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Hotel World: Ali Smith

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There are five characters, two relatives, three strangers, but all female. There is a homeless woman, a hotel receptionist, a hotel critic, the ghost of a hotel chambermaid, and the ghost's sister. These women tell a story, and it is through this story that unbeknownst to them their lives and fates intersect. The catalyst of their story is the Global Hotel. The plus side is that its probably my favorite book that's even been on the Booker Prize short list. Hotel World is everything a novel should be: disturbing, comforting, funny, challenging, sad, rude, beautiful. The Independent (London) A masterful, exuberant novel from the acclaimed author of How to be both and the ongoing Seasonal quartet

Ali Smith’s Numismatic Modernism About Change: Ali Smith’s Numismatic Modernism

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.”Faulkner's As I Lay Dying: The sections narrated by the different characters don't feel to me an attempt to capture their voices. The sections are not so much spoken by the characters. Instead they seem to be the writer allowing the reader to enter the consciousness of the characters. Hotel World is a postmodern novel, influenced by modernist novels, written by Ali Smith. It won both the Scottish Arts Council Book Award (2001) and the Encore Award (2002). Smith is so deft with language that it's easy, at first, to mistake Hotel World for an exercise in style." - Charles Taylor, Salon For the first time this talent, glimpsed and admired in earlier work, has been structured into a world-view; fragmented, tenuous, allusive, sparse -- a provocative view of the world in which we must live and die." - Ruth Scurr, Times Literary Supplement

ALI HOMING THE UNHOMELY: TESS S COSMOPOLITAN AFTERLIFE IN ALI

So, there are always parts I like. Some I even like a lot. And that is always when the author lets us get close to a character. But you see, this is Literature with a capital l, so there is much stream and conciousness and lots of parts that are hard to understand on purpose. And the only purpose seems to be to make it harder to get. If I find myself wondering "wait is this section from the point of a ghost too or is that a random other woman?" and feel a little stupid for 'not getting it', it doesn't make me wanna dive it deeper, it makes me wanna hurl the book across the room. the other, younger woman begging flees from Lise’s approach, Else eagerly steals all the money she has left behind. Diria que es una novela... diferente, quizá por la manera de escribir de la autora o simplemente por la trama. Think of all the great hotel books. The Hotel New Hampshire, The White Hotel, Hotel de Dream. In every one of them, there’s the central metaphor of passing-through, the central theme of transience. In big focus–life plus death, in small focus–just another night in a hotel. And for example the great thirties Garbo movie, Grand Hotel, one of the first movies to use interrelated stories. Because the other wonderful thing about hotels is that they imply more than one story, that several stories happen in them at once, that there is a collison of narratives only walls apart from each other. More gifts. In this voice from beyond the grave Ali Smith has created the perfect literary ghost…imbued with a powerful sense of wonder at the minutiae of everyday sensuality…and her beautiful, vivid descriptions are reinforced by a sharp, unsentimental tongue.”– The Times (London)The book Girl meets Boy (2007) is one of a series entitled The Myths where important world writers have been commissioned by the publishers Canongate to retell a classical myth in a modern manner. Smith chooses to base her contribution on the myth taken from Ovid of Iphis and Ianthe. Iphis is born a girl but brought up by her mother as a boy. She grows up with Ianthe who becomes her best friend and society dictates that they will marry, but what will happen when Ianthe discovers her “husband” is in fact of the same sex as her? Iphis’s mother pleads with the Gods who turn Iphis into a boy and the couple marry and live happily ever after. The intricacies of family relationships – the main characters of the book are two sisters - the blurring of the lines between the sexes – one sister falls in love with a man so sensitive and kind he could be a woman and the other delights in a lesbian relationship - are constant themes in Smith’s work. The book contains some bold observations on homosexuality as one of the sisters realises her sister is gay and is forced to listen to the sexist, homophobic leering of her male friends. Many writers would rail or demonstrate outrage at the malice of the men, but for Smith it is enough for the men’s utterances to be self-condemningly ridiculous. Ambientado en el Londres del siglo XX, cinco extrañas, un fantasma y su hermana, una huésped, la recepcionista y una joven indigente, estas serán las cinco protagonistas de esta historia, que cruzan sus vidas en una noche en el hotel World. Though not all the voices are as mesmeric as Sara's, each is enriched and enforced by the author's ability to find life where there is death and language where there is silence." - Melissa Katsoulis, The Times The second person is a homeless person who sets up nearby the hotel. Her story was less interesting, but still impactful and I was motivated to go on. Once we got to the third person, it became, for me, less and less coherent, and I decided I didn't want to put myself through it anymore.

Hotel World By Ali Smith | Used | 9780140296792 | World of Books Hotel World By Ali Smith | Used | 9780140296792 | World of Books

None of the five seems to be happy, complaining about their lot but accepting it, presumably because, given where they live, there are few options. What romantic relations they have are not happy ones. Sara has a crush on the woman at the watch repair shop but does not pursue it. Penny has sex with a friend of her father as way of revenge when he is unfaithful to her mother. Sara, aged fourteen, has sex with the man doing the tiles when her mother is upstairs having a shower.Ali who? Hotel what? Even for people who follow contemporary British literature, neither the name nor the title meant a lot. They do now. HOTEL WORLD makes a striking impression. It's a challenging, often bleak but affecting journey through the lives of four young women united by the death of another . . . What an introduction to Ali Smith. Avoiding any semblance of plot, Smith prefers to follow the wild daydreams and complex interior lives of her characters, and to pursue her own playful ideas and imaginings. And, somehow, she pulls it off magnificently." - Jerome Boyd Maunsell, Evening Standard Well once again I encounter that remarkable "wretched stream-of-consciousness" that I'm not really a great lover of (Virginia Woolf immediately springing to mind) but somehow it worked very well here. I must confess that I felt like a voyeur travelling in a somewhat sleepy fashion at times through the book but it is an enthralling work. hooooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into dark into light what a plunge what a glide thud crash what a drop what a rush what a swoop what a fright what a mad hushed skirl what a smash mush mash-up broken and gashed what a heart in my mouth what an end.

Hotel World - Wikipedia

That this story line was exploded out into five POVs each told in first person narrative—the ghost of the teenage girl, a homeless woman who ends up helping the younger sister, the receptionist at the hotel on the night the younger sister visits, a yuppie journalist staying at the hotel who also ends up helping the younger sister, the younger sister—did not for me make it any more than what it was: at best a superficial examination of the struggle to accept oneself and/or the struggle to cope with a devastating loss.In this voice from beyond the grave Ali Smith has created the perfect literary ghost...imbued with a powerful sense of wonder at the minutiae of everyday sensuality...and her beautiful, vivid descriptions are reinforced by a sharp, unsentimental tongue."- The Times (London) Hotel World is everything a novel should be: disturbing, comforting, funny, challenging, sad, rude, beautiful.-- The Independent (London) Hotel World is everything a novel should be: disturbing, comforting, funny, challenging, sad, rude, beautiful.— The Independent (London) A: Two books, I would suggest. The first is Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, which is similarly rousing about the deeps, and to whose modernism Hotel World is I’m sure indebted. The second is Muriel Spark’s third novel, Memento Mori, a brilliant sparkling comedy in which a community of old age pensioners in London starts getting crank phone calls–or are they phone calls from Death himself?–telling them, "Remember you must die." Hotel World‘s phone message, if it had one, would be connected to Spark’s–only inverted. Remember you must live.

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