Hotel Du Lac (Paperback)

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Edith Hope (a.k.a. romance author Veronica Wilde) has been banished by her friends to a stately hotel in Switzerland. During her stay she befriends some of the other guests, each of whom has his or her own tale. Edith struggles to come to terms with her career and love--the lack, the benefits, and the meaning thereof.

Review

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

"Impeccably written and suffused with pleasing wit." ?Newsweek

"Distinctive, spellbinding...elegant but passionate, funny but oddly earnest.... Novels like hers are why we read novels." ?Christian Science Monitor

"A remarkable novel...Anita Brookner's best." ?Victoria Glendinning, The Sunday Times (London) -- Review

In the beginning of this novel, we know only that Edith Hope, "a writer of romantic fiction under a more thrusting name" has been banished to the Hotel du Lac, a "quiet hotel ... in which she could be counted upon to retrieve her serious and hard-working personality and to forget the unfortunate lapse which had led to this brief exile." Penelope, the friend and neighbor responsible for sending Edith away for her as-yet-unexplained act is prepared to forgive only when Edith becomes "properly apologetic." Slowly, through luxurious prose narrated by way of Edith's thoughts, unsent letters, and conversations with Hotel residents, Edith's transgression emerges. Not surprisingly, this is a story of love: The love between women friends who have differing values, the love of a man who needs a woman now that his mother is dead, the love of a single woman who everyone thinks needs a faithful man. Edith struggles to understand and articulate her own truths while she lives in the overly-proper and ostentatious Hotel du Lac, takes long walks, eats excellent cuisine, retires early, and tries to write romantic fiction. She ponders accepting the proposal of a man she doesn't love: "I shall settle down now. I shall have to, for I doubt if I have anything more to look forward to." But can she? Or will she, as she fears, "turn to stone" if she settles for less than her kind of love? -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Contemporaries Ed edition (October 3, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679759328
• ISBN-13: 978-0679759324
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #158,402 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a gem, September 19, 2000

By	marzipan "panchild" (Greenwich, CT United States) - See all my reviews

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The subtleties of the discerning heart, January 13, 2005

By	Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Woman's Illusions Revealed..., September 25, 2002

By	"celiatraum" (Knoxville, TN United States) - See all my reviews

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.