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 second woman is Elspeth, known as Else. She is homeless and has a pitch just outside the hotel. It is not clear why she became homeless but now she scrabbles for small change, envious of the young woman over the road who, because of her age, does much better. She reminisces about her past and about her current life but seems quite happy to be homeless. She remembers when someone from a Sunday paper came and photographed all her possession for an article in the paper. Towards the end of her section, someone comes from the hotel – we will know her as Lise, a receptionist – and offers her a room for the night, as the hotel is fairly empty and it is going to be cold. She accepts and enjoys the room but, inevitably, this has consequences. Diria que es una novela... diferente, quizá por la manera de escribir de la autora o simplemente por la trama. The Pepto Bismal pink book cover is a shame. In fact, most of her book covers are a shame. They seem to scream "Ladies Only" and probably put most male readers off. If Ali Smith is a woman's writer, then call me Shirley and sign me up for the next one.

Hotel World by Ali Smith | Goodreads Hotel World by Ali Smith | Goodreads

To me this is a book of associations and benefits from a hermeneutic reading in its simple methodological sense. I hope to avoid being apophantic, jargon heavy, or avuncular, but I have a feeling that is precisely my tendency. So, sorry if you read this. 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. A 20 year old girl dies when she plunges to the bottom of an elevator shaft while playing around in a hotel dumbwaiter. That doesn't sound like a premise for an exceptional novel, but in Ali Smith's hands that's exactly what it becomes. There are five viewpoints here, including that of Sara herself, as she recalls her death and the days immediately before and after. Her younger sister gets a say, as does the desk receptionist at the hotel, and a homeless woman and a young female reporter. The latter two women never knew her at all. BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • 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.I’ve always loved the quote below by William Faulkner and it sprang to mind when I began to re-read this book. I very rarely DNF a book. This was my first by Ali Smith. It started out as a five star, or close to five star read, which is why I'm disappointed, to say the least.

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

Duncan – He was the sole witness to Sara's death. As the novel's only dominant male character, Duncan appears in each story within the novel. He too is moved to an emotional state of depression after witnessing the tragedy. Including Duncan in each of the novel's stories, Smith seems to imply that these stages of grief may affect mere observers too, that these stages are not exclusive to family or close personal friends of those who have died. Ali Smith possesses the perfect characteristics of the short story writer: rigorous self-discipline in the planning process, an eagle eye for condensing detail, a capacity for using the personal and individual to suggest universal truths and a skill for hinting at a wider world beyond the story, all of which can be seen in her three major collections of short stories Free Love and Other Stories (1995), Other Stories and Other Stories (1999) and The First Person (2008). 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.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. Yes I did initially think this book was bad and I had indeed been sorely tempted to throw it out of the window but what a dreadful mistake that would have been. Q: Hotel World, which was first published in the United Kingdom, garnered much critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the 2000 Orange Prize. Many of the critics, when discussing Hotel World, hypothesize about why you set the novel in a hotel and what it (the hotel setting) symbolizes. Care to answer that yourself? Smith implies there is a hierarchical structure to society, by setting her entire novel in a luxurious hotel. 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.

Hotel World - Ali Smith - Complete Review Hotel World - Ali Smith - Complete Review

Because it was October, I had campaigned for my book club to read something scary, but I was overruled and we ended up with Hotel World as the selection. I didn’t get my first choice, which would have been Frankenstein, although I did get a ghost story, but a sad one, not a scary one. Told, as Ali Smith’s stories often are, by different characters in alternating sections, the language and narrative structure of the book are creative, sometimes experimental, which is also in keeping with what I’ve come to expect from her. This one, however, was not as skillful or readable as the other Smith novels I’ve read. Smith's sidelong approach to plot produces an overall effect of a pebble dropped into water, echoed in recurrent images of fallings both physical and emotional. (...) She is an extremely readable, easy-flowing writer, and one of the subtlest and most intelligent around. Hotel World is essential reading from a writer confirming herself as a major talent." - Carol Birch, The Independent Ali Smith knows how to make her very own wounds blossom. Her prose is strong, at moments heartbreakingly funny, and allusive. But everyone has a story, and stories have a way of bumping into each other and creating other stories.....ad infinitum. Sara Wilby – a teenage hotel chambermaid who has fallen to her death in a hotel dumbwaiter. She is the daughter to her parents Mr. and Mrs. Wilby, and also older sister to Clare.Cada parte contada desde una perspectiva diferente, pero que todas hablan de temas como la soledad, la muerte, la enfermedad, la autora juega mucho con la sintaxis y las palabras, quizá es lo que me ha sacado tanto de la historia. 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. 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) And then there is that nagging question the dead Sara can't get an answer too: how long did the fatal fall take ? All five seem generally decent people but not averse to committing bad deeds. Penny gives Else a generous cheque and then phones her bank and stops it. Lise lets Else stay in the hotel, strictly against company policy, but then leaves clients on hold and lets one of the chambermaids take the blame for Else’s damage. Else is happy to get what money she can but when