Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Hotel Du Lac: A Novel (Man Booker Prize Winner)
    Unavailable
    Hotel Du Lac: A Novel (Man Booker Prize Winner)
    Unavailable
    Hotel Du Lac: A Novel (Man Booker Prize Winner)
    Ebook187 pages3 hours

    Hotel Du Lac: A Novel (Man Booker Prize Winner)

    By Anita Brookner

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • When romance writer Edith Hope’s life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, she flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to restore her to her senses.

    "Brookner's most absorbing novel ... wryly realistic ... graceful and attractive." —Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review

    But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive.

    In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?"
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateJul 25, 2012
    ISBN9780307826220
    Unavailable
    Hotel Du Lac: A Novel (Man Booker Prize Winner)
    Author

    Anita Brookner

    Anita Brookner was the author of several novels, including Fraud, Dolly, Brief Lives, Incidents in the Rue Laugier, and the Booker Prize winner Hotel du Lac. She was the first female Slade Professor at Cambridge University and is well-known as an international authority on eighteenth-century painting.

    Related to Hotel Du Lac

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Sexting Scandal

      Jan 22, 2021

      Sexting Scandal
      1 min read

    • Article

      Robert Malherbe

      Nov 9, 2016

      Robert Malherbe
      5 min read

    • Article

      Championing Campion

      Mar 22, 2022

      Championing Campion
      6 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Love

      Feb 4, 2023

      Shelf Love
      1 min read

    • Article

      Generation RESIGNATION

      Sep 29, 2021

      Generation RESIGNATION
      8 min read

    • Article

      Personal Views

      Jan 3, 2020

      Critic, Haaretz Top 10 Films (ranked) Holy Motors, Toni Erdmann, Girlhood, Margaret, The Act of Killing, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, Moonlight, Get Out, Boyhood, Fire at Sea Best New Filmmaker Jordan Peele Filmmaker; Conservator, Smithsonian

      19 min read

    • Article

      Songbird

      Nov 28, 2021

      Songbird
      5 min read

    • Article

      Pleasant Glen

      Jun 14, 2022

      This new lifestyle hadn’t been so bad, had it? Clean living! Or mostly clean. Carter had started drinking a smoothie in the mornings—two raw eggs cracked into a blender with a frozen banana and a scoop of wheat germ. It would have been vastly improve

      30 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: C Pam Zhang

      Dec 11, 2019

      It was the last year of my third decade on this earth, and it seems with every passing year I grow increasingly alien to that earth, or it to me. The post A Year in Reading: C Pam Zhang appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Man Of Letters And Warm Coats

      Nov 1, 2021

      Man Of Letters And Warm Coats
      3 min read

    • Article

      On The Shelf

      May 30, 2021

      Four generations of one family are chronicled in this epic, sprawling saga of personal history by Australian journalist Mimi Kwa. Leaping from Hong Kong to the Philippines to Perth, House of Kwa is an extraordinary true story. (ABC Books, $34.99) by

      1 min read

    • Article

      Flowery Twats

      Mar 5, 2023

      Flowery Twats
      2 min read

    • Article

      A Wimple Plan

      Dec 11, 2020

      A Wimple Plan
      3 min read

    • Article

      Murdering Mum And Dad

      Jul 11, 2019

      Murdering Mum And Dad
      6 min read

    • Article

      The War On Words: How Cancel Culture Is Taking Over The Literary World

      Jan 26, 2021

      Who would have thought that in 2021, as cancel culture becomes the new norm, the effect on authors has been to plunge the literary world into a freedom of speech crisis? Author Lionel Shriver calls it “a  quasi-Soviet phenomenon”.   A writer says or

