Hotel World: Ali Smith

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The whole story is a hymn to life, an admonition to appreciate the experience, existing as we do in the shadow of our mortality. “Carpe diem” resonates throughout Hotel World which the London Times called a book “imbued with a powerful sense of wonder at the minutiae of everyday sensuality.”

Hotel World by Ali Smith | Waterstones

in Smith's hands, this slender plot serves as an excuse for a delightfully inventive, exuberant, fierce novel of which the real star is not the dead Sara, or any of the living characters, but the author's vivid, fluent, highly readable prose. HOTEL WORLD was a well-deserved finalist last year for two prestigious British prizes: the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize. . . . I can't begin to paraphrase all that this dazzling book conveys about humanity and mortality . . ." Then the last chapter was this nebulous string of descriptive verse with very little to do with the 5 main characters of the story and even less to do with the Hotel from the title. 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.Smith is so deft with language that it's easy, at first, to mistake Hotel World for an exercise in style." - Charles Taylor, Salon I really loved the first chapter in which the ghost of a woman called Sara irritably interrogates Sara's earthly remains - an unintentional lovely-bonesey echo); I loved the dizzying leaps of perspective, and I thought the very quirky Notes-to-the-Previous-Chapter beginning on p 103 was very nice, but didn't go far enough. But otherwise, Penny the Copywriter was straight out of all the worst Radio 4 Afternoon Plays (this is a torture reserved for British people) and if the last chapter is a searing exploration of grief, my heart must be made of stone, I couldn't wait for that one to shut up already. 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. A masterful, exuberant novel from the acclaimed author of How to be both and the ongoing Seasonal quartet

Hotel World by Ali Smith: 9780385722100 | PenguinRandomHouse

Ali Smith does not, of course, do happy. Her characters, mainly women, struggle with life in some bleak area of the UK. Men are at best necessary evils and often harmful and unpleasant, whether as husbands/boyfriends or bosses or other authority figures. In this book, there is really only one vaguely sympathetic man and that is Duncan who was with Sara when she tried her dumb waiter stunt and who, as a result, has mental health issues, hiding out in the Left-Behind Room (i.e. Lost Property Office), with everyone trying to cover for him but even he remains a shadowy figure. Just then, Penny and the girl get the boards free from the wall, revealing the dumbwaiter shaft behind it. The girl tosses a few random items down the shaft, then starts crying. Else decides to keep half the coins and leave the girl the other half. Else and Penny exit the hotel together and walk around town. We visit five people who are all connected to a ritzy hotel in a city. The first died there, and is now a ghost. That chapter, which was a long one, was riveting and I loved it. I was ready to read everything this author wrote. Ali Smith possesses the perfect characteristics of the short story writer: rigorous self-discipline in the planning process, an eagle eye for condensing detail, a capacity for using the personal and individual to suggest universal truths and a skill for hinting at a wider world beyond the story, all of which can be seen in her three major collections of short stories Free Love and Other Stories (1995), Other Stories and Other Stories (1999) and The First Person (2008). Another astonishing piece of work from Ms. Smith. Is there anything this writer can’t do? I have domestic duties and a rumbling stomach at present, so this review might be brief, and gushing. But here goes.

Lise – a receptionist for the Global Hotel, Lise was responsible for inviting Else, the homeless woman, to spend a night there. This novel is set in and around a hotel in a unspecified city. It tells the stories of five women who have some association with the hotel. The hotel is run by a chain called Global Hotels ( We Think The World Of You). The best parts of this book was the brooding on the topic of death and the unique perspectives. They added some variety, but you will never find a conventional thrill in one of her books. More likely, you will stumble through with the sensibility you have during those dreams, where you're in a public place, nothing is happening, but you are suddenly overcome with incomprehensible anxiety, or you're suddenly naked and dead - one or the other. Obviously, Ali Smith has garnered popularity and success through her slanted view of modern people and their foibles.