Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects

Hotel World

Name: Hotel World
Author: Ali Smith
ISBN: 9780385722100

by Ali Smith

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Overview

Woooooooo-hooooooo.

Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.

Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense of love. Blending incisive wit with surprising compassion, Hotel World is a wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book.

Synopsis

Cinco mujeres: cuatro están vivas, tres son forasteras, dos son hermanas, una está muerta. Y todas han pasado alguna vez por el hotel. Hotel World nos acoge en una noche de sus vidas. Por los pasillos caminan sus esperanzas y desencantos, cobijados en la memoria de ese lugar. Cada una cruzándose con las demás sin reparar en la casualidad de sus encuentros.

Juego, desafío, inventiva desbordante, esta novela es una alquimia de mundos opuestos que chocan para dar como resultado una parábola moderna sobre la comunicación y la indiferencia, y, finalmente, una defensa del amor.

Washington Post Book World - Chris Lehmann

To her considerable credit as a writer, Smith manages to have her characters approach these grim subjects in moods of humor and unselfconscious bumbling, which makes Hotel World a greatly appealing read.

About the Author, Ali Smith

Ali Smith nació en Inverness (Escocia) en 1962 y vive en Cambridge. Su primer libro de cuentos, Free Love, ganó el Satire First Book Award y el Scottish Arts Council Award en 1995. Su primera novela, Like, apareció en 1997 y su segundo libro de cuentos, Other Stories and Other Stories, en 1999. Su obra ha recibido los mejores elogios de la crítica y los lectores, y se caracteriza por una enorme frescura y originalidad, además de por una excepcional perspicacia para encontrar los detalles cotidianos capaces de sorprendernos. Colabora con The Times Literary Supplement. Por Hotel World, finalista del Booker Prize, recibió el Premio Encore, dedicado a la segunda mejor novela. Su más reciente obra, Accidental, que será publicada por Alfaguara a fines del 2007, ha sido ganadora en el 2006 del Premio Whitbread, uno de los más prestigiosos de las letras inglesas, optaban autores de la talla de Nick Hornby (A long way down) o Salman Rushdie (Shalimar el payaso).

Reviews

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
A finalist for the Booker Award in 2001, Ali Smith's fiction debut is a truly inventive narrative that is told through the voices of a handful of different characters. Among them is the 19-year-old hotel chambermaid Sara Wilby, who, in a fleeting moment of terrible imprudence, wagered a coworker that she could fit her entire body into the hotel dumbwaiter. She did, but under her weight the cables snapped, and in a matter of seconds she fell four floors to a violent death.

However, readers meet Sara only after her fatal error in judgment; now she is a ghost wandering the scene of her accident, desperate to experience again even a few precious moments of earthly existence. From her incorporeal vantage point, Sara is able to observe both the daily lives and future destinies of her family and her former coworkers, all of whom struggle to come to terms with her foolish act -- without quite realizing that in doing so, they will allow Sara to move on as well. As her energies begin to wane, the ghostly Sara becomes obsessed with learning just one last thing: exactly how long it took for her to die. To accomplish this, fate must play a different hand, bringing five unrelated people from very different walks of life together in the typically transient setting of an urban hotel.

Ali Smith's explicit, unsentimental prose and brilliantly precise descriptions of the disassociative, catastrophic, but also redemptive aftermath of a sudden death make Hotel World at once a challenging, sad, beautiful, and ultimately comforting love- and life-affirming novel. (Winter 2002 Selection)

Chris Lehmann

Lisa Allardice

Hotels provide ideal microcosms of the world; from the lowliest cleaner to the most glamorous guest, they have the effect of bringing strangers from different worlds together.

Ali Smith’s second novel is a series of stories connected by the spirit of a dead chambermaid who, a few months earlier, squeezed herself into a dumb-waiter for a dare and plummeted to her death. A female tramp, a depressive receptionist, a bored journalist and the sister of the dead girl all tell their tales as their lives intersect one night at the Global Hotel.

