany, and his work has been translated into the major European languages and Arabic. In 2001 he published A Life, a biographical memoir of his mother, the translator and poet Sacha Rabinovitch (London Magazine editions). His most recent works are Two Novels: 'After' and 'Making Mistakes' (Carcanet), What Ever Happened to Modernism? (Yale University Press), Heart's Wings (Carcanet, 2010) and Infinity (Carcanet, 2012).

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Living In Ambiguity

Deciding about what’s real is a tiring business for the one deciding, and rather more tiresome for any friends or relations within earshot. Not everyone feels the need to pursue this delicate art. But those who do are typically obsessive. They live in a perpetual state of doubt and uncertainty.

The search for reality is a step up from truth-seeking. Truth is subject to logic - state a premise and a qualification and you’re off to the races. It’s a purely linguistic thing. But reality is not about truth. It’s about meaning, which is in a constant battle against the language in which it is expressed. Meaning can be based on entirely false facts (as the world now knows from the antics of America’s ex-president). And the way meaning is arrived at is mysterious. There are no rules for deriving meaning.

More significantly, meaning can never be linguistically fixed. As soon as it is explored or explained, meaning evaporates It often becomes trivial or incomprehensible. But mostly it transforms itself into other meanings. Meaning cannot rest. It can never be authenticated or disproven, although many will attempt to do both according to the rules of truth-seeking.

Nevertheless it is meaning and not truth which drives our lives. It simply doesn’t matter what the facts of the case are. In fact the facts of the case are dependent upon meaning and not vice versa. Those who take meaning seriously know this is the case and consider meaning for what it is - a decision, perhaps the fundamental decision of one’s life.

There are others who take meaning to be obvious. These people are dangerous. Their danger is proportionate to their smugness. Their smugness is apparent in their lack of concern about the nature of meaning and their responsibility toward it. They are easily led and just as easily mis-led. But they really don’t care about that because it means nothing to them.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not Quite Luke Jennings

- I think you might like this novel, babe.

- Really? It's not as fat as some of the books you've read this year.

- That's one of the reasons I liked it.

- Good. I don't like long novels, unless they're historical fiction.

- Or crime fiction?

- No. I like my crime fiction short. If it's too long and complicated, I can't solve the crime.

- Your memory's not what it used to be?

- I thought you'd worked that out already! Do you want to pass the book over here and I'll have a look at it?

- Here. Be my guest!

- Hey, you didn't tell me it was all dialogue!

- It's not all dialogue. Maybe only 95%, but who's counting?

- I thought you always took note of that sort of thing?

- Just quotable quotes and anything else that crosses my mind.

- So, what's it about?

- It's about this English guy who meets a Jewish woman called Lily while he's on holidays in the Dolomites with his girlfriend.

- Is she older than him?

- It doesn't say, but she's young enough for him to get obsessed by her.

- Is she beautiful?

- It doesn't say, but his girlfriend is supposed to be beautiful.

- How do you know?

- His best friend and his wife think she's beautiful, and they can't work out why he broke up with her.

- So he broke up with her, so he could go out with Lily?

- No, they never start a relationship. They walk up a mountain together and then along the Thames, but that's about all. After that, she doesn't really return his phone calls.

- So, he's obsessed by her unattainability? This sounds like your life story.

- No, he's obsessed by Lily's dead grandmother who met a guy in a hotel garden in Tuscany, and they, I mean the grandmother and the guy, talked all night about everything, and then he left and married his girlfriend back in Turkey or somewhere, and then he died in the Holocaust. The grandmother felt really guilty because she refused to answer any of his love letters before he died.

- Even though he was married? I think that's fair enough!

- She felt guilty about her silence in the context of the Holocaust. If she had answered his letters, then maybe he might have come to England and not died in the Holocaust.

- What about his wife?

- I don't think she would have gone to England.

- So she expected him to leave his wife behind? Maybe she did the right thing by not answering his letters.

- Lily made the whole story sound so much more romantic and mystical.

- Lily or the English guy?

- Well, the English guy had an obsession with Lily who had an obsession with her grandmother. And the hotel garden.

- I think I'll give it a miss.

- Lily thinks that everything came together in that hotel garden, it's as if that day their whole lives were present to them, their lives before and their lives after, everything that would happen and not happen and all that would happen and not happen to their descendants, and if she could understand it then perhaps she could understand why she was alive and what she had to do.

- Oh no, it sounds like Heidegger.

- The dialogue's really great.

- I'm sure it is. You can have the brainy stuff. I'll stick with Villanelle.

[JimZ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a solid 3 stars for me. I would have rated it higher if only he had not been so confusing. But I think that is his style. I have a GR friend who once asked him what happened to a character at the end of the Josapovici book he had been been reading, and Josapovici basically said he did not know. Well , if he doesn’t know, then how is the reader to know what happened? But it wasn’t this particular book my GR friend was asking him about as far as I know. And in fairness to Josapovici, it appears to me sometimes his characters at the end of a novella/novel do not resolve things…so who’s to know how things end? 🤨

As with many of his works, this book was largely a dialogue between people…either Ben and Lily (the two main characters in the novella)…or Ben and his friend Rick, or Ben with Rick and Rick’s wife Francesca, and their annoying (to me) son, Robert, or Francesca and Rick talking about Ben…and Ben and his girlfriend Sandra before they broke up.

