Hotel Du Lac By Anita Brookner
By Anita Brookner
Edith Hope, a romance novelist, has been exiled temporarily by her friends to the Hotel du Lac after an affair with a married man which led to her leaving her own fiancé at the altar. At the hotel Edith is expected think about her life, her actions, and to work on her current novel.
While their, instead of working on her novel, Edith spends her time moping, interrogating the other guests (mostly women), and composing letters that she will not send to David, the object of her infidelities. Slowly, she is drawn into acquaintance with these women who bluntly, sometimes cruelly it seems, tell her what kind of woman she appears to be, demeaning her looks and clothing, yet wanting her attention. In their company Edith seems to come around, to begin to liven up.
Then one of the guests, a Mr. Neville whom all of the women seem to fancy in one way or another, makes Edith an absurd proposal of marriage out of the blue. He claims he can make her the kind of woman she deserves to be while she provides him with the comfort of knowing someone is around to care about his life. Both openly disavow any sort of love for one another--they're strangers, after all--but Edith seriously entertains the idea before coming to her senses and deciding to return home to face what she left behind, knowing she will have to make her own way.
Most of the way through this novel I was interested in Brookner's study of sadness and longing. The writing was beautiful and elegant, understated. But the final two chapters leading up to the ending were almost too absurd and unrealistic to make actual sense. They seemed so abrupt and surprising. The novel is quiet, with sly humor, and fun in its dissection of the ridiculous guests, but the whole Mr. Neville bit sort of ruined that. The ending was a poignant statement, and maybe it needed that whole proposal angle to work, but maybe it could have been done in a better way. Ultimately, I think Hotel Du Lac was a fun way to look at a woman's struggle to come to terms with herself and her loneliness, but it wasn't a groundbreaking read. I am giving it 3 stars.
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