Strange Hotel

by Eimear McBride

From the multi-award-winning author of the literary phenomenon A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, an exquisitely rendered and emotionally devastating meditation on love, loneliness, grief, and the possibilities for renewal.

A nameless woman enters a non-descript hotel room she's been in once before, many years ago. Though the room hasn't changed, she has, as have the dimensions of her life. As she goes on to occupy a series of hotel rooms around the world -- each of which reflects back some aspect of herself -- we begin to piece together the details of what transpires in these rooms, the rules of engagements she's put in place for herself and the men she sometimes meets, and the outlines of the absence she is trying to forget. Gradually, we come to understand what it is the narrator seeks to contain within the anonymous rooms she is drawn to, and how she might become free.
Told in a mesmerizing voice that will beguile readers with its fierceness, vulnerability, honesty, and black humour, Strange Hotel immerses us in the currents of attraction, love, and grief. It is an immensely moving and ultimately revelatory exploration of one woman's attempts to negotiate her own memories and impulses, and what it might mean to return home.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Ireland, Irish Literature, Contemporary, Audiobook, Literature

160 pages, Paperback

First published February 4, 2020

About the author

Eimear McBride was born in Liverpool in 1976 to Irish parents. The family moved back to Ireland when she was three. She spent her childhood in Sligo and Mayo. Then, at the age of 17, she moved to London.

Reviews

[Jaidee · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 " Hurry up Darling....we are late....we are due to have brandies with Beckett, Modiano and Cusk " stars !!!

4th Favorite Read of 2023

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. This was released May 2020. I am providing my honest review.

Jaidee, my love, he whispers, did you find this book intriguing because we read it together in a very ordinary hotel suite while drinking sparkling rose with a bit of cassis ? Perhaps I did as I looked at you and wondered if I had the means, and I lost you that I could be the Irish woman in this novel.

Jaidee, my love, you would be a sopping mess. Yes I truly would for many years but I would gladly drink in the hotel room with this lassie and her metacognitive meanderings would help me access not only my deep pain but also your beloved face, warm baritone and silky chestnut hair. I would lose lose myself in her loss to assuage my own grief. She might take me and dispose of me like she did to the man in Prague or Oslo or Austin or she might just masturbate next to me.

Jaidee, my love, you are lost in her words, her circular excuses and her lovely parfum. Yes, yes I am but I love hearing her thoughts and I can feel the mattress rumble as you read my sweet dear love and I would wander like she does if you left.

Jaidee, my sweetheart, put on your burgundy velvet jacket as we must hurry as we are meeting Beckett and Modiano and of course your effervescent Cusk for brandies. Shhhh I will hold your hand....

A friggin masterpiece....thank you Ms. Eimear McBride !

[Nataliya · Rating 4 out of 5]

“She should and should not think of this. If the past comes in it will wring her neck. So, she prevails upon her memory to recollect it as though from far away. And it is far away. Now, very far away.”

This book fit perfectly into an hour of silent reading, but coming up from under its spell took much longer - to the point where I leafed through it again, just to realize that yes, despite its slim size it can punch above its weight if you let it. And I let it.

“Memory assembles. Then she refuses to collaborate. There was a time before she knew how to do that but she can’t really recall now how she managed it. Youth, probably. And it’s not that the past hasn’t earned its weight, its weight just never helps with the pull.”

A woman checks into a hotel - actually a succession of them of which we get to see five: in Avignon, Prague, Oslo, Auckland and Austin over years of her life from thirty-five to fifty-something. She drinks, she smokes, sometimes she has casual sex and sometimes she does not, all while deliberately, painstakingly distancing herself from emotional involvement, with wounds of the past still deep in her memory and the need to cling to loneliness and grief prevails. We don’t know why the travels, why the hotels, or in fact much of the story here (although it’s temping to insert a lot from The Lesser Bohemians here) — it’s almost claustrophobically directed inward, but carefully guarded at the same time to not reveal a lot. There’s an intentional thick wall of distance that the protagonist is putting between herself and others while self-reflection nevertheless breaks through the armor.

“She has at times, perhaps frequently, found it harder to stare at that life than that death.”

In the repetitive sameness of the hotel rooms — “once distilled all hotel rooms are essentially alike, if not exactly the same” — in these spaces “built for people living in a time out of time” she finds the constant “again” of the life which she’s been so good at living through in circles.

“She could, if she wanted, imagine so much. She could remember who exactly she’s thinking of, who came to this city long ago. She could put herself in his place and draw a good guess at his impressions of it back then. She could pluck them right out of thin air. She has so much information stored within her. So many apertures in memory through which to see. Uselessly now, she supposes, except for fantasies like this, which serve no good purpose beyond causing upset. Being younger would be no remedy for this. Being older might.”

I was hoping for a similar experience that I had with McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians, and in a way I got it in the intense internal focus on the ruminations of inner monologue that pulls you into the narrator’s head. But it was done so differently this time, with the language far removed from the broken stream of consciousness and instead deliberately verbose, polished, full of clauses within clauses and elaborate metaphors. McBride’s protagonist has been purposefully, carefully constructing her inner narrative, creating her armor of age and experience and control against the pain and grief of the past. It seems that the language here can be off-putting to some fans of her other books, but I loved it.

“It’s harder to let the words into her body now or, maybe, out. They used to form and re-form themselves in order to dole out whatever she had in mind, whatever the meanings her body inclined to make them make. Now, they barely carry meaning beyond the literal wattle and daub. This does, occasionally, make her wistful for the savagery of before when, beholden to no one, the words did whatever they pleased. She wouldn’t mind going back to that. But there’s no going back and, she suspects, the price of regaining access is one she’d now be unwilling to pay. The sight, sound, taste and smell of it all grew too much. Originally, she’d thought this was just for a while but it had become, in the aftermath of turbulent times, her preferred manner in which to proceed. Thinking her way carefully around every instant. Grammatically and logically constructing it. Even now she can hear herself doing it. Lining words up against words, then clause against clause until an agreeable distance has been reached from the initial, unmanageable impulse which first set them all in train.”

It may be simple in the end, but in that simplicity lies what’s good here. Grief and memory and under that a hidden desire to still live. Wounds must heal, or at least we can hope so.

4.5 stars.