      4 min read

    • Article

      Cormac McCarthy Pushes The Boundaries

      Oct 29, 2022

      Cormac McCarthy Pushes The Boundaries
      4 min read

    Reviews for Hotel Du Lac

    3.5/5

    696 ratings54 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Whenever I read a certain kind of woman's novel where the protagonist is either middle-aged, tired and/or disgraced, I tend to worry about, what I call, "The Awakening" effect where a woman may find, when there are no other options available to her, that there's only one way out of a bad situation. Hotel Du Lac, written nearly 100 years after Chopin's "The Awakening" and set in the 1980's proves to be a document as to how far women have come. Romance writer, Edith Hope, has been advised by her friends to get out of town, regroup and think about the dreadful thing she's done. Exile at Hotel Du Lac at first repulses Edith and also perhaps the reader. Edith describes everything in her room the color of cooked veal, a misty shroud encompasses the lake and surrounding mountains. Edith and the reader are trapped! Although the story unfolds at a snails pace and some may even toss it aside one should look at Edith's story more as a character study of those also staying at the hotel. The other women at Du Lac are also in some type of exile and in them Edith reflects on who she is and who she might become if she chooses to remain on the path she's been traveling. She may find it necessary to fall into line with old school thought or she may discover she has options. Hotel Du Lac in September and Edith, both dignified, solid and out of season are empowering and well worth a quick read.
    • 4/5
      Astonishingly well-written--I think those who didn't love it must be plot obsessed and blind to the merits of great writing, the pleasure of the well-turned phrase or perfectly-chosen verb. For not a lot happens, but the little that does is exquisitely described.

      I must take issue with the marketing on the copy I read. The back cover made the book sound like a particularly exciting romance, and it is neither exciting not romantic. It is, in a nutshell, the observations of a very observant woman, a writer, of the other guests at a discreet unmodern inn in Switzerland.

