Customer Reviews

Hotel Du Lac

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Hotel du Lac is Anita Brookner at her best (recognizing that she's a writer who either draws you into her spell or doesn't.) In this novel she held me spellbound. A young woman has been sent by well-meaning friends to respectable Swiss lakeside hotel, elegant and restfully dull, to get over a disastrous love affair. But as in all of Anita Brookner's novels, there are deep layers to apparent dullness, and the traquillity of the hotel's atmosphere and the predictability of its guests is only apparent.

The melancholy yet lovely coming of autumn on the shores of the lake is as much an integral part of the story as the heroine's lonely and reflective voice. The other guests at the hotel frame Edith's awareness and become major catalysts of the book's plot. The sadness of the events Edith reveals to the reader is always balanced by her deliciously honest irony toward herself--her awareness that she has chosen her destiny. The ending is remarkable.

I read Hotel du Lac when it was first published and again recently. It's even better on re-reading, richer and deeper, proving itself a contemporary classic. Anita Brookner has a voice that's unique, original, and, certainly in this book, perfect.

Within the exquisitely refined prose of Hotel du Lac, British novelist Anita Brookner illuminates the quest of the human soul through the journey of one apparently meek, middle-aged writer of romance.

Encouraged to take some time away in order to come to her senses after committing a rather glaring social faux pas (which just so happens to be a manifestation of genuine truth), Edith Hope sees little to be gained from her exile. Yet, whether enveloped within the solitude of her dreary room or lingering within the company of the hotel's curiously assembled guests, this unassuming heroine finds herself gleaning perspective into the nuances of romantic entanglements while, at the same time, acquiring heart-wrenching insight into the ways of the world.

The subtlety with which Brookner so gracefully propels the tale, without question, serves to intensify the profundity and depth of the work upon its conclusion. Indeed, a moment arrives in which the reader holds within her hands not merely an engaging work of contemporary fiction, but a mirror within which she may discover her own illusions revealed.

Anita Brookner is a writer of enormous intelligence and subtlety. She is a writer who chronicles the small motions of the heart in expectation and disappointment. She writes usually with a kind of fine irony and her characters rarely escape untouched by careful criticism. In this novel still thought to be her best Edith Hope the protagonist a romance- writer who has walked out of her own wedding and is carrying on a passionate( from her side) affair with a married man escapes to a Swiss vacation resort. There she encounters other lives caught in the desperations of love, and there too she comes to meet the one who will be something like her rescuer, the decent Neville who she will commit herself to a loveless marriage too. With Brookner the heart of the story is not in the major movements of the plot but with the line- by- line perceptions which mark out an extremely intelligent observer of the heart's minor motions. Disappointment and learning to live with a life far less than one has hoped are major Brookner themes. She gives the reader that consolation of knowing that a certain kind of quiet suffering is not theirs alone.
I myself have found that reading a few Brookner novels has been enough, but I know one faithful reader of Brookner who continues to see her as the best diagnostician of the ailing human heart writing novels today.

Potential Readers Beware: This book is subtle, intelligent, witty, heartbreaking, arid, sensuous, eloquent and luminous. If you are looking for a rollicking, wham-bam-thank-you-maam plot, look elsewhere. Anita Brookner writes of the quiet and unnoticed desperation of women and men of a certain age. If you give yourself over to this book and this writer, the reward will be lasting.

Anita's Brookner's "Hotel du Lac" is purely perfect. Her writing is precise, sparkling, and emotive. Edith Hope (even the name is evocative), is one of Brookner's most finely drawn characters.

Sent by well-meaning friends to a timeless, proper hotel at the tail-end of the tourist season for a transgression of the romantic sort, spinsterish Edith is left to ponder the outcome of the rest of her life. But there are tentative friendships, quiet observations and a fragile hope that come from her exile.

Reading this novel gave me the exaltation that comes from reading great literary fiction, along with the satisfaction of discovering a well-written story. Treasure this book!

The plot is unconvincing and lacking in depth. The heroine, Edith Hope, takes a break in a respectable lakeside Swiss hotel, escaping for a while from the immediate consequences of a social indiscretion which she recently committed at home in England. The story concerns her relationships with people who are only acquaintances: her fellow guests in the Hotel du Lac and at home her neighbour and her housekeeper. In often flowery vocabulary, we are introduced to these acquaintances and their foibles: people who have unhealthy relationships with their mothers, daughters, dogs, food and money. The heroine's relationships with these acquaintances amount to little more than disparate and somewhat trivial ancedotes, which are unsatisfactory in the sense that they are peripheral or even irrelevant to the main theme, the true love of the heroine. Her character is languid. It is hard to believe that anyone (even the heroine, who is a writer of romantic fiction) could have mere acquaintances talk them into marriage with a man acknowledged from the outset to be a mother centered bore, while subsequently considering marrying another where both acknowledge from the outset that they do not love each other. Lost in these unlikely banalities is the potential story of her love for the man of whom she is mistress. Ironically, the indiscretion, for which the heroine is banished to the Hotel du Lac, is perhaps her only principled and courageous act.

