The Transformation: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)Hauntingly beautiful engrossing summer read. This book sticks with you like sweat hungry flies in the oppressive Florida humidity. Captured the mood of the era just right and gave me all the seediness about it that I wanted. Enjoy this great off-the-radar book with a mint julip in an old creaky beachfront house with hosiery draped over Tiffany lamps for optimum pleasure.

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The Invention of Everything Else Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is primarily about Nikola Tesla, the eccentric scientist and inventor from Smiljan, who invented AC electricity and wireless communication and belatedly received recognition as the inventor of radio. For the most part, it is a fictionalized account of the latter part of his life while living in New York, especially the time he spent at the New Yorker Hotel, and his interactions with his few friends and acquaintances.
It's also about a fictional chambermaid named Louisa, who is inclined towards being insatiably curious about the lives of the guests of the hotel. Louisa becomes obsessed with Tesla, his life and his inventions, and the two are drawn into a platonic friendship after discovering a mutual interest in homing pigeons. Louisa is also a part of another sub-story involving her widowed father, a family friend who claims to have invented a time machine, and a mysterious young man who may have come from the future.
Even though it's a relatively small book, it includes a detailed account of the life of Tesla, his triumphs, his failures, his phobias and inventions, and the many times he snatched defeat from the jaws of success. The writing style is largely conversational, and it doesn't get so bogged down in science that your eyes glaze over, but the overall structure of the story is sometimes hard to follow (and swallow).
The fact and the fiction don't quite fit together in this historical work, but the rich descriptions of the architecture, social structure and ambience of early twentieth century New York make for interesting reading.
Recommended for inventors, science buffs and historiansAmanda Richards, April 10, 2008


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Mrs. Palfrey, Hôtel Claremont Review

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(More customer reviews)When Mrs. Palfrey, a genteel, elderly widow, arrives with her possessions at the formerly elegant Claremont Hotel in London, she expects "something quite different." Planning to stay at least a month, possibly permanently, she prefers her independence in this aging London hotel to living in Scotland near her daughter, who prefers to ignore her. A variety of elderly eccentrics call the Claremont home--an aging "actress," a ditzy busybody, a haughty observer of the social niceties, a woman who fancies herself an ingénue, and one lone male, an expert on all subjects. The residents put up a good front, but their loneliness and boredom are obvious--no one visits them, they rarely leave the hotel, and nothing in their lives changes very much.
When she falls while walking one day, Mrs. Palfrey is rescued by Ludovic Meyer, a struggling young writer. Because of his kindness and her pleasure in his attention, she invites him to dinner, where the residents assume he is her grandson Desmond. Ludo/Desmond is everything that the other residents of the hotel long for--he genuinely cares for Mrs. Palfrey, he listens to her, and he recognizes her value. Having never known a normal family life, Ludo needs Mrs. Palfrey as much as she needs him, and she happily becomes his much-appreciated "grandmother."
As the two develop a close relationship, Mrs. Palfrey reminisces about her married life, teaching Ludo about the many kinds of love and all its pleasures, and he, having failed in past relationships, begins to understand what love means, blossoming under her attention. As Mrs. Palfrey shares her past with him, he takes notes for a story he plans to write about her life and her experiences at the Claremont, where the informal motto is "We Aren't Allowed to Die Here." As time passes and life becomes more complicated for both of them, their relationship is tested.
Filled with hilariously eccentric characters who respond to aging in different ways, this 1975 novel shows a feisty Mrs. Palfrey challenging convention by reveling in her relationship with Ludo. With an unerring eye for the telling detail and the perfectly revealing comment, the author brings universal themes to vibrant life--the passage of time, the aging process, the compromises we make, and our continuing need to be accepted. The author never resorts to caricature as she makes her wry observations, respecting her characters even when presenting them in sometimes hilarious scenes. In this sweetly romantic comic masterpiece, old age is shown as a stage in life, one in which rewards and happiness are more important than the inevitable conclusion. Mary Whipple


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Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neills Hotel Review

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(More customer reviews)The first Trevor book that made one realize that Trevor was more than merely a brilliant funny man. Which is not to say that the book isn't full of laughs--it is. But it's much else besides. Of all his books this is probably one of his richest in terms of character, moral insight, etc. At any rate, certainly a pivotal book for the most artful storyteller now working.