      I reserve 5 stars for my all-time favourites, and this book would need to be slightly quirkier to completely appeal to me. But it is a lovely piece of writing, and I'm already googling "if you like Anita Brookner" in the hopes of discovering similar authors.
    • 1/5
      It's written well, but it's terribly dull. The story is barely a story, nothing happens. I'm glad it was short as I could power through. I had high hopes given it won the Booker, but nope.
    • 4/5
      An ordinary woman hiding from an ordinary life , tainted slightly by an affair with a married man, is exiled to an ordinary hotel on Lake Geneval at the "end of the season" and with the help of the last of the summer visitors, attempts to change her life.
    • 2/5
      Anonymous female author arrives at country hotel, peruses grey landscape, ignores novel-in-progress, and instead writes breezy, boring letter to David, her former loverwhose family they betrayed, as well as the fiance she deserted. It would have been welcome to have Geoffrey Long come alive with spirit.Mild mystery evolves about why she has banished herself from her home and friends.This is undercut by her near-total self absorption ("melancholy of exile") and her relating of the hair styles, fashion, shoppingand concerns of rich and privileged women.The most exciting main character is the weather on the lake and mountain during the a new season.The meek, depressed author never changes into a person with enough character to be guided by her own feelings andnot always by other's expectations.Worse still, the ending hinges on a plot twist which makes the strongest human character, Mr. Neville, a ridiculous liar.
    • 3/5
      The elegance of Jane Austen...in the 1980s, 6 March 2015This review is from: Hotel du Lac (Kindle Edition)It's the end of the season, at the Hotel du Lac on a Swiss Lake. Novelist Edith Hope has been urged to take a break in this sanctuary, following some unfortunate event back in England - not revealed till further on in the book. Meanwhile, Edith writes letters to her married lover at home (to be posted or not?) in which she describes her fellow guests; she muses on her childhood with a 'difficult' mother, and reflects on the difference between her assured, well-dressed, married friends and herself ...in her cardigan, 'mild-looking...distant, inoffensive.' But how will Edith resolve her unhappy love life? There may be unexpected events...As other reviewers have noted, the whole environment feels pre-War, so when certain hints make one aware that it actually is set in the 1980s, it's quite a jolt. Ms Brookner writes faultless, elegant prose, but I wasn't entirely convinced by Edith's choices, given that she was a successful woman of only thirty years ago. (One can empathise with events in Jane Austen's novels because women of that era were under very different social and financial constraints.)Consequently the whole story didn't really work for me, despite its polished style.
    • 3/5
      This is a short but pleasant little read and well worth the Booker Prize. It makes you think about love and relationships and has a nice little twist at the end.
    • 4/5
      Lovely, dreamy, evocative language, with interestingly portrayed, not terribly interesting people, mostly women, a sparse handful of out-of-place and time English staying at a Swiss hotel. The feeling is 1930s yet the time must be late 70s or early 80s. Romance novelist Miss Edith Hope, pressured to remove herself from her social circle after an embarrassment of some sort (we eventually told what), slowly confronts what her life was, is, and is likely to be and is offered a strange choice. I do wish she could have made the decision without the final piece of data, and in fact that she should find a social circle that wouldn't have pushed her out in the first place. Lord knows, the 1970s and 80s were quite rich in different social milieu. Also, anyone with the resolution to produce several novels probably is somewhat driven to do so and mistress of more resources that Edith credit's herself with.
    • 5/5
      Meditative, insightful and bittersweet. The most lyrical prose that I've read in a long time. The plots twists were really very fine and the slow unravelling of Edith's misdemeanours fit in perfectly to the manner Brookner wrote this story. Half-star off a 5-star read, because the ending was slightly an off-note in capturing the protagonist's state of mind. I so wanted Edith to see that being meek had not served her well. I wanted the author to cast the final chapter in a way that promised change. I may have to re-read this book to satisfy my niggles.
    • 5/5
      You will love this book if this is the kind of book you like lol. By that I mean it's a quiet, thought provoking, character study kind of book loaded with long beautiful poetic sentences and a dollop of humor thrown in for good measure. I love this kind of book and have found a new favorite writer. Brookner, who died in 2016, won the Booker Prize in 1984 for this book which was one of her early novels. She wrote a total of 24 novels and all but one are available from Overdrive so I now have a plan for next year's reading. Edith Hope, a writer of romantic fiction books, is in residence at the elite Hotel du lac in Switzerland. The reason for her stay is murky but we learn pretty early on that there has been an incident that seemed to force her here. It's the off season and within a few weeks the hotel will close until next year's new season starts so there are only a few guests.We get to know these guests fairly well because Edith is an observer of human nature. And so is Anita Brookner. Discovering the secrets that lie within the hearts of both Edith and the other guests is an integral part of the book. Things are not