From the epigraphs on, the novel echoes with Modernist influences. Sara’s death creates an absence at the heart of the book like the now closed shaft through the middle of the hotel. Her prose is broken by omissions and ellipses, forgotten words and painful memories. As in her previous fiction, Smith experiments with time, wittily dividing the novel into tenses as the narrative moves backwards and forwards, forever drawn back to the same fateful evening. Each character’s narrative evolves into an unconventional love story but, though Sara’s ghostly playfulness makes it hard to be deeply saddened by her plight in the afterlife, the novel comes together in its joyful message of continuity and hope.

Publishers Weekly

When it was published in the U.K. earlier this year, the latest offering from Scottish writer Smith (Free Love) was made an Orange Prize finalist and shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. Featured are five women whose lives (and a death) overlap at the Global Hotel, a generic establishment in an unnamed city in England. The novel begins with Sara, a chambermaid who plummeted to her death in one of the hotel's dumbwaiters, as her ghost tries to recollect what it was like to be alive. Else, a homeless woman who sits on the concrete in front of the hotel, is invited by Lise, the receptionist, to stay for a free night. Penny, a freelance travel journalist thrown into the mix, looks for ways to curb her boredom and unwittingly helps Sara's sister, Clare, in her search for Sara's spirit. Smith expertly fuses humor and pathos throughout the novel. When Sara's ghost visits her corpse in the grave, it's none too happy to see her; when it won't answer her questions, she harasses it by singing songs from West End musicals. And when the disgruntled Lise lets Else into the hotel, she contemplates throwing in a free breakfast, as an extra snub to her employers. Smith's narrative style varies with each character and is generally exciting and quite successful, although some readers will find the acrobatics tiring. The connections she makes between the characters across class lines and even across the line between life and death are driven home in a beautifully lyrical coda. National advertising. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A heartfelt and introspective ghost story, Hotel World begins at the end and works backward and then meanders some in between. Readers first witness the accidental death of Sara Wilby, a hotel chambermaid who is also the narrator of the story. In an attempt to make sense of her demise, she comes back as an apparition at her own funeral and relives earlier events. While Sara's parents enter a catatonic state, her sister Clare is propelled by her grief into finding answers and reconciliation. She stakes out a spot near the hotel where she can sit daily and observe the commerce going on in the hotel and the nearby shops. So, too, does a homeless woman, Else, who begs for spare change. These and other characters come together in a tender, moving story of innocence, love, and kindness. This first novel was short-listed for the 2001 Orange Prize. Smith's beautiful, unpretentious writing mesmerizes. Highly recommended. Lisa Nussbaum, Dauphin Cty. Lib. Syst., Harrisburg, PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A prizewinner back home, Scotland-born Smith (Like) offers a verbally high-speed tale of a girl's death that may touch some but will seem mainly airy to others. It was shortlisted for the 2001 Orange Prize-as it is now for the Booker. At 19, Sarah Wilby is a promising competitive swimmer, is newly infatuated with a shopgirl but hasn't yet said anything, and has a new job as chambermaid at the Global Hotel in a smallish English city. Then, just like that, she winks out. She bets a coworker five quid she can squeeze into a dumbwaiter, does it-and falls from top of hotel to bottom. The remainder of the novel-after a section where dead Sarah herself drifts around to looks things over ("I went to the funeral to see who I'd been")-consists of chapters, often interior monologue-like, about or by people who were near the scene or connected to Sarah. There's hotel's deskgirl, Lise, for example, who later falls deathly ill, but first, deathly bored by her job, derides the hotel's corporate ownership by giving a room to a homeless person; the homeless person has previously had a long chapter of her own (before you know who she is), as will an utterly ditzy journalist who stays in the hotel and thus meets up not only with the homeless lady but with Sarah's kid sister Clare (none of us yet knows who she is), who's come to grieve by prying open the dumbwaiter shaft and having a look down. Etc. The pieces do finally come together, yet all remains oddly mechanical, no matter how many words and pages accumulate, and accumulate, and accumulate. One feels as though Smith were taking as long as possible on as little as possible to make things seem as important as possible. "Lise breathed out. Then she breathed in." "Outside, in the world, people still walked about and did things. For example, they went shopping." Long riffs on a theme, presented like a puzzle.