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: 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: 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: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Precise and Elegant Storyline
Review: Hotel Du Lac is a treat. It reminded me of Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools, but with a hotel setting rather than a ship setting, because of the wonderfully drawn characters who come together in this hotel. I was intrigued with Edith's banishment to the Hotel Du Lac by her friends. What could she possibly have done? The setting is superb in its grayness. It feels cozy to me- the walks around the lake, tea drinking. Edith is an old soul, though only 39 years old, and is so likable. She's generous and thoughtful, and she learns a great deal about herself while at the hotel. We should all banish ourselves away somewhere when we are troubled! I loved the ending; I was so fearful it would go one way, and was grateful that it didn't. I can't wait to read more of Brookner, and am so grateful to have found her. She writes cleanly, with precision, and with beautiful word choices. She rates right up there with the best writers of women's fiction (with Kate Chopin, Katherine Ann Porter, Edith Wharton, especially). Highly recommended!
Rating: 
Summary: Apprentice work...
Review: Hotel du Lac, Brookner's fourth novel, reminds one very much of Henry James, Katherine Mansfield and, most of all, that mistress in ironic observation, Jane Austen. Her prose style could be a delight, and is at best refreshingly limpid.
Yet by the time I came to the end of this short novel, I had felt Brookner was writing a novel based on style with very little substance. The barren plot cringes, the characters are stock and two-dimensional, and the protagonist concerns herself with trivialities and broods and broods...about nothing really worth at all. The deus ex machina is perhaps the most unbelievable--a protagonist who falls into the same trap *twice* over the course of the book is simply not credible enough. In the end romance novelist Edith Hope elicits very little sympathy; whereas one comes out of an Austen or James novel feeling older and wiser, one feels here that Brookner is extending her tentacles very tentatively at something supposedly profound, without reaching it at all. One star for the style, and another for making me finish the book, which is quite a feat.
Rating:
Summary: Wake me when it's over
Review: I read this book on the recommendation of a friend who noted the art of it, and I did finish it, but my reaction was more frustration than satisfaction. The protagonist's motivation was held overly long ... right to the end, which might have been all right if I'd been enchanted by the descriptions of the vacuous characters sharing her world, but there wasn't anything enchanting about them. I hung on to learn something about her that was satisfying -- something that would make my investment in time worthwhile. (The longer an author holds out on you, the more you expect as a payoff however, and this story didn't deliver). When the secrets of Edith's motivation were finally revealed, I liked her even less. Perhaps if I had come to know her earlier I might have felt something more rewarding than annoyance. The author did indeed create an artfully bleak picture of dreary lives, but it was a picture all in shades of gray. Great for putting one to sleep.
Rating: 
Summary: I read the book at the back of Hotel Du Lac
Review: It took me forever to get into "Hotel du Lac." I love Jane Austen and I love Anne Tyler and this books sorta straddles both and was recommended to me by a used bookstore owner who said his wife liked it. Finally after several chapters I got hooked and I read it slowly enough to relish it. I lived in Geneva and Basle so I could understand the place and was fascinated to read her version of Lake Geneva. The book slowly unfolds and has the unexpected twists you get in mysteries and at the end you are still puzzling - it isn't so neat in fact like a good movie it makes you want to go out and discuss it with others. The reviews here make me think the people who are reading it prefer action novels and would be the last people I'd like to discuss this book with. But I really loved it. I'm only sorry every one says it's her best as I'd like to read others by her and not be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Creature From Another Planet
Review: Once again, I finished a Brookner novel wondering if I have read science fiction or maybe the Brits are from another planet. I always have a strong urge to find some one to discuss a Brookner novel with because it they are generally maddeningly absurd in the portrayal of characters. The writing and scenery are fine. I believe that the author attempts to remind us of our own foolish feelings: Remember how it feels to "love" someone foolishly the way Edith "loved" David? (Do you know why you did you did it, or why you are doing it?) Is freedom better than love or mining for a rich husband even though you might have to pay for it by continuing with a empty "love" non-relationship with a David? Brookner does paint in vexing terms these asinine relationships that we have been involved in. The parent/child relationship is there. Master/slave is always lurking in the name of love. Things are not what they seem because this is a satire. You are reminded of your self if you are a woman. But please, Anita, give us a break. There are happy relationships out here. Try to write about one now and then.
Rating:
Summary: Creature From Another Planet
Review: Once again, I finished a Brookner novel wondering if I have read science fiction or maybe the Brits are from another planet. I always have a strong urge to find some one to discuss a Brookner novel with because it they are generally maddeningly absurd in the portrayal of characters. The writing and scenery are fine. I believe that the author attempts to remind us of our own foolish feelings: Remember how it feels to "love" someone foolishly the way Edith "loved" David? (Do you know why you did you did it, or why you are doing it?) Is freedom better than love or mining for a rich husband even though you might have to pay for it by continuing with a empty "love" non-relationship with a David? Brookner does paint in vexing terms these asinine relationships that we have been involved in. The parent/child relationship is there. Master/slave is always lurking in the name of love. Things are not what they seem because this is a satire. You are reminded of your self if you are a woman. But please, Anita, give us a break. There are happy relationships out here. Try to write about one now and then.
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