always as they seem."Taking coffee in the salon, Edith found herself treated a little distantly by Mrs. Pusey. Perhaps her return earlier that evening with Mr. Neville had been noted, and filed away without comment. In any event, Edith was obliged to listen to Mrs. Pusey's plans, which were, as usual, extensive, without being awarded any interest in her own. Reciprocity was a state unknown to Mrs. Pusey, whose imperative need for social dominance, once assured by her beauty and the mute presence of an adoring husband, had now to be enforced by more brutal means."I am so happy to have found a new author who, it seems, hit all the right notes for me. Very highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      I'd always wanted to read Hotel Du Lac, and have finally managed to get around to it. Why? Well there's something about old, slightly stuffy, family owned European hotels that appeals to me. Also, the book has been so frequently blurbed in the end pages of other books I've read, that I thought I really should read it. Finally, the title reminds me of The White Hotel by D.M Thomas (NOTE: This book bears absolutely no resemblance to The White Hotel. It would be hard to think of two more dissimilar books). My first thoughts were how much writing styles have changed in the last 35 years. This was published in 1984, won the Booker that year, and even though a review of the short list reveals that 1984 was hardly a vintage year, compared to other novels on the list, such as Flaubert's Parrot, let alone the 1985 winner, The Bone People, this feels like a literary throwback, a restrained, drawing room novel of manners and mild romantic intrigue that could have been published at almost any time in the preceding 50 years. In fact its unclear when it is set; there are cars - but they tend to be chauffeur driven; there is airline travel - but people seem to be generally unfamiliar with airports; there is television - in the TV room; people are disparaged for being "in trade" - was that really still a term in use in the mid 1980s? Perhaps it was. Most importantly, though, Edith Hope, our protaganist is banished to the end of season Hotel du Lac for an embarrassing incident that frankly, wasn't really that embarrassing for anyone other than her. 1980s Edith would have been encouraged by her friends to move on, rather than bolt for the Continent. So the timing is unclear,All of which sounds as if I didn't enjoy the book, but actually I did. Edith, as a novelist, has a sharp eye for detail, and a waspish tone to her analysis of her fellow guests. Her description of the furnishings as "veal coloured" is exactly right. Her portraits of her fellow guests, are decorously insulting. She brings to life beautifully the turgid boredom of holidays in bad weather, near the end of season, in resorts that have no attractions other than shopping, the hairdresser, and the long walk. A quiet pleasure then this novel, much like the Hotel du Lac itself. The plot, such as it is, is easy to summarise. Edith is a moderately successful romance writer, under a nom de plume. She conducts a moderately successful affair with an auctioneer, David, who the modern reader will probably think is taking advantage of her. He gets sex, comfort food, and no pressure to leave his wife, She gets to see him once or twice a month. Her life is bland, vaguely unsatisfying, and she fails to see a way to change anything. Until the "embarrassing incldent" leads to the purgatory of the Hotel du LacOnce at the Hotel du Lac, other guests try to drag her into their own petty dramas. Monica has an eating disorder and a not coincidentally fat pet dog. The Puseys, mother and daughter, float by propelled by comfortable wealth and a total lack of imagination as to what to do with it, the smooth Mr Neville believes he understands Edith but might find he is completely wrong.As I say, its all very readable, with a mild twist which the observant reader would have seem coming 50 pages earlier, if he / she hasn't dozed off in a comfortable armchair. Its that sort of novel; comfortable.
    • 4/5
      Romance novelist Edith Hope has escaped from her life at a quiet Swiss hotel at the end of its season. Her life in London consists chiefly of making others happy – her publisher by writing not-quite-bestseller romances, and her friends by making up numbers at dinner parties and saying what’s expected of her. She is more isolated than ever in her retreat, and to occupy her mind she analyzes her fellow guests almost as if they are characters in one of her books. The only eligible male guest attaches himself to her and he seems to offer a permanent escape from the difficulties she left behind.This novel appears to be a response to Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women. Brookner uses this phrase twice in the novel, and this seems deliberate. Pym’s Mildred Lathbury ends her loneliness through marriage to an anthropologist, to whom she can be useful. Brookner’s Edith Hope makes a different choice, rejecting marriage to a man she doesn’t love and who doesn’t love her to continue as mistress to a man she loves who will never leave his wife for her. She has realized just in time that marriage to such a man will not end her loneliness. It would be interesting to pair these novels in a reading group and see where the discussion goes.
    • 3/5
      I might have liked this more if I were reading it in a plush European hotel, instead of on my commute. Couldn’t help but compare it unfavourably to Moon Tiger in the ‘ennui of adventurous woman’ stakes.
    • 4/5
      This book is a little gem of stark emotional reality. Our hero Edith has been banished
    • 4/5
