Hotel World: Ali Smith

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Q: If someone was going on vacation and was bringing Hotel World to read, which other novel would you suggest that person take along as well to read afterwards as a companion piece? Why? The several characters are people employed by or having some other connection to a corporate chain hotel in an English city: A young female employee who has a tragic accident; a night reception clerk who extends a kindness to a young homeless woman; a guest who’s a PR writer on assignment; the deceased employee’s little sister. Ali Smith does not, of course, do happy. Her characters, mainly women, struggle with life in some bleak area of the UK. Men are at best necessary evils and often harmful and unpleasant, whether as husbands/boyfriends or bosses or other authority figures. In this book, there is really only one vaguely sympathetic man and that is Duncan who was with Sara when she tried her dumb waiter stunt and who, as a result, has mental health issues, hiding out in the Left-Behind Room (i.e. Lost Property Office), with everyone trying to cover for him but even he remains a shadowy figure. 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 Hotel World is compelling, however, precisely because it suggests shifting yet coherent perspectives rather than simplifying lives into rigid, inert realities. Most impressively, Smith has mastered sophisticated literary techniques, which never intrude or bog down a delectable narrative of human perception and rumination. (...) (A) damn good read." - Alexandra Yurkovsky, San Francisco Chronicle

Hotel World - Ali Smith - Google Books

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Q: Hotel World‘s main character is a young ghost named Sara, whose bodily death is vividly reimagined at the start of the novel. How did you get the idea to write this novel from the perspective of a ghost? Have you written about or been interested in ghosts before Hotel World?

But everyone has a story, and stories have a way of bumping into each other and creating other stories.....ad infinitum. The plus side is that its probably my favorite book that's even been on the Booker Prize short list. 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. Ali Smith's remarkable novel HOTEL WORLD....is a greatly appealing read. Smith is a gifted and meticulous architect of character and voice." The Washington Post I’ve always loved the quote below by William Faulkner and it sprang to mind when I began to re-read this book.

Hotel World by Ali Smith | Goodreads

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. 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. 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.” Quello che più mi piace di Ali Smith è come scrive. Sempre. Le storie sono raccontate in modo originali, con delle strutture narrative estreme. Penny is a guest at the hotel. She is a journalist for The World. She has to stay there but is not happy about it. Hotels were such a sham. She was bored out of her mind. She does have some interaction with two other people: she hears a noise outside her room and sees someone trying to unscrew something off the wall (only later do we learn who and why). She tries to help and then gets help from another guest, who we know is Else. The activity is all somewhat mysterious. Penny even later accompanies Else on a walk around the town.Hotel World is told from the perspective of five different women who as fate would have it cross paths and in doing so affect each other's lives through moments spent together. Each character is unique in that they each signify a different stage of the grieving process, a theme prevalent throughout the entire novel. 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) Clare Wilby – the younger sister to Sara, Clare is not entirely introduced until the last section of the novel. Clare's character signifies the final stage in the grieving process, that of acceptance.

Writing the Contemporary: Temporality, Tenses and the (DOC) Writing the Contemporary: Temporality, Tenses and the

There are six sections in the book covering various time periods and four other women are gradually drawn into the equation and their lives are all examined in detail: Clare, Sara’s sister, who cries a lot and wants to find out how this accident happened; Else, a vagrant really, who lives outside the hotel but gets invited in for the night by the receptionist Lise and Penny, a journalist who’s on the outlook for a scoop. Most staggering of all, however, is the internal monologue from Clare, a stream-of-consciousness outpouring and the most bone-shudderingly effective representation of grief I have read. The moment the mist clears and we realise Clare is throwing objects down the hotel’s dumbwaiter to determine the duration of her sister’s fall, our hearts break like Sara’s brittle bones. To her considerable credit as a writer, Smith also manages to have her characters approach these grim subjects in moods of humor and unselfconscious bumbling, which makes Hotel World (shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize) a greatly appealing read in spite of the heaviness of its themes." - Chris Lehmann, The Washington PostLise is the next one we meet and she is no longer at the hotel but very ill. The doctors can find nothing wrong with her but, nevertheless, she feels particularly unwell. It is her mother, Deirdre, who comes round to take care of her. Deirdre was a popular poet (older British people may recall Pam Ayres) and Lise remembers the many LP covers with her mother’s face on them. Deirdre even wrote a poem called Hotel World: 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.