——————
Also posted on my blog.

[emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

i can't resist a short weird book

...but maybe i should try.

i read this 1.5 months before the day i sit here before you, writing this, and it is already fully purged from my mind.

that title / cover combo, though...

bottom line: this was a negative reading experience.

[Sandysbookaday (taking a step back for a while)]

EXCERPT: Prague

There are more cobbles down there than you could ever wish for, she thinks, no wonder defenestration was a thing. She has no doubt, if each could speak, their mouths will yawn fantastic with history. But, in truth, hers is a beggared interest. Missives from antiquity are not why she's here and, if more rigorous motives yet remain unclear, she is at peace with that. She can be, and can choose to be, in any given place. Furthermore, she's a grown woman and no body exists to which she must report back on every instant. Too much already of that though. Far too much, she thinks, her scorn rising at the redundant aegis of her instincts. All she really wants is the dark behind her eyes and perhaps for the rain to relent.

ABOUT THIS BOOK: At the mid-point of her life a woman enters an Avignon hotel room. She's been here once before - but while the room hasn't changed, she is a different person now.

Forever caught between check-in and check-out, she will go on to occupy other hotel rooms, from Prague to Oslo, Auckland to Austin, each as anonymous as the last, but bound by rules of her choosing. There, amid the detritus of her travels, the matchbooks, cigarettes, keys and room-service wine, she will negotiate with memory, with the men she sometimes meets, and with what it might mean to return home.

MY THOUGHTS: At 20% I labelled this book strange.

In Oslo (45%), I decided to abandon this read, tired of the reiteration of her stream of consciousness, unable to make sense of, well, anything really. At this point she thinks, 'For God's sake, just get up and go.' So I decided that I would, and would not be returning.

But I woke during the night and picked Strange Hotel up again, too lazy to wander down the other end of the house and find something else. And something changed. For the first time there was interest in her surroundings, outside her interchangeable hotel room. '...she can see to the fjord. To the promenade. To the opera house. To a damp sky behind, weakening into day.'

And we start to gather little snippets of information about her, though never her name. Her French is terrible, as a result of an unenthusiastic teacher and an endless confusion with both the tenses and the numbers. She describes herself as slightly agoraphobic, and yet she travels ceaselessly. She always requests a ground floor hotel room, not because she thinks she might jump, as she may well have been tempted when she was younger, but because she might fall. She is in her late forties, forty nine, in fact and grieving. Not for her youth. She considers her age 'a hard-won victory over the excellent carnage of being young.' She is grieving for the loss of her love. Husband? Lover? Partner? The father of their son who is not quite an adult yet. And on her endless travels, the purpose of which we never learn, she conducts her sex life rather like having dinner- sit down, eat, get up and leave.

But while in Prague, something happens, something that rocks her world a little...and as a result, she does something quite out of character.

So, what do I think of Strange Hotel? In all honesty, I don't know. I hated parts of it, I loved others. It bewildered me, it bewitched me.

🤯🤯.5

#StrangeHotel #NetGalley

THE AUTHOR: Eimear McBride was born in Liverpool in 1976 to Irish parents. The family moved back to Ireland when she was three. She spent her childhood in Sligo and Mayo. Then, at the age of 17, she moved to London.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Farr,Strauss and Giraux via NetGalley for providing a digital ARC of Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This review and others are also published on Twitter, Amazon, Instagram and my webpage https://sandysbookaday.wordpress.com/...

[Fionnuala]

Strange Hotel opens with the unnamed main character visiting a French hotel room, one she'd visited before under different, and, we are given to understand, painful-to-remember circumstances.

On that first visit, she reminds herself, her attention had been on everywhere and so nowhere near the now all-important imperative to forget.

Her experience is a little like mine when I'm plunging into a book for the first time. Because, yes, my attention is everywhere, and the all-important details that are imperative to not forget, may get missed. And just as the protagonist feels the need to revisit that hotel room in order to work out something about herself, I often feel the need to revisit a book in order to find the details that will help me work out something about what I've just read. Take this line where she's describing the hotel room:

What about that cigarette burn, to the far left, was that there? Located, unusually, in the skirting board. Surely she would remember a peculiarity like that?

I didn't notice that line the first time I went through the book but now it has jumped out at me and reminded me of a vague thought I'd had when I finished the novel: how this story is connected to McBride's earlier book, The Lesser Bohemians, which when I finished it caused a similar connecting-thread back to her first book, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, to launch itself in my mind.

So that unlikely cigarette burn location has confirmed an unlikely link—one which other readers may not see. The thing is, I associate cigarette burns in unlikely places with abuse, and I associate regular abuse with a tendency to self-harm, and all of McBrides female protagonists have been victims—and have also found complicated ways of punishing themselves for being victims.

The main character of Strange Hotel punishes herself by picking up strange men each time she visits a hotel in the seemingly random parts of the world she finds herself in, running the risk every time of being killed—or being driven to kill herself out of disgust at the meaninglessness of it all:

In the corridor, fronds dust-patinaed to rust, as though some off-Riviera Death in Venice were the desired effect...And there it is, death again. Displaying its feathers as the always inevitable...Outside the sky's a horror of fight and bruise.

I hear your thought right now that this book sounds terribly depressing and why would I read it and then reread it? Well, the thing is, Eimear McBride speaks about vulnerable people and vile doings in a way that wakes me up. And the writing itself always startles me though it's been different in each of the three books I've read.

In her first book, the writing was as fragmented as the young teenage narrator's mind, and it was very preoccupied with the blood and guts of living and dying.
In the second, the writing still had a fragmented quality but was becoming more 'together' as befitted a young adult narrator who herself is somehow coming together in her psyche in spite of the underlying blood and guts that threaten to spill.

So I was ready to expect different writing in this third book but still I was startled by how different it was. This time, rather than there being fragmented language, it's as if the writing is sewn into a strait-jacket of formal usage: Certainly, more is not in the plan and, unwilling as she is to expand on that, she has little difficulty in recollecting why. So, she will drink only until her musculature relents which, even from this starting point, will require some intransigence.

But sometimes, the former loose and free-roaming style slips through the seams: She is far from home or however that place may be best called to mind. Where the stuff is. Not the heart. No, some heart is there and nowhere near enough wine has passed through her yet to make that any less true.

