Hotel World

Ali Smith delves into the psyches of a teenage ghost, homeless woman, young front desk worker, and guests connected to a hotel. The prose is disturbing and also very funny, sometimes at the same time. Jim Crace blurbed the book: "Courageous and startling. I doubt that I shall read a tougher or more

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affecting novel this year." i'd agree if i hadn't just read Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, but Hotel World is still wonderful and i recommend it highly.

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Hotel World tells the story of a young woman who starts working at a hotel chain and dies. She climbs into a dumb waiter, but it is old and snaps and she falls down the shaft being killed on impact. There was one witness, a boy who she worked with and got along well with. The girl had recently

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fallen in love for the first time and was shocked to find it was with another girl.

The tale is split into sections told by different people with connections to the hotel and the dead girl. The first narrator is the ghost of the girl herself. I loved the way she is portrayed as not really remembering who she was and being able to appear to her family. The second character is Else, a homeless lady who asks for change outside the hotel. She is offered a free night in the hotel by a receptionist (the third narrator). The fourth character is a guest at the hotel, a journalist who reviews the hotel. The next story is that of the dead girls sister and how it has affected her. The final story is the girl in the watch shop who had been the object of the dead girls love.

I loved this short novel. It read like a series of short stories that were interconnected. Somehow Ali is able to change her writing style so it really does feel like you are reading the thoughts of different people. I also warmed to all the characters, even the journalist and loved how little comments from one persons story had an affect on another characters.

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This book is distilled insanity. It's told from the more or less stream-of-consciousness points of view of five women whose lives intersect in a certain hotel: a dead teenager trying to remember her past, her sister working through her grief, a self-absorbed journalist, a bed-ridden invalid, and a

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barely coherent homeless woman. I wish I could explain the plot, but there really isn't one - just snapshots of life that happen to overlap a bit. That said, it was kind of a fun read in places. The ghost's manic descriptions were fun, the journalist's ignorance was amusing, and some of the writing style was novel. Plus, it was short enough that I never felt overtaxed by any one character - save the sister, whose entire chapter contained no punctuation. That was exhausting to read.

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Finished this one, it was a little tough for me to read especially those sections without any punctuation. I can't say I would really recommend it to someone who prefers a more traditional literary format.

I loved this book. The way it was written really woke me up. IT's abstract and really makes you think on how you should change your life after reading it for a long time.

I had such high hopes for this book. I even bought it.


The story and construction of this book had so much potential. But I barely read the last 30 pages of the book because of the lack of punctuation. I hate stream of consciousness. I hate anything that resembles it. Which is why I refuse to read

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Virginia Woolf. And the content of those last 30 pages didn't grab me as they should have.

Those stinkin award winners have just been disappointing lately. I think these books just say they get awards just to sell more books, not because they're any good.

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Love the unconventional writing style from the point of view of a ghost figuring out how she died in a curious and funny way. Loved that she was in love with the girl at the watch counter instead of with a boy.

I was pulled in by the different styles of voice, but I was left a bit unsatisfied by not having a moment of clarity at the end of the book.

Hotel World is a fairly accessible non-traditional novel, deploying various techniques of modernist fiction without ever completely overwhelming the reader or collapsing into empty formalism. Its six distinct parts, with their six distinct literary voices, each offer a distinct take on the

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phenomenology of memory and experience. More than introducing us to their different protagonists, or to their different perspectives on the same situation, each part introduces us to a different way in which we engage with and make sense of the world around us.

However, I was never really gripped by the novel's actual story, and this lack of emotional connection ultimately kept the book from being something greater for me. I really like what Smith was up to in this novel -- I just wasn't ever all that swept away by how she did it.

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Hotel World started out strong and then petered out. By the time I had gotten to the long run-on sentence chapter done by Clair I had lost interest in the book.

Five intertwined narratives, with Smith's trademark wordplay, puzzles, &c. Powerful.

I am passionate about Ali Smith and have so enjoyed her later novels. This book is one of her very first, if not her first. If anything, it is more of a standard narrative than the others, and there is a clear theme that runs through the book that is an important message to convey: that life is for

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living and that our lives continue to affect others even after we die. I found the endless interior monologues generally tiresome and wasn't as moved as I might have been because there seemed to be only one reaction to sudden death -- shock -- and yet there is so many more ways to experience such an event. Still, if this were my first Ali Smith book, I might be more appreciative of what she has done here. Her other books, The Accidental, How to be Both, and Autumn, are absolute masterpieces so to read this after having read those means my disappointment may be more exaggerated than the book may actually deserve.

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Bought this at the Strand on my heartbreak tour of NYC 2002. I enjoyed the fluid presence, the floating questions of motive, most of which were left unanswered. There is something spectral about these damaged souls. While walking in London eight months later, I found myself glimpsing those souls'

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reflections.

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I read this for my OU course and am looking forward to studying it in more detail, because it will definitely bear a second reading. The language is beautiful, and although I found Clare's stream of consciousness difficult to understand at first, I soon got into the rhythm of it.

Unusual and

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thought-provoking, but sad and not an easy read.

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Five people who happen to be in the Global Hotel one night, including the ghost of a hotel maid who's plunged to her death in "the, the. The lift for dishes, very small room waiting suspended above a shaft of nothing, I forget the word, it has its own name." It's playful with language, funny,

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tragic, all about love and life and death, and so compassionate toward ordinary, everyday people without ever becoming sentimental.

"Remember you must live.
Remember you most love.
Remainder you mist leaf."

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I honestly have no idea why I chose to read this book. It was described as "experimental" - simply another word for "pretentious," I thought - and I really do not care for stream of consciousness. Or so I thought, before I found myself swept up into Hotel World.

If the first chapter were a painting,

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it would be one of those swirly Impressionist things. The narrator is the ghost of Sara Whilby, a teenage chambermaid who died in a bizarre accident. She longs for any sort of sensation, even a stone in a shoe, and finds herself forgetting simple words like "toast." Most memorably, she has a conversation with her decomposing body about her death. While I thought the beginning was perfect, I was gradually less interested in the chapters that followed. The thread connecting the five women is a little too delicate at times, and I was not really gripped again until I read the grief-stricken soliloquy from Clara, Sara's younger sister.

While I liked Hotel World, I know for sure not everybody will. This is the kind of book where the most important event has already occurred, so if you keep reading in the hope that something major will happen, you are going to be disappointed. Ali Smith is also a very playful writer, so if you like, say, punctuation marks, this book will drive you nuts. But I am very happy that I stepped outside my reading comfort zone for once!

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This book was a refreshing change of pace from the others I've read recently. The writing style is fragmented, challenging, stream-of-conscienceness, moment-in-time, random, specific... Words and words and words, sometimes making sentences, sometimes pages with no punctuation. I loved the view

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points, the differences in their dialogue with me, the reader, and their perspective. This was a very different and satisfying book.

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+ Well-written, interesting voices & prose.
- Sometimes the artsy prose was too much, I wish there was a "wow" moment when you find out everybody is connected (instead, the knowledge trickles out throughout the book.)

It's about a young woman, who works as a housecleaner in a hotel, and dies in a freak accident falling through the dumbwaiter. Part of the book is told by her ghost, and I liked that part, it was very creatively done to think about how a person would think and feel after death. But then the book is

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turned over to four other characters in turn, and none of them really worked for me. I later looked it up and found out that the book is supposed to be about the 5 stages of grief. Honestly, I thought if that was the case it should have been more obvious to me, and I shouldn't have had to look in up on line.

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