      Reading this novel was my introduction to the world of Anita Brookner. Having started with Hotel du Lac, her Booker prize-winning novel, I moved on to others including Providence and Incidents in the Rue Laugier and Look at Me. But it was experiencing her distinctive prose style and characters with complicated emotional lives that drew me in. Hotel is written mostly in the form of musings of the protagonist and has very little overt activity. But her life is changing, partly at the suggestion of her friends and partly through her own meditations on her situation. The developments of these small changes, of her reactions to loneliness and the stigma of being unattached, are the stuff that moves a reader to think about her condition as a woman and a human being. Her choices lead to a reinvigorated self-reliance that may be difficult, but it is being true to herself. Anita Brookner's novels are short but they pack a powerful punch.
    • 4/5
      It is a book about women on personal retreats at an exclusive hotel on a Swiss lake, yet is wholly about Edith and her introspection, and experiences at this place, both geographically, and in terms of where she is in her life. She is there to make some decisions about what to do next. There are 4 other women resident with whom she interacts, and this is a lovely, beautifully written novel about this group of guests in late September. The descriptions of place and setting are exemplary. You can feel Edith standing looking at the mountains shrouded by mist.
    • 5/5
      My faithful listeners/readers are well-aware of my love for the Man Booker Prize collection of novels. I first discovered this treasure trove of literary works when I came across Anita Brookner’s prize-winner, Hotel du Lac. On this, the sixth anniversary of Likely Stories, I return to the author of the first novel I reviewed. Anita Brookner was born in Herne Hill, a suburb of London. She was the only child of Newson Bruckner, a Polish immigrant to Britain, and Maude Schiska, a singer whose father had emigrated from Poland and founded a tobacco factory. Maude changed the family's surname to Brookner because of anti-German sentiment in Britain. Anita Brookner had a lonely childhood, although her grandmother and uncle lived with the family, and her parents, secular Jews, opened their house to Jewish refugees escaping Nazi persecution during the 1930s and World War II. Brookner was educated at the private James Allen's Girls' School. In 1949 she received a BA in History from King's College London, and in 1953 a doctorate in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. Brookner has not married, but took care of her parents as they aged.This wonderfully introspective novel traces the journey of “Edith Hope, a writer of romantic fiction under a more thrusting name,” -- as Brookner labels her -- has committed a social faux pas of immense proportions. Her friend Penelope bundles her off for a month at the end-of-season to Hotel du Lac in Switzerland. There she wanders around the lake, works on her latest novel, and makes the acquaintance of several denizens of the sparsely occupied hotel. Brookner writes, “The result of all this was to re-open in Edith’s mind the question of what behavior most becomes a woman, the question around which she had written most of her novels, the question she had attempted to argue with Harold Web [her publisher], the question she had failed to answer and which she now saw to be of the most vital importance. The excitement she thus experienced at being provided with an opportunity to study the question at first hand was if anything heightened by the fact that everything Mrs. Pusey had said so far was of the utmost triviality. Clearly there were depths here that deserved her prolonged attention” (40).Edith immersed herself in her novel, and garnered endless thoughts and comments by the somewhat eccentric guests living out the last days of the fall season at Hotel du Lac. She slowly begins folding the experiences of others into her current novel. Slowly, she comes to a rational solution to her exile, and returns to London – wiser, more confidant, and fully in charge of her future.This pleasant, short novel slowly reveals the peculiar reason for Edith’s exile to Switzerland, which has some significant effect on her outlook -- past, present, and future. I also recommend Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac as a great introduction to the amazingly entertaining series of Booker Prize winners. A wonderful summer, autumn, winter or spring read. 5 stars--Jim, 8/7/15
    • 4/5
      Edith Hope, an English writer of romance novels, arrives at the titular hotel in Switzerland after a mysterious faux pas. The nature of this faux pas is not revealed until later in the storyline, keeping the reader interested in finding out why she would be staying at a remote hotel just before the hotel will be closed for the off season. What could this seemingly conventional and inconspicuous woman have done?The narrative covers Edith’s interactions with the unusual hotel guests, including wealthy domineering widow, Mrs. Pusey, her daughter Jennifer, and the enigmatic Mr. Neville (who has his own agenda). Edith gets to know them well, avoiding work on her latest novel, and is slowly drawn into their lives. The storyline is character-driven and slow in developing. Edith is gradually revealed to be a woman of greater complexity than meets the eye. The narrative includes beautiful prose, irony, and subtle humor. It is not for anyone looking for action. It is more about the desires of an individual to be her own person.
    • 3/5
      I am giving this book three stars because I found it easy to read and I loved Brookner's writing style The story was mediocre. Brookner assumes her readers are intelligent and uses the language to its fullest flourish. I adore reading books that drive me to the dictionary!