Early in the book, I realised that the two styles might stand for the protagonist's seeming two personas, the strait-jacketed one, as it were, and the one that sometimes slips the seams:
So she turns aside from this noxious recreating of the past...She prefers to move forward, on to the next, and the next thing is: is that the wind getting up? Howling a bit, like it knows to distract?
Remember how he used to stoop against it?
This extra rumination she stops dead in its tracks.
Is it possible you have not heard myself speak?
To be clear then, enough of this.
Uncooperative though, it continues to maraud and assert its vague right to be heard.
Think of. Think of.
No I will not. And unwilling for her own brain to leave her outfoxed, she peers into the weather again. It is stormy and effectively diverting.

As I read on, it was rewarding to find the protagonist confirming this split, and speaking of the exercises in pedantry she now employs to deal with the side of herself she prefers to keep hidden: Not actual talk so much as a good old linguistic knot. Punctuation, sentence structure, etc. Send those good constructions out to war, and then, from your lovely grammatical afar, watch them mown down by the whim of the world. From afar as possible being the emphasis—keeping words as far as possible from the scent of blood and guts...She learned all those lessons, of course she did, but ultimately could not help herself. All the words filled up with blood and moved around as though entitled to motion so she gave them the freedom of her brain. And they went running in loops and running out of arrangement or simply running until their running was done...

That last sentence is such a great description of McBride's writing in her first book and parts of the second, and is why I think the three books are connected. And then further on, Strange Hotel's protagonist starts speaking as if she is in fact the writer who had used the running-in-loops style:
…The trick was knowing when to stop. The trick was knowing how much others could take. And then she got tired of the trick. And then she saw others using sub-standard versions of it...And then she knew she'd have to find other configurations somehow...It's harder to let the words into her body now or, maybe, out? They used to form and re-form themselves in order to dole out whatever she had in mind, whatever the meanings her body inclined them to make. Now, they barely carry meaning beyond the literal wattle and daub.

Ok, I've got to stop quoting from this book—but isn't that phrase 'the literal wattle and daub' such a neat description for the basic components of grammatical sentence construction! And Eimear McBride, whom readers excoriated in the past for her ungrammatical fragments, has proved in this book that she can wattle and daub with the best, but that underneath, the blood and guts are boiling away as furiously as ever.

Maybe just one more quote before I finish:
Even now, she can hear herself doing it. Lining words up against words, then, clause against clause until an agreeable distance has been reached from the initial, unmanageable impulse which first set them all in train. She's doing it now, and now, and now, and now, and it will continue, she's certain, unto the horizon, and then, indeed, beyond.

I do hope Eimear McBride will continue to write in her inimitable way that says there is no horizon!

Speaking of the inimitable, I just read an article about how, in thirty to fifty years, we may be reading machine-generated fiction now that Large Language Models such as ChatGPT have access to all the texts on the internet and can imitate particular writing styles. Well, I feel like issuing ChatGPT a challenge: imitate Eimear McBride's writing style!
I'd feel safe betting that it can't be done.

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

This hypnotizing, short novel is rendered in an enigmatic stream-of-consciousness, full of self-doubt and attempts at rationalizing situations and behaviors, gloomy, regretful and claustrophobic. The protagonist is a middle-aged woman who drifts through hotels in Avignon, France, Prague, Oslo, Auckland, and Austin - we never fully learn what she is doing in these cities except attempting to forget a man she once loved and who is probably the father of her child (god knows where this child is). The woman indulges in alcohol and casual sex, but it's never anything but a half-hearted distraction and unsuccessful self-medication.

The narrative technique is exceptionally well done, it conveys all the confusion and desperation of a protagonist who feels trapped in her own life, unable to break free of her behavioral patterns and depression. McBride makes a rather daring move by deciding to fully omit crucial information, thus creating a feeling of uncertainty and disorientation on the side of the reader, an unsettling fog. And of course, this is also frustrating: The narrator can't make sense of her own existence, and so can't we.

The stream-of-consciousness that goes back, forth and then in circles is not unlike the writing in Milkman, and the overall vibe of loss and pain is reminiscent of another woman-travels-and-drinks-because-she-lost-a-man-novel: The Third Hotel. Overall, the writing is impressive, but the book is too long for what it is, and it's also not a satisfying reading experience, although intentionally so.

[nastya · Rating 4 out of 5]

This tiny book makes no or little sense if read on its own, I’m sure of it. This is the only non-standalone book Eimear McBride has written to date. And the abysmal average star rating is proof of it.

McBride has written three books and they make up this triptych of introspecting the life of this woman.
The girl is a half-formed thing is maybe the rawest of them all, about growing up with abuse and grief.
Lesser bohemians is about the girl who did grow up, encountering a turbulent intense love affair, some people would say destructive but in the end it’s the love that breaks both parties to pieces, that were crudely glued together before anyways, examining those parts and gluing them together with care.

This book is a collection of episodes from hotels featuring a middle aged woman looking back on her life and choices, dealing with the aftermath of that intense all-consuming love of the second book, dealing with grief of losing her love (one of the most touching is her waiting for her birthday that will make her older than him), hooking up with men far away from home, no string attached.

The first episode is when she’s 35 and just recently experienced a loss and the last one is her in her early 50s finally making progress after ruthless self-interrogation.

And this book must be read after Lesser bohemians, being a kind of sequel to it. Or one of the possible sequels, you choose. Or one of the possible continuations.

If you’ve read McBride, this writing style would be at first unexpected - a third person limited. And she addresses this change explicitly in the text:

It’s harder to let the words into her body now or, maybe, out. They used to form and re-form themselves in order to dole out whatever she had in mind, whatever the meanings her body inclined to make them make. Now, they barely carry meaning beyond the literal wattle and daub. This does, occasionally, make her wistful for the savagery of before when, beholden to no one, the words did whatever they pleased. She wouldn’t mind going back to that. But there is no going back and, she suspects, the price of regaining access is one she’d now be unwilling to pay. The sight, sound, taste and smell of it all grew too much. Originally, she’d thought this was just for a while but it had become, in the aftermath of turbulent times, her preferred manner in which to proceed. Thinking her way carefully around every instant. Grammatically and logically constructing it. Even now, she can hear herself doing it. Lining words up against words, then clause against clause until an agreeable distance has been reached from the initial, unmanageable impulse which first set them all in train. She’s doing it now, and now, and now, and now, and it will continue, she’s certain, unto the horizon and then, indeed, beyond. Frankly, she finds it exhausting, interrogating her own interrogation.

