Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Rebegotten, 14 Mar 2002
By A Customer
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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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoying it more with the remembering, 27 Jul 2004
By A Customer
3.5 stars would be more accurate for this book. It didn't touch me enough for a 4, but 3 seems stingy for a book that has so much in its favour.As other reviewers have pointed out, the title doesn't really describe the content. I think I was hoping for a novel / stories grounded very much in the setting of the hotel - I expected that the hotel would be an ever-present nameless character. But it wasn't; I felt the hotel was really just used to group the characters. So i'm still waiting for the book that WILL evoke hotel life in the way I'd hoped this would. However, there were some wonderful moments in this book, fresh prose, some lovely ideas - the spirit questioning the corpse of the departed Sara Wilby was beautiful and I liked a lot of Claire Wilby's chapter; I really felt the pain of the sister left behind. I loved the detail, though at times the stream of consciousness style got a little much for me. I enjoyed the interplay between the characters, and the links that the reader was able to see which the characters couldn't. Unfortunately, in some areas, I wished the prose on at a faster rate. With reflection though, I feel enjoyed the book more than I did on first reading. I found the last passages of the book quite magical, the morning; glimpses of all the characters we'd met, some we hadn't, the threads between characters waking up around the country. Not the most startlingly original idea, of course, but beautifully executed. I would recommend this book, and I think that in time I will read it again, and probably gain even a little more from it.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Hyped, 31 Jul 2006
I first learned of Ali Smith's Hotel World on Radio 4. She was being interviewed about her award-winning book, and I thought, 'Radio 4 -- it must be good.' Wrong. While the multiple narrators in the novel have an incredible ability to notice minute details and form them into connected ideas or have them flow from one idea to another (stream of consciousness), the novel fails. The individual characters have limited space, literally and physically/metaphysically, and their messages are muted by all of the insignificant observations they make. I struggled to get throught the novel, and twenty pages from the end, I threw in the towel. Smith will never be a Virginia Wolf based on Hotel World.
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