Author: Anitha Brookner
Publisher:Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pages: 192
Price: Rs 450
ISBN:0679759328
Genre: Woman's Fiction
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Source: Personal
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Summary
Hotel du Lac tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a psudonym. When her life begins to resemble plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to restore her to her senses. But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualities and exiles. She also attracts attention of a wordly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure.
Review
Edith Hope is an English author whose genre is romance , now she is on a self imposed exile at a Swiss hotel, during off season ..There she meets fellow guests majority being women...These are array of people whom she meets include Mrs Iris Pussey, widow ,she is rich and glamorous accompanied by her devoted daughter Jennifer , she is too thin which is amusingly put in, Lady Monica and her dog, Madame de Bonneuil, she sent out of her home by her sister in law, hence she carries an aura of that of a depressed soul being ..Initially Edith's decision to come over to this old fashioned hotel is a mystery..She composes letters to David that describe her day today affair in the hotel with immense details of the people she has been meeting..But David is a married guy , and thankfully this is not the main focus of the book then enters Mr Neville rich and single , guest of the hotel and they slip into a relation which you can't define ii to be very romantic..
She discovers the true nature and feelings of these illustrious lives of these people, which in turn makes her to contemplate upon her life, her decisions, her mistake and the life she has been living so far...People are pretending to hide away from their unhappiness, disdain and self- melancholy...The more she gets closer to these women the more she reflects upon things finally getting a clear cut vantage...Through the novel we also feel a change in the way Edith sees things, her judgement on people that her rich experience has brought in her...Through the first half Edith spends much time guessing the age of mother daughter duo, later she lets things be..There are some eccentric , whimsy, funny moments all along...
The specialty of novel is that it is not the magic of the plot that drives you ahead but the characters ., their complexities and shedding up of the layers that they seem to carry around...Puseys's relationship with each other was weird and good at the same time ., as the novel progresses their true feelings for each other unfolds well and sound.. At times I felt the characters were under expressed revolving into an orbit of lethargy as I read through...The hotel itself carries an aura of old , yet not being classic about it and the residents somehow reverberated that spirit even more...I loved the overall calm, slow, steady pace of the book...The mix and match of words and sentence were simply brilliant to me...I would have loved it even more if the spirit of writing could transcend to the novel itself...Although I liked the book I couldn't figure what was so special about this book to win a Booker Prize...
Book 4 for TBR challenge
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