      I felt quite like I knew these characters, as seen through the eyes of the protagonist, Edith Hope. As an author, she is a very astute observer of people, and the hotel gives her a small but interesting menagerie. Interestingly, she is keen on looking at others with a critical eye while dismissing her own indulgences until late in the story, where her self-reflection takes her to a crossroads.

      It is worth the read, in that the less-than-200 pages will cost you only a few days. Brookner's writing style is a delight and this winner of the 1984 Man Booker prize will hold its own on your TBR list.
    • 1/5
      I am totally bewildered by this book and the response to it. At least 3 readers I generally admire and agree with highly recommended it. I found it unbelievable from beginning to end. In fact, from cover to cover. The front cover proclaims it a "national best-seller"--really? why?-- and "Winner of the 1984 Booker Prize". What was the competition?? (OK, I looked it up---I haven't read any of that year's shortlisted works.) The back cover calls it "bewitching, magical" and likens its heroine to a Barbara Pym character. Sorry, Ms. Brookner. I've read Barbara Pym.... The characters seem at least 60 years out of time; the heroine's situation (and her allowing herself to be in it) incomprehensible to me; the prose wordy, repetitive, soporific. I finished it with a definite "The Emperor has no clothes" feeling. Under 200 pages, but not nearly far enough.QUOTE: "My patience with this little comedy is wearing a bit thin." Indeed.Review written in April, 2010
    • 5/5
      An excellent story with exceptional character depictions. The writing is so well done that you might close your eyes and imagine yourself in the Hotel du Lac. At first I wondered, tried guessing, why Edith was there, in an obscure hotel on Lake Geneva just before they close up for winter. Alone, with fellow guests with whom she has nothing in common. They cannot even supply grist for her writing. This is a subtle story where very word is to be savoured, every description relished. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Such was the stunning imagery of the Swiss lakes in this novel, I feel like I've just been on a 2 day mini-break.This short novel (a Booker winner in the 1980s) centres on the character of Edith Hope, a moderately successful romantic novelist who has been banished to a hotel by a Swiss lake at the end of season until an embarrassment at home blows over. The story that unfolds is predominantly that of her observances and relations with the 5 other main guests, and her introspection of the disappointing life of spinsterhood that awaits when she returns home. I found this to be a wonderful book - beautifully written, with evocative descriptions of the old-fashioned hotel and lake, and amusing and memorable characters. There is an air of melancholy to the story, but it's peppered with enough dry humour to make it a warm and poignant observation. As the main character is a writer, her observance of the lives of the other female guests is sharp and insightful, and I felt that Brookner brought the book to a great conclusion.This is another of those quiet books that is all about human relationships rather than explosive plot, but it is fantastically executed. Written in a style reminiscent of the best classic novels, to quote from the Observer on the front of the book jacket "A classic... a book which will be read with pleasure a hundred years from now".
    • 4/5
      It is, as has been pointed out, very good.
    • 3/5
      A strange book; it seems dated and the protagonist seems older than 39. The language is beautiful and the characters are rich, but not enough happens for my taste.
    • 3/5
      Tedious and old-fashioned farce of manners and courtship that reads as incredibly dated, white, classist. I don't know how it won the Booker and it didn't give me much desire to read more of Brookner's work, although I've heard Look at Me is great.
    • 3/5
      Edith Hope is a woman of a “certain age,” who has been shipped off to the quiet, secluded Hotel du Lac to wait for some sort of scandal, in which she played a central role, to die down. She is morose, and rather lost – without any real purpose, except to wait for the hubbub to blow over. Despite her name, Edith really has no hope; she is bored and boring. She wants to be left alone, but she’s lonely. The other guests are similarly hiding or waiting for something to happen, and so the days pass. Most ironic, this grey little mouse of a woman writes romance novels for a living, but is unable to identify any real love in her own life.