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What was the tragedy that turned O'Neill's hotel from a plush establishment into a dingy house of disrepute? Ivy Eckdorf is determined to find out. A professional photographer, she has come to Dublin convinced that a tragic and beautiful tale lies behind the facade of this crumbling hotel.

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Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad (Contemporary American Fiction) Review

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(More customer reviews)An uneven collection of seven short stories by the author of "The Bird Artist" and "The Museum Guard". Many of the stories feature one of Howard Norman's typically quirky, unmarried, 'male in his 20s or 30s' narrators. In his novels, these characters have the opportunity to grow on, and charm, the reader - this is less the case within the confines of the short story, so that often what remains with the reader is the eccentricity, without the charm.
I found the title story, in which the main protagonist never transcends his wilful eccentricity, to be the least successful among the seven included in this book. "Old Swimmers", with its alienated teenager and geriatric survivors of a torpedoed ferry, also failed to rise above the quirkiness of its characters. "Milk Train", in which an engineer considers his life while waiting for rescue in the aftermath of a train crash, seemed pointless, lacking in any kind of resolution.
However, I really enjoyed the remaining four stories: "Jenny Aloo", in which an Eskimo woman believes the spirit of her son has been trapped in a jukebox, "Laughing and Crying" (a young teenaged boy's confusion following his parents' divorce), "Whatever Lola Wants" (a man's special 50th birthday gift to his wife), and - the best in the book, in my opinion - "Catching Heat", in which a racing announcer describes his sadness at the loss of his girlfriend to a jockey.
As I said, a mixed bag. But the four best stories are really exceptional. Norman stays on my list of interesting writers to look out for.

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Hotel Savoy (Works of Joseph Roth) Review

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(More customer reviews)Gabriel Dan, a POW in World War I, is returning to Europe from Russia. He stops temporarily at the huge Hotel Savoy, the great building in a gray and grimy manufacturing town, where revolution is in the air and workers are on strike.
In this town, Gabriel meets at least 25 characters to whom Roth gives a name, an occupation, and a social status based on money. Most of these characters inhabit the six-story Hotel Savoy. Those who live in the top three stores are too poor to leave. Meanwhile, the first three floors are inhabited by the wealthy, who "plan to go into business" and "compete with him [God]"... "on an equally large scale."
In HOTEL SAVOY, Roth briskly explores the interaction among his many characters. When that interaction is between rich and poor, exploitation and anger are manifest. When that interaction is among the poor, the subject is the absence of money or the effort to make some. The characters are no more than their jobs and their expectations. Meeting them is like going to a bar and getting a quick impression of people who, for the most part, don't like each other.
HOTEL SAVOY has two great events. The first is the visit by Bloomfield, a wealthy American returning to visit his father's grave, who is said to be looking for investment opportunities. During Bloomfield's visit, a sense of hopefulness sweeps the town. Then, Bloomfield leaves and instability, in the form of a mob, returns.
In this novella, the narrative is frenetic and muddled and probably captures the social tensions affecting Weimar Germany at its nadir.
Some lyrical passages. Saved by its brevity.