Do you also find it fascinating?

Maybe I should ruthlessly edit? Maybe I should stop fucking around with language? It’s not improving matters at all.

How about this? Because to me it’s so exciting. What does it mean? Is it just this book, or is it a change for the author? I guess we’ll see in her next book. But it positively won’t mean anything to the readers not familiar with her work.

All in all, I’m McBride’s fan, she’s one of the most interesting writers who are working today and this is another piece of a puzzle in her oeuvre. And kind of a sequel to my favorite book.

But this is not a book that will make you fall in love with McBride’s writing, so don't start here.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Staying in a hotel room on your own can inspire a special kind of self-reflection. This is a space that’s meant to simulate feelings of relaxed domesticity, but it’s more likely to make you feel anonymous. It’s somewhere you can either radically confront yourself or create yourself anew. The nameless female protagonist of “Strange Hotel” seems caught in the impermanence of this liminal space that is “A place built for people living in a time out of time – out of their own time anyway. And if that isn't always the reason why they came, it is often the reason she has.” It’s not so much an escape from her reality as it is an escape from the boundaries of time itself with all her past disappointments and anxiety about the future.

If this sounds like a novel more concerned with ponderous thoughts than plot that’s because it is. The pleasure a reader can find in it will probably depend on how much they are prepared to engage with this amount of ambiguity and intense interiority. I was in the right mood to read this novel so found it a pleasure to follow the teasing twisted path of her inner journey. Exactly who she is and what she’s doing in the many hotel rooms she inhabits around the world is never fully explained although there are oblique hints. Like taking off layers of makeup or complex clothing, it takes time to get to the real person beneath. For instance, after using room service to order a couple bottles of wine she finds “a few drinks bring the further joy of shearing away the female body’s perpetual role as ill-fitting attire.”

Read my full review of Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride on LonesomeReader

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't review this immediately after finishing it the week before last because we were planning to discuss it in a group, but the plans for that have changed, so I will try to review it retrospectively now.

This book felt rather slight compared to McBride's two previous novels - the narrative describes a series of nights/mornings spent in anonymous hotel rooms around the world, with the sections introduced by lists of apparently random place names, some accompanied by an x, ending with the one in which the next section is set (Avignon, Prague, Oslo, Auckland and Austin). In each of them the middle-aged narrator either flirts with or spends the night with a different male stranger, and descriptions of these encounters are mixed with her memories of a more significant relationship in the past. This makes for a rather elliptical and repetetive narrative. Had I not seen reviews that mention it, it would probably not have occurred to me that the narrator might be an older version of the same woman that narrated The Lesser Bohemians - there are hints at this but it is deliberately left ambiguous.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

And what does my will think of me now? Probably that it’s tired of this tone. Of relentlessly reshuffling the deck of pseudo-intellectual garble which, if I’m honest, serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence.

This is Eimear McBride’s third novel after her Goldsmith and Women’s Prize winning, Galley Beggar published “A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing” and “Lesser Bohemians”.

Famously “A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing” was finished in 2004 (many years before publication) and while “Lesser Bohemians” was finished a more conventional period before publication, it was started in the mid-2000s. This book can be said therefore to be by a much more mature author, and this is reflected in the protagonist: a middle aged woman rather than the young women in the previous two books.

From the opening paragraph (after a list of hotels – some marked with an x) we realise immediately we are in different territory.

Compare:

“She has no interest whatsoever in France. The subject is unbroachable with her. She disregarded it as best she could on the train from Nice. She did not absorb her cab ride here. With this indifference, of course, she has defeated herself: tomorrow will mean the acquisition of a map”

With

“For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed. I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day”

And

“I move. Cars move. Stock, it bends light. City opening itself behind. Here’s to be for its life is the bite and would be start of mine”

And thereafter, unlike the rawness, immediacy and lack of filter in the first two books – here the book is all about control, distancing, barriers as the protagonist, faced not with a trauma in her immediate present but one in her distant past, puts in place coping strategies and rules to deliberately not allow the memories to control her, and in fact that distancing process lies exactly at the heart of the novel.

The author has commented (https://granta.com/interview-eimear-m...)

My first two novels feature young protagonists who are at the mercy of their impulses, and of experience more generally, but this time around, I was writing a woman old enough to be able to assert control over how she reacts to the outside world. In fact, her aim is to keep the world, and memory itself, at a distance, which is the reason behind the far more formal – perhaps even overly formal – register of Strange Hotel.

In the first two books the girls/young women are open and invite the world in – for better and worse. Middle-aged people tend to be a bit more discerning, have their eyes open about the areas where risk lies for them and have experienced enough pain to not willingly lay themselves bare to more. There is a lot in her past that has caused her pain and having come through the furnace, she is reluctant to revisit those sites. But memory can’t be entirely vanquished by an act of will and so she’s developed various strategies to distract herself.

The book is set in a series of cities/towns visited by the unnamed narrator (part of a much longer list of cities/towns reproduced at length in the book – as both opening and closing).

In each city/town the narrator stays in a hotel, and we quickly realise the lists are of other hotels in which she has stayed and that those marked with a cross are where she had sexual encounters. The lists (including those which start and end the book) tell their own story – a series of one-night stands all around the world before the book, followed by a period of relative sexual abstinence, and at the book’s end the hint of a new regular relationship.

In each hotel, the narrator is faced with something that challenges the barricades she has built around her behaviour, the fortress around her thoughts. Each vignette (the book is really a collection of linked short stories) moves agonisingly slowly as a result, as the narrator circles rather than confronts her challenge.

Avignon: the narrator flirts with a man in a neighbouring room, while constantly telling herself to a plan to stay alone. Falling asleep while flicking through hotel channels she is mortified on waking to realise she has left a porn movie blaring away the paper thin walls all evening, and is reluctant to go to breakfast in case she meets him.

Prague: the narrator waits on her balcony (her mind full of thoughts of defenstration) for a man she slept with to leave, the encounter turning awkward when she made it clear their encounter was little more than a way for her to get to sleep.

