Hotel World: Ali Smith

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Hotel World is everything a novel should be: disturbing, comforting, funny, challenging, sad, rude, beautiful.— The Independent (London) The heaviness of the prose gave this work the sensation of swimming through metaphors that could not be rushed. One had to come up for air from time to time to continue the breaststroke forward. And then there is that nagging question the dead Sara can't get an answer too: how long did the fatal fall take ? The fifth section of the novel titled “Future in the Past,” is entirely Clare's memories on the life and death of her sister Sara.

Hotel World by Ali Smith | Goodreads Hotel World by Ali Smith | Goodreads

While I appreciate Ali Smith's experimentation, I'm not a fan of the quotidian rhythm of her narrators. Whether they are waiting at the airport, or sitting around on their home computer, or flopping on the bed of a sleazy hotel room, I find myself waiting for something interesting to happen far too frequently. Many will find much appeal in Smith's wry and pointed, thought-provoking comments on society, but you can't es In “True short story” Smith overhears two men, possibly father and son, arguing in a bar about the differences between short stories and novels. Is the novel a “flabby old whore” and the short story a “nimble goddess, a slim nymph”? they ask each other. “They were talking about literature, which happens to be interesting to me, though it wouldn’t interest a lot of people” says Smith in her ironic fashion. She puts the short story dilemma to her friend who is in hospital recovering from an infection after a course of chemotherapy. Her friend is an expert on the short story and this gives Smith the perfect terrain for stating some of her literary opinions. Literary ideas are more fully investigated by Smith in a series of lectures she gave at the University of Oxford in 2012 which were published in a collection entitled Artful where she gives her opinions on four aspects of literature: time, form, edge and offer and reflection using a witty combination of fictional pieces entwined with a series of quotes from a rich and wide range of literary sources. Smith is so deft with language that it's easy, at first, to mistake Hotel World for an exercise in style." - Charles Taylor, Salon Dando a cada capítulo uma forma particular que abarca diferentes visões de mundo, a autora mergulha no fluxo de consciência de suas protagonistas, revelando fatos que parecem surgir do próprio ato de narrar. O limite poroso entre o isolamento e a convivência é um tema onipresente que se desdobra em episódios marcantes, como aquele em que o fantasma da camareira desce ao próprio túmulo para ouvir do cadáver suas lembranças de uma vida outrora compartilhada, memórias de um tempo em que eram uma só pessoa.All five seem generally decent people but not averse to committing bad deeds. Penny gives Else a generous cheque and then phones her bank and stops it. Lise lets Else stay in the hotel, strictly against company policy, but then leaves clients on hold and lets one of the chambermaids take the blame for Else’s damage. Else is happy to get what money she can but when

Hotel World by Ali Smith | Waterstones

Smith implies there is a hierarchical structure to society, by setting her entire novel in a luxurious hotel. Ali Smith's remarkable novel HOTEL WORLD....is a greatly appealing read. Smith is a gifted and meticulous architect of character and voice." The Washington Post The second part, "Present Historic", is about a homeless girl (Else) begging for money outside the Hotel. The book opens with the story of a chambermaid at the hotel -- nineteen year old Sara Wilby, as we later learn. A character in Hotel World talks of manipulating people with stories. She'll tell lies to them about her life, stories designed to evoke sympathy and pity: she is an orphan, she was neglected by her parents, she was sexually abused by a family friend. The stories are tearjerkers, tropes designed to pull the heartstrings. Someone tells you a story like that and, unless you have no heart, you have to say, "Oh my god! How horrible for you!"