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Hotel World Review

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(More customer reviews)Ali Smith's Hotel World was shortlisted for both the Orange and the Booker Prize. Although this book is in many ways about death, it is so vivid and vital that it is not surprising that it has won such critical praise. Some readers have compared Ali Smith's writing with that of Virginia Woolf, but I think that Virginia Woolf would have good reason to be afraid of Ali Smith. Okay, so both have written novels that are full of streams of consciousness, but the spirits in Ali Smith's world are far more witty and recognisable, even if their "minibar is fear".
All five voices in this book belong to women, so Ali Smith may have a weakness when it comes to portraying men. The first voice we hear is the spirit of the recently departed Sara Wilby, a promising young swimmer who could have been a sub for the national team. She has died in a freak accident just days after starting a new job in a hotel. Her spirit interrogates her corpse with clenched teeth to find out how it happened. Clare Wilby, Sara's younger sister, is just as determined to find out what exactly happened, and haunts the streets outside the hotel. Lise, the hotel receptionist, only has vague memories (if any) of Sara before her death, tries to help Clare, unaware that she will be bedridden a few months later, felled by a mysterious disease. Else is dying on the streets, probably wasting away with tuberculosis. Her world seems inhabited by the strange words she picks up from poets in libraries who died long ago. She tries to find the meaning of "rebegot" from John Donne's A Nocturnal on St. Lucy's Day. In the company of the affluent, but ignorant, journalist Penny, this word transmutes into "rebiggot". Else's voice shows that she had an education once, but now she even has difficulty reading clocks - time has lost meaning to her. Her TV is watching through the windows as other people watch TV, with TV dinners in their laps. But this is not a dismal world, despite the poems dedicated to dying children - there is every indication that Else could be 'reborn'. This is a world, after all, where the birds sing cheerful TV ads in Lise's dreams.
There's a whole range of other, minor characters too, such as the girl in the watch shop, the learner driver and his amorous teacher, Duncan, the guy with whom Sara Wilby had the bet that led to her death. Even Princess Di and Dusty Springfield make fleeting appearances towards the end, and perhaps they and the Millennium could date the novel. But Ali Smith carries off her prose with such poetry and style that I am sure that it will always remain fresh. I don't think of Virginia Woolf when I read this novel - I laughed at the joke about the dog who walked into the Western saloon looking for the guy who shot his paw - James Joyce's The Dead seems a much more apt comparison. Now and again, the Booker prize panel does nominate really good books on its shortlist from powerful new writers. Ali Smith's voice (to borrow a phrase from her companion in Internet search engine results) will rumble in the jungle for a very long time.

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Hotel Iris: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)The beautiful cover of this slim novel, an hotel bedroom window looking over a wide sea, suggests a gentle romance -- something fleeting, a little sad perhaps, but tender. Ogawa's previous novel, THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR, about the affection between an old man, a young woman, and a child, leads one to expect a similar beauty here. And when this novel begins to sketch a tentative, courteous friendship between a lonely girl of seventeen working in her mother's seaside hotel and a much older man, one settles in for a bittersweet novella of romantic initiation such as might have been written by Elizabeth Bowen or Anita Brookner.
Wrong! But also right. For no matter where the story goes (and it takes us into some strange territory indeed) it retains some of those qualities of eager innocence, a bud that opens in the span of a single summer. But nothing about the book prepares the reader for the R-rated content. The girl, Mari, first encounters the older man (simply referred to as "the translator" since he ekes out a living translating from Russian) when her mother throws him out of the hotel after a noisy row with a prostitute. Bumping into Mari some days later, he is apologetic and almost old-fashioned in his meticulous courtesy; we assume that this was a one-time occasion that will not be repeated. But Mari, it seems, was equally attracted by the man's power and sense of danger. More than once, she lets him take her to his home on an island a short ferry-ride from the town, and all that happens there is embraced by her as much as by him.
Some readers may be disturbed by the explicit action. But the truly disturbing aspect is the clarity of the author's insight into Mari's mind. Ogawa refuses the easy categories of predator and victim. Short though the book is, she achieves an exquisite balance between innocence and experience that turns a four-star subject into a five-star achievement. I cannot help thinking that she must have taken Thomas Mann's DEATH IN VENICE as her model, inverting its viewpoint and moving it to Japan. She has written a worthy homage, if so.

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