Oslo: the narrator wakes up in bed, knowing she wants to leave before her partner of last night wakes, but unable to do so and trying to analyse why, while reflecting on the light.

Auckland: the narrator feels unanchored/unmoored – even not sure if her feet are touching the ground and feeling she is at the furthest point from home.

Austin: the narrator is almost tempted to go to breakfast with the man she slept with last night, at the last moment asking him to leave – but now as he returns to the room asking to see her she agonises over what to do and starts to confront the very memories she has been suppressing of another relationship.

The memory seems possibly to be of the night that “Lesser Bohemians” Ends – the narrator (possibly Elly) it told by her London lover, a man “more than twice my age” (possibly Stephen) of his past

That night I heard a story that might have made me run. I learned how the body I loved and touched had lived another life. Pitilessly, physically. In its recountment, guiltily. Even when younger, brokenly, in similar ways to mine”

An admission the young narrator is unable to cope with, allowing her lover to book her a hotel room (her first ever) and effectively ending their relationship, left only with her memories and, some months later, the man’s son.

But in Austin, she begins the journey back towards restarting a relationship.

I am beholden to no past, that much is clear. I am the last one standing in so many memories. Will I decide there can be more again? Or will I procrastinate at this door until the end of my days? Or will I choose to remember that there are some things I already know how to do?

Overall a difficult book to judge. In many ways a much more comfortable read than the author’s first two books, which were at times close to unreadable – but also as a result lacking much of what made them so vibrant.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eimear McBride is an author whose works I often have to circle back to because I have to be in the right place or mood to tackle her experimental or dense prose. I had a similar experience with Strange Hotel, where the words on the page are largely an internal dialogue as a woman enters a hotel room alone...except then there are multiple hotel rooms, and she isn't always alone. The reader has to read between the lines a lot and I may have come to the wrong conclusions. It does resonate with the feelings of displacement and nostalgia I often feel in hotel rooms, but hadn't really thought about.

It was bizarre to read this book alongside my daily reading of Ducks, Newburyport (not an experience I would recommend) since both are stream of consciousness in style. I actually found that it was best read in the middle of the night, something about the restless quiet that really works as a backdrop for the narrative.

I had a copy from the publisher through Edelweiss; it came out May 5.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally, she’d thought this was just for a while but it had become, in the aftermath of turbulent times, her preferred manner in which to proceed. Thinking her way carefully around every instant. Grammatically and logically constructing it. Even now, she can hear herself doing it. Lining words up against words, then clause against clause until an agreeable distance has been reached from the initial, unmanageable impulse which first set them all in train. She’s doing it now, and now, and now, and now, and it will continue, she’s certain, unto the horizon and then, indeed, beyond. Frankly, she finds it exhausting, interrogating her own interrogation.

I ended my review of Eimear McBride's previous novel, The Lesser Bohemians, by commenting that “given the extremely troubled past relationships of Eilis, Stephen and his wife, the reader can not help but assume that it will be unlikely that they will in reality all live happily ever after.”

Her third novel Strange Hotel provides an answer of sorts, and suggests that the relationship may have ended not in separation (as I had assumed) but tragedy. The narrator of this novel may or may not be Eilis, but there is a scene in her past that is very similar to that in the previous book, and we gradually discern that her partner died just before he turned 50 and shortly after they had a son. McBride acknowledges the ambiguity:

I do think that my books are very intertwined. And Strange Hotel could be the story of Eilis twenty years later. But there are reasons she’s not named. That’s not set in stone.

Strange Hotel, while only around 150 pages, is set over 18 years, spanning the middle age of the narrator, a London-based Irish woman, who is aged 35 when the novel opens and (I think) 53 when it ends (she refers to an event 35 years earlier which would have taken place when she was 18).

The narrator - for reasons to which we are not privy - travels, alone, around the world over the years to a variety of hotels, no longer the girl who’s never been anywhere, (a neat nod to Eilis in Lesser Bohemians).

McBride has suggested these are places where she herself as stayed on various book tours.

These places are recorded in the novel via by a list of city names, some marked with a cross, which seems to designate where the narrator undertook a casual fling.

In five instances over the unmarked years (in Avignon, Prague, Oslo, Auckland, Austin) the lists are interrupted with a short passage describing her stay in the hotel. But the narration doesn't leave her room, and is largely focused on her own interior journey and understanding.

The first hotel is in Avignon, with a nod to one of the novel's key influences (see also below):

Fronds dust-patinaed to rust, as though some off-Riviera Death in Venice were the desired effect. Should this be the case they’ve not been entirely unsuccessful, she reflects – the aqueous decadence of old Venice excepted, alongside any perceptible increase in the likelihood of an untimely death.

But some limited description of the rooms aside, if anything, the narrator seeks out hotels for their anonmyity and heterogeneity:

Some must have bigger bathrooms. Super king beds. Perhaps facilities more elaborate than a teabag and kettle, or a dispiritingly understocked mini-bar – she’s not reflecting on her own room’s amenities now, she has yet to check. But opportunities for increased billing and superfluities aside, she will not, cannot deny that, once distilled all hotel rooms are essentially alike, if not exactly the same. A place built for people living in a time out of time – out of their own time anyway. And if that isn’t always the reason why they came, it is often the reason she has.

But as McBride has explained, in a sense her plan backfires, as it forces her to confront her own situation:

Spending time in a place in which you have no personal stake breeds a peculiar kind of contemplativeness and makes it harder to evade any sense of existential isolation you may be prone to experiencing.

The tightly controlled, elliptical language here is very different to her first two novels as even the narrator acknowledges: this does, occasionally, make her wistful for the savagery of before when, beholden to no one, the words did whatever they pleased.. McBride herself has explained:

My first two novels feature young protagonists who are at the mercy of their impulses, and of experience more generally, but this time around, I was writing a woman old enough to be able to assert control over how she reacts to the outside world. In fact, her aim is to keep the world, and memory itself, at a distance, which is the reason behind the far more formal – perhaps even overly formal – register of Strange Hotel.

