Rating: 
Summary: A wonderful read
Review: A slow-moving, low-key narrative of a season in a woman's life packs a surprising punch. I have had this book for years and just never got around to reading it. Why, I do not know. I am very glad I finally read it!
Edith Hope is a quiet, late 30ish writer of romance novels who is spending some time at the Hotel Du Lac in Switzerland. She has been "banished" there after backing out of her wedding at the time of the ceremony and causing so much embarrassment to her friends, not to mention the expectant groom.
While at the hotel, she meets a number of women and the descriptions of their lives adds to the aimlessness and seeming futility of her existence. She writes to her secret lover, David, describing them and the life at the hotel and speaks of her love and passion for him. He, needless to say, is married and their relationship is sporadic and quite one-sided. Then, seemingly, rescue comes when a wealthy, successful man staying at the hotel, Philip Neville, proposes to her and offers her a very businesslike, loveless marriage.
Through these avenues, Edith comes to some profound understanding about not only her life but the lives and needs of women.
There are so many undercurrents in this story and the writing is marvelous, wry, witty and multi-layered.
Rating: 
Summary: I read the book at the back of Hotel Du Lac
Review: All I can say is that the book is not a true image of the hotel nor the place, (Vevey Switzerland) itself. But this was passed as a fiction so scratch that out and give this award-winning novel a break. I just saw on Amazon that there's a used book for $0.47, go click on that and keep this book as part of your collection. Could have been a 2-star, but I have a penchant for reading books such as Tojours Provence and Bella Tuscany in the exact places that they were described in the book. So sentimental me....huhuhu
Rating: 
Summary: A so-so book about a bourgeois writer.
Review: An english writer of romance novels takes an excursion to a Swiss Hotel in order to "settle down" after committing an unspeakably embarrassing act back home. The characters of the novel are the people she meets at the hotel. Much is said about clothing, manners, and other bourgeois topics. Each character, except for our mediating exiled main character, is essentially a flat character that promotes a certain way of life - one a free-lover, another a chronic shopper, etc. This book about ideas is mildly interesting, but fails to achieve a structural beauty which, in my mind, makes a great book
Rating:
Summary: The subtleties of the discerning heart
Review: Anita Brookner is a writer of enormous intelligence and subtlety. She is a writer who chronicles the small motions of the heart in expectation and disappointment. She writes usually with a kind of fine irony and her characters rarely escape untouched by careful criticism. In this novel still thought to be her best Edith Hope the protagonist a romance- writer who has walked out of her own wedding and is carrying on a passionate( from her side) affair with a married man escapes to a Swiss vacation resort. There she encounters other lives caught in the desperations of love, and there too she comes to meet the one who will be something like her rescuer, the decent Neville who she will commit herself to a loveless marriage too. With Brookner the heart of the story is not in the major movements of the plot but with the line- by- line perceptions which mark out an extremely intelligent observer of the heart's minor motions. Disappointment and learning to live with a life far less than one has hoped are major Brookner themes. She gives the reader that consolation of knowing that a certain kind of quiet suffering is not theirs alone.
I myself have found that reading a few Brookner novels has been enough, but I know one faithful reader of Brookner who continues to see her as the best diagnostician of the ailing human heart writing novels today.
Rating:
Summary: Great writer and great book
Review: Anita Brookner is one of the best writers today. I read Hotel du Lac right after Undue Influence and was not disappointed. Brookner captures perfectly the mood of Swiss lakeside hotels in the off-season (I know because I ve been there). As with Undue Influence, the interaction between the different characters is rare and seems less important than the description of how they view one another and how they view themselves. The loneliness accurately described by Brookner is as much a result of self-sufficiency and choice as it is a result of fate and wasted opportunities. The writing is very very good.
Rating:
Summary: A Perfect Book
Review: Anita's Brookner's "Hotel du Lac" is purely perfect. Her writing is precise, sparkling, and emotive. Edith Hope (even the name is evocative), is one of Brookner's most finely drawn characters. Sent by well-meaning friends to a timeless, proper hotel at the tail-end of the tourist season for a transgression of the romantic sort, spinsterish Edith is left to ponder the outcome of the rest of her life. But there are tentative friendships, quiet observations and a fragile hope that come from her exile. Reading this novel gave me the exaltation that comes from reading great literary fiction, along with the satisfaction of discovering a well-written story. Treasure this book!