The story: Ben meets Lily (Liliane), a young Jewish woman, in Italy at a hotel in Italy while on vacation with his girlfriend Sandra and one thing leads to another and Ben and Lily end up taking a 7-hour walk together up a mountain (without Sandra who is not feeling well that day and does not want to take a hike with them). It turns out Lily has temporarily left her boyfriend, Frank, because she needs to make a decision about something (I think whether to stay with him or not). And she tells Ben about her grandmother, a Levantine Jew, and how before WWII she (the grandmother when she was young) met a young man while she (the grandmother) was on vacation with her family and he, a young man who was also Jewish, was on vacation with his family but he had a fiancé (who was not with him at the time)…and she (the grandmother) and her family left to go to their next stop on their itinerary on their vacation, a hotel in Siena Italy, up in the mountains with a garden behind it (which was odd given the rocky terrain). He apparently was interested in her (the grandmother) because he left his family and arrived at the hotel where she and her family were staying, and she and he had a very long talk together in this hotel garden (Hence the name of the novella, In a Hotel Garden.) And one other thing, Lily made a trip to this same hotel many years after that, apparently right before she met Ben, to try to come to a decision (I think whether to stay with her boyfriend, Frank), because she felt she would get the answer in the hotel garden where her grandmother had sat many years before.

So what came of all this? Did the young man leave his fiancé for Lily’s grandmother? Did Lily and Ben end up together—after all I already told you Ben and Sandra broke up. Well, the answer is…I shan’t tell you. That would be a spoiler now wouldn’t it!? 🙂 🙃 😉

I will say this and perhaps this is a spoiler. As far as I can tell the situation between Ben and Lily are similar to her grandmother and the young man:
• THEN: The young man who visits the grandmother (when she was young) has a fiancé but she is not with him. NOW: Ben has a live-in girlfriend, Sandra, but she did not go with him on his 7-hour walk with Lily.
• THEN: The young man and the grandmother have a very long talk. NOW: Ben talks with Lily over the space of 7 hours
• THEN: The grandmother when relating the story to Lily (her granddaughter) says this: “We talked about all sorts of things…we talked about everything. Nobody disturbed us. It was as if we were sealed off from time. And from other people. It was as if I was there with him, talking, and as if at the same time I was at an upstairs window, looking down on us talking. I couldn’t hear what we were saying but I could hear our two voices, like two streams, intermingling and flowing together.” NOW: Ben is talking to Francesca several weeks later after he is back home, about the 7-hour walk he took with Lily: “And gradually…it was as if my body, which had separated itself from me and had been walking and sitting and standing at a little distance from me, was returning, taking its rightful place, piece by piece, until I could feel every bit if it, not in pain but with a warm glow of contentment.”

I honestly don’t know if I am reading too much into this. If I went up to Gabriel Josapovici today and asked him whether he plotted out the story line this way so that lives in the past mirrored lives in the present, and if this was a key piece to understanding the novella, he might say “Beats me!” 😐

And finally this novella also deals with the Holocaust…and how perhaps the events of that one day in the life of the woman’s grandmother and the young man in the hotel garden, and the subsequent Holocaust, impinged on “the woman’s” life.

Reviews:
• This blogger also says his works provoke ambivalence… and he has a different and more complex take on the story line of this novella: http://this-space.blogspot.com/2017/0...
• https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-...
• https://www.waggish.org/2006/gabriel-...
• https://litlove.wordpress.com/2008/09...

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novel told mostly in dialogue-- a technique commonly employed by Josipovici. Characters develop through their own words and minimal description of their gestures and physical interactions. As with many of Josipovici's works, it is more nuanced than its straightforward prose might first indicate. The pages of conversation turned rapidly but by the end a cloud of ambiguity had obscured the reading experience. Certainly not my favorite of his but still a solid read displaying, as always, keen insight into the human condition. (3.5)

[Gabrielle Jarrett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Granted, I always liked Faulkner more than Hemingway. Josipovici seems to follow Hemingway. Very brief dialogue. Very brief story. Very shallow characters. Lots of indecision. Lots of unfinished thoughts. Considering such factors in my experience of reading IN A HOTEL GARDEN, very well done.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars

[Christopher Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I once met a woman who had uprooted herself from life in America to come and work in Poland because she had seen the orange-tiled roofs of Prague and felt that she had lived there before, in another life; an impossibility in a rational world but still justification to change everything she was doing. Why am I saying this? Because it feels like the story at the heart of 'In a Hotel Garden' makes perfect sense to me, and I think it made perfect sense both to Liliane and to Rick, though not to Ben and certainly not to Francesca because they are looking for rational explanations, and because they believe that life is explicable. It isn't, and the charm and the value in this novella surely comes from that conflict and how it resolves.

[Amari]

I got to p. 91 to find that my copy is missing pp. 91-128. I have asked the publisher for a new copy... do check that all pages are there before buying this book!

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hi.