I am a massive fan of McBride, both her literary influences:

The 20th century European legacy was far more on my mind during the writing, particularly Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Von Aschenbach’s rootlessness and paralysis in the face of his own ruined mortality has always exerted a powerful sway over my imagination and this seemed the moment to give that influence an opportunity to play itself out. Work in translation has always been central to my reading and having the influence of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils on The Lesser Bohemians, and Mann[‘s Death in Venice] on Strange Hotel, completely ignored in favour of the old Irish reliables gets quite irritating.

(elsewhere when compared to Sally Rooney, McBride says she feels more “literary kinship” with writers like Anna Burns, Claire-Louise Bennett and Anakana Schofield)

and for her views on how novels should be written:

McBride has an aversion to exposition. “It just doesn’t interest me to write it,” she says. “I just don’t care. The things that count to me are the things going on inside. Things that hit.” These are strewn across her novels: moments of humiliation, desire or violence, the thrill and terror of intimacy, smells, sounds, déjà vu. “There are things that invade you, that you can’t control, no matter how protective you are. There are things that will just go through all of that. Those are the things I’m interested in catching.”

But she is also frustrated by a “backlash” reasserting the literary merit of conventional fiction, the kind that you can “enjoy reading or skimming. I have a problem with those books being treated as serious literature. That annoys me, a lot.”

That said, Strange Hotel is a difficult book with which to engage, but then McBride would argue that making the reader work is the point of worthwhile literature. Here, the narrator manages to not only keep the world, and memory itself, at a distance, but, perhaps inevitably, the reader as well. I had to read the novel a second time to really connect with it.

That said McBride succeeds brilliantly in the effect she wants to create - a character who wants to keep both others (including her various lovers, who she casually discards when they have fulfilled their service) and her own feelings at a distance:

Forever the carnival trick of a seeing woman trying not to see? Forever the carnival trick of a woman trying not to be … opened into every room on every floor in every hotel around the world? Unfolded and unfolded, boundlessly. Never to be less or more, better or worse. Just this crystallised extending version of self. Liberated from the scourge of accountability as well as hope of reprieve. But no … not exempt reality. Still moving forward. Still on the inside of time.

and a narrator circling around a double underlying trauma: her partner's death but also his personal revelations early on in their relationship, echoing her previous novel.

All these years later, I’m still thinking about that night. In some ways I think I’ve never stopped circling it, niggling at what it meant. About him. About me. It is my brightest, my one unalterable memory. No matter what use I put it to, it never fails to bloom. So, if in every life there must be a touchstone, then this one is irrefutably mine. Because. That night I heard a story that might have made me run. I learned how the body I had loved and touched had lived another life. Pitilessly, physically. In its recountment, guiltily. Even, when younger, brokenly, in ways similar to mine.

And as with Lesser Bohemians the novel ends on a note of hope - one rather cleverly signalled by the closing list.

In a way I hesitate to recommend this book, but I certainly found it highly worthwhile.

Interview sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

https://inews.co.uk/culture/books/str...

https://granta.com/interview-eimear-m...

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/...

https://thequietus.com/articles/27936...

[Jennifer nyc · Rating 2 out of 5]

I almost hated this book. Imagine my surprise after wanting to read it so badly, after loving The Lesser Bohemians, and really appreciating Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. At first, I was pleasantly surprised: Eimear McBride’s usual slant of language – more like scrambled symbols that tap into my subconscious, rather than actual sentences – this book was written in traditional prose. Having had serious COVID brain, I was at first relieved. But then the protagonist started badgering me, talking nonstop in an abrasive way. Maybe the narration on Audible was what felt like an assault? But then it was too late; the book felt that way, too: like a novella-long stream-of-consciousness from an unpleasant woman about her unpleasant life. But I didn’t hate it. It’s well written. The structure of time woven through similar hotel rooms over the course of a women’s life, as she looks it over, does share her humanity. I just really didn’t enjoy being with her. She felt a little like the narrator of Milkman matured and embittered.

[Maxwell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, this was not really what I expect from a McBride novel. The language was quite different than her previous two novels, which I both enjoyed immensely. There were glimmers of her style throughout this, but overall it was more simply written and accessible. But the story felt not fully realized. Whereas in her other novels, I was completely absorbed by the prose and characters' lives, in this one I really could not have cared less. Sadly, not a story I think will stick with me, which is shocking considering The Lesser Bohemians was a 5 star read I still think about years later.

[d · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will be re-reading this in the very very near future. So much gained, but so much eluded me/was purposefully elided. This book is phenomenal.

“And what does my will think of me now?
Probably that it’s tired of this tone. Of relentlessly reshuffling the deck of pseudo-intellectual garble which, if I’m honest, serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence. And that will no longer do. And that will no longer be? This is the day. The hour. The minute.
And so?
I am beholden to no past, that much is clear. I am the last one standing in so many memories.”

[Michael Livingston · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very deliberate turn away from the electrifying prose of her first two books. It all left me a bit baffled to be honest. This felt like almost an argument against her first novels - it's reflective, verbose, slow-moving and vague. I got none of the visceral thrill that I got from her earlier work and I wound up feeling like I was really missing something key to the whole work. A puzzle I couldn't quite solve.

[Nicola Balkind · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t think I can give this a star rating.

It reads more like a writing exercise than a novel. She seems to be in conversation with herself about her own writing rather than sharing a story. Maybe this should have been the basis for a novel rather than the novel itself. It felt like it wasn’t fully developed. It certainly did not live on the page as her writing is able to do. There were a few flashes of that vibrancy but most of the time I found my mind wandering.

I may go back and re-read this but based on the sections I did re-read on the first read-through I don’t anticipate gaining a whole lot more from it.

[Ana Jembrek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sinopsis je sladak, kao što je i specifični stil pisanja ove autorice, ali skupa ne idu, nikako. Dok je u Manji smo beomi sadržaj iznutra punio prikaz toka misli, ovdje suhoća radnje jednostavno ne pridonosi dovoljno da bi se tekst prestao opirati ugodnom čitanju. Srećom, nije duga.

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

No. That won't fit. That's what I believed before imagining this situation I'm in. But tonight I am in a strange hotel and, therefore, an ulterior me. Yes, that surely makes sense. Unless, of course, in reality it doesn't. After all, it may be the case that the act of leaving him would not have left me changed. Perhaps, by my choosing to imagine coming to this place, I am merely absenting myself from what I don't know how to hear?