British author Anita Brookner poses many difficult questions in Hotel du Lac, not the least of which is what, really, can women expect to achieve in this world? This novel, which won the Booker in 1984, like her others, has a main character who is sensitive and solitary - not the stuff of which an adventure tale could be told. But at the book's end, a lot has happened. Her family fears Edith, a 39yo romance novelist, is headed for a nervous breakdown when she stands up her fiancé on their wedding day. They send her to Switzerland, where she spends her days working on her next book, observing other guests at the hotel on the lake, and communing with her married lover.
Doesn't sound like much, does it? Suspend your disbelief and read it. It's excellent.

A slow-moving, low-key narrative of a season in a woman's life packs a surprising punch. I have had this book for years and just never got around to reading it. Why, I do not know. I am very glad I finally read it!

Edith Hope is a quiet, late 30ish writer of romance novels who is spending some time at the Hotel Du Lac in Switzerland. She has been "banished" there after backing out of her wedding at the time of the ceremony and causing so much embarrassment to her friends, not to mention the expectant groom.

While at the hotel, she meets a number of women and the descriptions of their lives adds to the aimlessness and seeming futility of her existence. She writes to her secret lover, David, describing them and the life at the hotel and speaks of her love and passion for him. He, needless to say, is married and their relationship is sporadic and quite one-sided. Then, seemingly, rescue comes when a wealthy, successful man staying at the hotel, Philip Neville, proposes to her and offers her a very businesslike, loveless marriage.

Through these avenues, Edith comes to some profound understanding about not only her life but the lives and needs of women.

There are so many undercurrents in this story and the writing is marvelous, wry, witty and multi-layered.

Anita Brookner offers up a deft and moving work in her lyrical tale of loneliness, love, and human interaction. Edith Hope, a writer of romance novels, has been banished to an isolated hotel in Switzerland for reasons which are at first unclear. The slow unfolding of her story and the reasons behind her banishment kept me mesmerized, as Brookner weaves a delicately intoxicating spell in Edith's interactions with the often bizarre hotel guests, including the wealthy and selfish Mrs. Pusey and her over-shadowed daughter, Jennifer, whose brilliant vibrance at once attract and repels Edith. She also finds herself courted by the equally wealthy, charming, and unscrupulous Mr. Neville, who understands her and yet would use her to his advantage. In long walks, dilatory conversations, and her meetings with and reboundings on these people, Edith is revealed more and more to be a woman of incredible depth and intensity, facing a turning point in her life, and her story, told in Brookner's clear prose and spiced with subtle irony, humor, and tragedy, is like sinking luxuriously into cool water. A quietly vivid, modern masterpiece, and not to be missed.

In her novel, Mrs Brookner portrays a middle-aged writer of romantic fiction, Edith Hope. People claim that there is a certain resemblance with Virginia Woolf in her features. At any rate her novels are published under the pen-name of Vanessa Wilde and they bear such titles as "The Sun at Midnight", "Beneath the Visiting Mood" or "The Stone and the Star". Edith doesn't seem to hold writing in high esteem. She describes this activity more like a compulsion: "she bent her head obediently to her daily task of fantasy and obfuscation", enjoying a rest "after her obscure and unnoticeable exertions". In fact she even considers reading as a kind of cure for the psychologically diseased: "Fiction, the time honoured resource of the ill-at-ease..."
After settling down at the Hotel du Lac - set in a small village on the Swiss shore of lake Geneva - Edith meets her extravagant fellow lodgers: Iris Pusey and her daughter Jennifer, Mme de Bonneuil and Monica accompanied by her insufferable dog Kiki. During her numerous discussions with these women, Edith starts reflecting on the life she has led so far and on love in general. The reader also learns about her past and her troubled relationship with her mother. And it is not before the end of the novel that we discover why Edith came to the Hotel du Lac, why she left London in such a haste and what exactly the "unfortunate lapse" was which brought her to her temporary exile in Switzerland.
Like one critic said about "Hotel du Lac": "Novels like Anita Brookner's are why we read novels".