Rating:
Summary: A Perfect Book
Review: Anita's Brookner's "Hotel du Lac" is purely perfect. Her writing is precise, sparkling, and emotive. Edith Hope (even the name is evocative), is one of Brookner's most finely drawn characters. Sent by well-meaning friends to a timeless, proper hotel at the tail-end of the tourist season for a transgression of the romantic sort, spinsterish Edith is left to ponder the outcome of the rest of her life. But there are tentative friendships, quiet observations and a fragile hope that come from her exile. Reading this novel gave me the exaltation that comes from reading great literary fiction, along with the satisfaction of discovering a well-written story. Treasure this book!
Rating:
Summary: Emotion seethes beneath the surface of this quiet novel
Review: British author Anita Brookner poses many difficult questions in Hotel du Lac, not the least of which is what, really, can women expect to achieve in this world? This novel, which won the Booker in 1984, like her others, has a main character who is sensitive and solitary - not the stuff of which an adventure tale could be told. But at the book's end, a lot has happened. Her family fears Edith, a 39yo romance novelist, is headed for a nervous breakdown when she stands up her fiancé on their wedding day. They send her to Switzerland, where she spends her days working on her next book, observing other guests at the hotel on the lake, and communing with her married lover.
Doesn't sound like much, does it? Suspend your disbelief and read it. It's excellent.
Rating:
Summary: wry, witty novel
Review: Edith Hope is a British spinster whose friends have packed her off to the Hotel Du Lac in Switzerland so that she can regroup after a horrible social disgrace, which is not immediately revealed to us. Ms Hope it turns out is a romance novelist, writing under a pseudonym. She spends her days at the Hotel working on her new novel, going for walks and taking tea with her colorful fellow guests and looking back at the chain of events which brought her to this place in her life. What develops is an extended meditation on the need for love and marriage and companionship. Ms Hope is all too passive in the face of these great issues. As she tells her agent: ''People love (the story of the tortoise and the hare), especially women. Now you will notice, Harold, that in my books it is the mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero, while the scornful temptress with whom he has had a stormy affair retreats baffled from the fray, never to return. The tortoise wins every time. This is a lie, of course. . . . In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Axiomatically. . . . Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game. The propaganda goes all the other way, but only because it is the tortoise who is in need of consolation. Like the meek who are going to inherit the earth.'' In the end, even if she doesn't necessarily get her man, she proves to be the tortoise emerging "victorious" once again. This is a wry, witty novel, sort of a humorous update of an E.M. Forster tale. But it's an extremely slender story and the docility of it's central character is quite annoying. In the concluding scenes she is rescued by a sort of Deus Ex Machina twist rather than by any personal growth or enlightenment. But Ms Brookner is a terrific writer and the book is a brisk enjoyable read. I just find it hard to believe that this was the best British book of 1984. Grade: C+
Rating: 
Summary: An Entertaining Entree
Review: Faithful devotees of Anita Brookner will want to return again and again to the groundbreaking "Hotel du Lac" as to a kind of sacred literary scripture. This book, with which its creator cast her authorial fishing line out into the world and brought back the considerable catch of the prestigious Booker Prize, is a perfect little novel with a modest voice and absolutely devastating proportions. Though several of Brookner's later books might justly leap into the boxing ring, throw out their chests and duke it out with "Hotel du Lac" for the honor of being the author's best, it is easy to see why "Hotel du Lac" attracted so much attention to its pretty self in the first place. Surrounded by crowds of Brookner admirers, it fans itself calmly, smiles with assurance, and opens wide its lovely eyes to acknowledge the presence of those who think it remarkable. "Hotel du Lac" takes place in an exotic setting. It focusses on a child's handful of characters who slip, at first nearly unnoticed, into the inner caverns of one's brain and remain lodged there with the tenacity of veteran spelunkers. The short time span covered by the book's plot intensifies the urgency of the action to a very heightened degree, as if chef Brookner were heating up the whole concoction in a kind of high tech literary pressure cooker. The result is a flavorful feast for anyone who cares to acquire a taste for her unique fusion of carefully chosen ingredients: the intense internal monologue; observation of phenomena in nearly microscopic detail; the situation of those who, by choice or otherwise, must live their lives essentially alone. Edith Hope, the book's main character, once met can never be forgotten. Why not walk by her side for the short space of these twelve lovely chapters? Would her decisions be yours? "Hotel du Lac" is a particularly intriguing resort destination, well worth the price of a week on its venerable verandahs.
|