I loved Eimear McBride's two previous novels (A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians), and for the most part, I loved them because of their charged and creative use of language and their gut-punch of emotional connection; the love was visceral, organ-deep. With Strange Hotel, the writing is still unconventional but this time is more formal; cryptic and cerebral. In contrast to the young women in her first two novels, the main character in McBride's latest is met in middle age (the author has even acknowledged that this unnamed woman could be considered one of her earlier characters, grown), and whether the more formalistic atmosphere is meant to reflect the lifestage of the character or the author's own maturation, the effect was distancing. Turns out, I read with my viscera and I want them to get punched. To be clear: Strange Hotel is still well-crafted – intelligent and purposeful – and the three stars I've awarded it reflects this book's ranking against McBride's previous novels. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Sometimes she forgets all the places she's been until someone asks and she'll remember then. Then remember that what she's been regarding as bedrock has, in fact, acquired sediment. No, she hasn't been there once but now she has. The time for not knowing about it has passed, and often considerably, on. She likes to think this happens only about countries, allowing her to enjoy recalling that she has indeed travelled and is no longer the girl who's never been anywhere. When this happens, it's a real, and valuable, pleasure but is also not the only occasion it happens to her. She keeps so little of her past bonded close that she frequently has cause for surprise. Here lies a whole slab of your life you've completely left out in the cold. Not on purpose, out of cowardice or shame. Not, in fact, for any good reason she can name. Except there was youth and then there was later but only youth got to dig its claws in.

When we first meet the main character, she is thirty-five and checking in to a hotel in Avignon (with the ironic opening line being, “She has no interest whatsoever in France”). The narrative will eventually jump ahead five or so years at a time – and we will revisit this woman in hotel rooms in Oslo, Auckland, and Austin – and while we'll never learn what causes her to be constantly on the move (something like a hundred cities are eventually named), the settings aren't really that important when we only see these cities framed through hotel windows. What is important is that hotel rooms make this woman introspective – remembering and trying to forget events in her past, and while she's skilled enough at suppressing her memories to make the whole thing totally opaque to the reader, she will also use room-service wine and casual hookups to blot out that past. McBride makes the reader really work to find a storyline in Strange Hotel, but despite my complaint that I didn't emotionally connect with the character or the plot, there is some relief in late hints that she eventually makes peace with her personal ghosts.

The intractable belligerence of this – her memory – is what she's come to hate. How it seems to insist on a future her past has already generated. No corrections. No deviations. Or, more concisely put: a coherent path for a conciliated self – for which she lacks sufficient new evidence to justify a change. She would have once – changed – practically on a whim. But that was before her hard-won victories over the excellent carnage of being young. Nowadays it's just being again, and always again, as you always were. In bleaker moments she wonders whether her very last choice has already been made? And, whatever her disillusion with this, she cannot deny there was a stage when that was exactly how she'd wanted it. Now seems to be the time she has finally grown tired of it: this entombment in more practical, replicable versions of herself, erected on the notion that her past is a secret. And it isn't a secret. It just became the easiest version to be.

I have quoted at length to give some sense of what this book is like – as I don't have the words to describe what I found to be so maddeningly distancing in the writing – and while it is certainly a puzzle to work over, there's satisfaction in that, too. Eimear McBride is no paint-by-numbers artist, and while I wanted more of the same of what I thought I could expect from her, I can't be upset that she flexed her talents in a different direction. I will happily read whatever she comes up with next.

[Emmeline · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

Maybe I should add more again?
Maybe I should ruthlessly edit?
Maybe I should stop fucking around with language? It’s not improving matters at all.

And then the coup de grace:

Funny how unbearable I’m finding all of this.

It’s annoying because there are moments of exceptional writing, and I liked the structure of the book, and even the concept: a series of vignettes or thought-monologues of a woman in different anonymous hotels around the world, where sometimes she sleeps with anonymous men, sometimes she resists, always she overanalyzes, and eventually she moves towards some kind of change, despite the liquid statis of her surroundings.

But the woman’s wittering on inside her head was just so tedious. Which was in a way the point. This is what Eimear McBride does, breaks language up to fit a character’s internal voice. I admire her, but I haven’t so far much liked the results.

Thinking her way carefully around every instant. Grammatically and logically constructing it…Lining words up against words, then clause against clause, until an agreeable distance has been reached from the initial, unmanageable impulse which first set them all in train. She’s doing it now, and now, and now, and now, and it will continue, she’s certain, unto the horizon and then, indeed, beyond. Frankly, she finds it exhausting, interrogating her own interrogation.

In a way, form fits content because the nameless woman desperately wants to get out of her own head, and so do I.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 2 out of 5]

Synopsis

In McBride books women are for the most part the recipients of bad treatment and theirs is a battle to fight back and regain a sense of worth. Strange Hotel also features a woman, older this time, in her thirties and forties, whose self respect has been severely compromised.
The intrinsic loneliness of hotel rooms provides a suitable backdrop for our narrator’s torpor, but the overall effect is one of extreme monotony and aimlessness. It’s a dull existence and a dull read at times.
The narrator rounds off the book with her declared objective to “serve the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence”. That’s hardly an endorsement.

Author background & Reviews

Eimear McBride’s previous two books A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing and Lesser Bohemians are renowned for being innovative, uncompromising, and thought provoking. I got the impression that McBride is best pleased with Young Bohemians (of the two)

I heard McBride speaking with Alex Clark at the Purcell Rooms, London Southbank 13 Feb 2020. This was an interesting challenge because I don’t think Strange Hotel is a book that lends itself to prolonged analysis.

* This is the first time a McBride novel has featured middle age (and not youth). This is about a woman outside the ‘normal’social settings (in which women are judged; for their achievements, motherhood, job). In McBride’s earlier books young women discover that life flies at them and affects them. Middle aged women just don’t allow that to happen.

* McBride wrote very quickly. Her lead character came easily. None of the ‘faff’ that surrounds the production of an anticipated work. It was written privately; not sold in advance, it was a surprise to publisher, and her agent. Initially submitted as a 8,000 words short story, only to be cajoled “there might be more”. She doubled the word count… and a second time “there might be more”, doubled it again. And then there was a novel. In the run up to publication… McBride says she ‘hasn’t suffered enough’! It only took 12 months (and actually only 3 months writing).