Summary

Though she is dead, we follow her ghost. She goes to her own funeral and, subsequently, frequently visits her grave. She even talks to her rotting corpse, which seems to have a separate but functioning existence. In the hands of a lesser writer, this could have been mawkish or even downright silly but Smith carries it off, as we see the ghost gradually forgetting things but remembering key events of her life, such as her first crush (on another woman), trying to recall her death (she can not but her corpse does remember and tells her) and spying on people and even peering into their minds (one man was was considering knives and blood.) She even appears to her family (parents and younger sister) with generally poor results. So, there are always parts I like. Some I even like a lot. And that is always when the author lets us get close to a character. But you see, this is Literature with a capital l, so there is much stream and conciousness and lots of parts that are hard to understand on purpose. And the only purpose seems to be to make it harder to get. If I find myself wondering "wait is this section from the point of a ghost too or is that a random other woman?" and feel a little stupid for 'not getting it', it doesn't make me wanna dive it deeper, it makes me wanna hurl the book across the room. Q: Hotel World, which was first published in the United Kingdom, garnered much critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the 2000 Orange Prize. Many of the critics, when discussing Hotel World, hypothesize about why you set the novel in a hotel and what it (the hotel setting) symbolizes. Care to answer that yourself?

Hotel World | The Booker Prizes

This book has four female characters, Else, Lisa, Penny and Claire. Each character has her own section which is written as an interior monologue. Each section is connected directly or indirectly to the hotel where a fifth character called Sara fell to her death before the book began. We hear the voice of her departing spirit trying to converse with her own dead body in a kind of preface but the book itself centres on the other four voices. I love Ali Smith. I love Ali Smith because she moves me, and being a man, I’m not supposed to be moved by books. I’m supposed to be stirred by the raging masculinity of men in battle: the sound of gunfire in the crisp Vienna air as heads rain down upon the blood-soaked streets. But no. This pink-covered novel moved me to bits, and I am proud of the fact. It’s a look that could be very, very deep or very, very barmy but that's how the character Else came across - very deep or completely crazy. This book was nominated for both the Man Booker Prize (then simply the Booker Prize) and what was then called the Orange Women’s Prize for Fiction. It won neither but clearly showed that Ali Smith was a first-class novelist who was going to have a successful career as a novelist. I found this novel very thought-provoking, superbly well-written and clearly the work of a top writer. Publishing history Most staggering of all, however, is the internal monologue from Clare, a stream-of-consciousness outpouring and the most bone-shudderingly effective representation of grief I have read. The moment the mist clears and we realise Clare is throwing objects down the hotel’s dumbwaiter to determine the duration of her sister’s fall, our hearts break like Sara’s brittle bones.

Apart from the fact that all five are women and all five are associated in some way with the hotel, they do have things in common. All five seem to be loners. Penny sits in her hotel watching porn films and bemoaning her past (her parents divorced and she became a kleptomaniac). Clare simply regrets her sister. Lise’s only friend seems to be her mother. Else seems to have no friends, not even fellow homeless people. The dead Sara is rejected even by her own corpse. A masterful, exuberant novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet Acclaimed as a truly inventive novel, Hotel World received much praise for its unique storyline and distinct formal choices. Garnered as a rare novel filled with hope and despair, Hotel World’s characters, linguistic choices, and thematic elements are what have set it apart as a genuinely modernist -- and some would argue postmodern -- piece of literature. Three books in and it’s official: I’m in love with Ali Smith. If you’d told me two years ago that I would love books written in a stream of consciousness style I’d have laughed in your face. I didn’t think it would work for me, and I can totally see why it doesn’t work for some others, but oh my, work it does!!

Hotel World Summary | SuperSummary Hotel World Summary | SuperSummary

Duncan – He was the sole witness to Sara's death. As the novel's only dominant male character, Duncan appears in each story within the novel. He too is moved to an emotional state of depression after witnessing the tragedy. Including Duncan in each of the novel's stories, Smith seems to imply that these stages of grief may affect mere observers too, that these stages are not exclusive to family or close personal friends of those who have died. For the first time this talent, glimpsed and admired in earlier work, has been structured into a world-view; fragmented, tenuous, allusive, sparse -- a provocative view of the world in which we must live and die." - Ruth Scurr, Times Literary SupplementQ: Hotel World‘s main character is a young ghost named Sara, whose bodily death is vividly reimagined at the start of the novel. How did you get the idea to write this novel from the perspective of a ghost? Have you written about or been interested in ghosts before Hotel World? There is unfinished business in Sara's life, too: a watch, for example, she brought to get repaired -- a momentous event in her life, though she did not act as fully on it as she might have.