      One of my favorite passages comes when Edith is speaking with her editor (or publisher). She says that her readers love the fable of the tortoise and the hare, where the steady, practical tortoise wins every time. However, in truth, says Edith, it is the hare who wins; but the hares of this world are too busy with the spoils of their conquests to bother reading, so the books are aimed at the tortoise market.

      I had to remind myself that the book was published in 1984, but even then, I doubted that the great scandal from which Edith is hiding was all that bad. Back in the mid 1980s, I had a friend who did the same thing (though not quite so late in the game), and there were no lasting repercussions. Maybe it’s the difference between Americans and British.

      I thought some of the portrayals of the other guests, seen through Edith’s eyes, were spot on, but the shortness of the work really didn’t leave room for further exploration, and on the whole I felt the book suffered because of that. So while I enjoyed it, I wouldn’t recommend that you put it at the top of your reading list.
    • 2/5
      I'm not entirely sure how to review this one. I didn't hate it, but I also didn't especially enjoy it. There were moments of it that I found interesting, and overall I think the language is quite nice, but overall my feeling towards the book is one of indifference. I am not a person who has to either like or identify with a main character, but I do need to find that character compelling in one way or another, and I just didn't find that here. Combine that with a moody and slow-moving plot, and you've got a book that was a bit of an effort for me to finish.
    • 5/5
      A very civilized little book that reads with intensity on every page. I felt unbearably sad when I finished, but surprisingly not for Edith. Edith, I believe, in the end triumphs.
    • 5/5
      This was excellent - a quiet story about a momentous life decision, beautifully written. Edith has arrived at the aging Hotel du Lac in Switzerland after committing some sort of societal faux pas and being shipped off there by her friends. There she meets a mother/daughter duo, a single woman with an eating disorder, and a few other guests of the hotel. Edith's transgression is slowly revealed as she experiences different emotions - stubborness, sadness, defiance, longing. In the end, this book is about one woman's decision of whether to do what her society expects of her or to be herself. Being herself, though, isn't so exciting as she is the kind of person who could very well lead a boring, slightly lonely life - and she knows it. So it is a real dilemma and struck me as very realistic. I grew to really like and respect Edith while reading this book.
    • 4/5
      ” I am not a fascinating woman,” reflects Edith Hope as she sits in an out-of-season Swiss hotel trying to decide how she should make her way through life. But there is something about this quiet, plain woman who wears comfy cardigans and prefers the quietude of her garden to drinks parties and social gatherings, that makes her fellow guests gravitate towards her.Perhaps it’s because, like her, they are all adrift; washed up at a lakeside hotel that provides solace to those in need by sticking stolidly to its traditions.Edith is a romantic novelist who’s been exiled to the hotel after an indiscretion that outraged her friends. The other guests include the beautiful Monica; a young woman with an eating disorder who’s been sent to the hotel by her husband along with an ultimatum — sort herself out and produce a son and heir otherwise she’ll be history. Then there’s Madame de Bonnueil, an elderly widow who is despatched to the hotel every summer by a daughter in law who considers her a nuisance. And finally the overbearing, self-indulgent Mrs Pusey and her curiously clinging daughter who spend their lives flitting around the shopping capitals of the world in pursuit of exquisite hand embroidered lingerie thanks to the generosity of the long-dead but not lamented Mr Pusey.They confide in Edith and use her as a fresh audience for anecdotes told repeatedly to anyone who will listen. Edith observes them all, as she drifts around the hotel and its environs, trying but failing to write her newest novel and all the while writing to the mysterious ‘David’. Brookner teases her readers with suggestions that a secret affair with this married man was the ’unfortunate lapse’ that landed Edith in Switzerland. It’s not until the last few chapters that we learn the truth.This is a novel that’s written in a clean and unadorned form of prose which yet manages to captures the atmosphere of this retreat and the foibles of its guests. Nothing much happens for most of the book. Only the arrival of the single, wealthy businessman Mr Neville disturbs the Edith’s routine of solitary walks along the lake shake, much partaking of cake in the one and only cafe in town, and then dinner in the hotel.Mr Neville succeeds in penetrating Edith’s facade, challenging her presumption that her only options for the future are spinsterhood or a marriage based on the romantic ideal of love that feature in her novels. What he offers her is a third way. He needs the kind of wife who will never cause a scandal and take great of his home and especially his collection of famille rose dishes. In return she will gain a recognised social position giving her the freedom to behave as she wishes, protected from castigation and recrimination.“You will find that you can behave as badly as you like. As badly as everybody else like too. ….And you will be respected for it. People will at last feel comfortable with you,” he tells her.As the basis of a relationship, it sounds more like a business transaction than a declaration of affection. Whether it’s one that Edith decides to buy into is something I’m not going to reveal. At the heart of the decision however is an interesting question about the way society views single women of a certain age and whether they can only achieve social acceptance by virtue of marriage.The book isn’t long enough to do full justice to this theme unfortunately, nor is the resolution of Edith’s dilemma fully convincing. Are these flaws sufficient grounds for the vocal criticism which greeted the announcement that Hotel du Lac was the winner of the Booker Prize for 1984? Malcolm Bradbury called the novel ”parochial”, and absolutely not the sort of book that should have won the prize while The New Statesman called Brookner’s novel “pretentious”. Both seem unfair criticism – while Hotel du Lac doesn’t have the same depth as winners by Michael Ondaatje or Thomas Keneally or the scale of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, but it’s still a well written novel that poses challenging questions and holds the attention long after the pages are closed.