* Writing about grief. It’s a tough subject. In A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing, there was an inescapability as the book moved towards its end. . In Strange Hotel it is ten years since original bereavement. Our narrator has an uncompromising way of dealing with her emotion. Sex; then push away (in response to a question about the ‘objectification’ of men : ’Women don’t always want love ‘
* Hotels are fruitful settings for literature

o Influence of Thomas Mann Death In Venice . Mann far from home, in Venice,
features a writer suffering from writer's block who is obsessed by the sight of a boy. Mann stayed at The Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido in 1911.

o Irish canon/writers. Much commented upon influence of Beckett on McBride after she spent a year in Reading, with his archives. But McBride is interested in getting away from being a part of an identifiable Irish tradition, hence Mann. McBride feels that translated writing is not sufficiently respected- to the detriment of literary culture. Many Irish writers plodding until a new post Crash generation.

Recommend

No. I was disappointed in this book.. I think McBride’s comments that it was conceived as a short story, and at most a novella, are telling. It has a single idea that is repeated. Not enough substance.

[Marie-Therese · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written but far too long, diffuse, and unbalanced, with all the emotion weighted at the end. I almost gave up on this at about the 60% mark and, even after finishing it, I'm not entirely certain I wouldn't have been better off just closing it and saving that last hour.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel I could have benefited from a primer for 'Strange Hotel', so here goes: This is a novel about a middle-aged woman in a perpetual struggle with her own desires and memories. We don't know what she does for a living, but she stays in a lot of hotels around the world. Sometimes she's there alone, other times she has company (these instances are marked by a 'x' on her lists of cities). She's deeply convinced she can intellectualise her way out of any sort of attachment or tricky situation with the men who sometimes keep her company, but the cracks open up gradually to reveal her past (and her reasons for her emotional fortressing). She also tries her darndest to repress what each hotel reminds her of - some fraught relationship in her distant past. That's all you need to know to start. The details and the weight of things reveal themselves slowly; have patience with this. It's worth it, I think.

*Possible spoilers and actual review ahead*

This novel rewards perseverance, and also, probably, re-reading. I found its structure and voice challenging (read: frustrating), but I think that was actually the point - the narrator's psyche is difficult to inhabit. She lives in a lonely agony just to keep a more painful grief at bay, similar to the mother ('Amelia') in the 2014 film 'The Babadook' (and upon reflection I think there are parallels worth exploring between that film and this book). Sometimes excruciatingly sharp, other times meandering and opaque, sometimes pretty funny - there's something quite extraordinary about the narrator's voice, the way she views her contained worlds and the way that her memories inevitably break through her carefully built and maintained intellectual fortresses. A traditional 'plot' isn't so forthcoming - the narrator's reasons and life background are revealed in subtle (sometimes breathtaking) details, in such a way that things become a lot clearer upon finishing. Though this choice didn't feel very kind to the reader, I think it was a well-considered one on the author's part.

This is actually a heartbreaking novel, and even more so because I didn't expect it to be at all. It's ultimately about redemption and healing from the deepest kinds of wounds - forged in youth - a bit later in life, and I think it's worth reading for its exquisite depiction of this journey alone. I will be re-reading it in the months to come.

[John Braine · Rating 1 out of 5]

That was like a bad joke. Completely impenetrable inner dialogue, with a promise of reward for perseverance (according to other reviews) that never came and yet just short enough to fool you into battling through to the end. Perseverance is a mode that I endeavour to avoid in my reading, so I never thought I'd have reason to give another one star review, because usually if I'm not enjoying a book that much, I'll stop reading, and not review.

It's as if someone read McBride's other two (amazing) books and said to her "I'd love to know what's going on inside your head". No, you really wouldn't.

Oddly, there were plenty of passages where it read like McBride was apologising for knowingly torturing us:

"...Probably that it’s tired of this tone. Of relentlessly reshuffling the deck of pseudo-intellectual garble which, if I’m honest, serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence."

[Tommi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Considering its formal, pensive language – a clear departure from her fiery earlier prose – Strange Hotel was, for me, unsuitable for casual audiobook listening. It appears to have been a deliberate change of style, reflecting a middle-aged woman’s thought patterns*, which obviously stands in contrast to e.g. the youthful, passionate ungrammatical voice of The Lesser Bohemians. I will wait for the library to order a physical copy of this so I can actually make some sense of it.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ziXg...

[Tala🦈 (mrs.skywalker.reads) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kobieta, mnogość hotelowych pokoi, przestrzeń wielu lat, nieprzepracowana żałoba, ucieczka, obsesyjne poszukiwania.

Nie ma tu akcji, nie ma nawet dialogów, jest bohaterka, jej wspomnienia, myśli, refleksje, lęki, wewnętrzne i zewnętrzne konfrontacje. Pochłaniające. Nie mogłam się oderwać.

Bardzo nieoczywisty, nieoznaczony w żaden sposób sequel Pomniejszych Wędrowców, ale paralele fabularne stają się w pewnym momencie dość oczywiste (a już ostatni rozdział całkowicie, do tego jest absolutnie przepiękny i pełen emocji).

Nie spodziewałam się tego, ale McBride znowu rozłożyła mnie na łopatki. RIP me

[Isobel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is only a short book and I thought at first it could have been shorter, because it spends a long time circling the thing it is approaching, but when it hits it it is very powerful and earns the 4 star rating. This story has at its heart the same as The Lesser Bohemians: that all consuming love. I think the first two thirds of the book which have a kind of numbing effect are necessary after all to make the last third and the memory it contains stand out in brilliant contrast.

[Garry Nixon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've stayed in a lot of hotels. So, clearly, has Eimear McBride. But the hotel rooms are simply the canvases and frames. What's contained is a whole universe of memory and regret and grief. It was so honest, often I had to stop reading to process my own memories. A marvel, it's like nothing else I've ever read.

[M. Sarki · Rating 2 out of 5]

After slogging my way through over fifty percent of this book I decided I was wasting my time. There is just nothing in this book worth reading. A total bore and simply an exercise in futility. What Eimear McBride was thinking by publishing this drivel is beyond me. She is a very talented writer who in no way proves it here. Sadly, I abandoned the book.