Tuesday, July 7, 2015

HOTEL DU LAC by Anita Brookner


Stellar

What was contemporary fiction like before we packed everyone off to MFA factories to practice literary pyrotechnics?

The cottage I’m in this month has the best library of any of the scores of vacation houses I’ve rented in my life. I arrived with my usual crate of summer reads, and found I didn’t need any of them. (Hard-gotten--four titles by trading in seven entire crates of old books at The Strand, two via a half-price Groupon from Book Culture, and the rest purchased on my educator’s discount at the big bad B & N—why not take them home, save them for later, and read what’s here?)

Brookner was one of those writers I’d known about forever and never read. Hotel du Lac, which won the Booker Prize in 1986, is about an unassuming writer of romance novels who is packed off to a discreet Swiss hotel—yup, by a lake—retreat fashion, after committing some sort of indiscretion, which we’ll find out about in due time. I mean… who can resist that? Certainly not this former YA romance writer, currently in the summer 2015 middle-of-nowhere hideaway.

Raise your hand if you’re tired of showy sentences—impressive though they may be—that scream “Look at me,” and are written by writing school insiders with pretty faces, alluring authors’ bios and good jacket photos. Brookner was a pro before all that. Her prose is as understated as the heroine of this novel, but fiercely clever—funny, acerbic, and with just the right verb or adjective, just the right detail noted. And she’s a wonderful storyteller.

This is a great summer read!

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