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Hotel World

3.44 of 5 stars 3.44 · rating details · 1,670 ratings · 178 reviews

Five disparate voices inhabit Ali Smith's dreamlike, mesmerising Hotel World, set in the luxurious anonymity of the Global Hotel, in an unnamed northern English city. The disembodied yet interconnected characters include Sara, a 19-year-old chambermaid who has recently died at the hotel; her bereaved sister, Clare, who visits the scene of Sara's death; Penny, an advertisin...more

Paperback, 256 pages

Published April 25th 2002 by Penguin Books Ltd (first published 2001)

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Feb 10, 2013 Jacob rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013, fiction-and-literature, demands-a-reread, i-own, smith-and-yamashita

February 2013

Woooooooo-
hooooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into dark into light what a plunge what a glide thud crash what a drop what a rush what a swoop what a fright what a mad hushed skirl what a smash mush mash-up broke and gashed what a heart in my mouth what an end.
What a life.
What a time.
What I felt. Then. Gone.
(Hotel World, p. 3)

Four girls, one ~~cup~~ ghost. Sara died in a dumbwaiter while working at a Global Hotel, Clare is her sister, Lise works reception, Else be...more

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Mar 19, 2012 Elizabeth rated it 2 of 5 stars

Recommended to Elizabeth by: karen

Shelves: reviewed, 2012, in-by-of-england, the-knights-who-say-meh

If I were on the Man Booker Prize committee, I would probably really like this book. It's different. It's unusual. It flows. From the perspective of Oh no, not another heavy intellectual novel about something important set someplace out-of-the-way I could see this being appealing for its difference. And why worry about plots? They're overrated anyway. It's even better when you make all the characters dead, dying, recovering from someone else's death, or at risk of imminent death. That always tur...more If I were on the Man Booker Prize committee, I would probably really like this book. It's different. It's unusual. It flows. From the perspective of Oh no, not another heavy intellectual novel about something important set someplace out-of-the-way I could see this being appealing for its difference. And why worry about plots? They're overrated anyway. It's even better when you make all the characters dead, dying, recovering from someone else's death, or at risk of imminent death. That always turns me on; I'm sure it does the same for the committee members.

I don't mean to be too hard on this. I can see the appeal. Stream-of-consciousness narrative told from five different points of view and with different styles for each one. That's a literary achievement if I ever saw one. That takes technical skill as well as creativity. I should be all over this, right? Anyone channeling Virginia Woolf like this should get all sorts of points from me. I couldn't get into it though. I didn't have anything to hang on to with these characters or the story. It was slippery, sliding away from me every page. It was a frustrating experience.

I feel like I'm being unfair to Hotel World. Because it wasn't what I wanted should I be so hard on it? I can tell that this is a clever book. I just could not connect to it. Maybe I was hoping for another The Breakwater House and without the emotional connection of that book, the stream of consciousness style became grating instead of flowing? This isn't even an emotionally flat book. It is dealing with characters who are suffering, in one way or another. Each is going through loss, pain, confusion, etc. I just -- I don't know -- this review is like the book itself, hard to latch on to.

I hate when I come up against books like this. There's no small amount of guilt on my side for not liking it more, when I can see its excellent qualities. It's like a bad date with someone who seemed great at first. But there's just no spark here. Think a text message will do or do I need to call Hotel World and say it's not you, it's me? Here's hoping for voicemail.(less)

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Jan 18, 2011 Paul rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: the author's mother

Shelves: novels

Ali Smith gets a lot of love from the reviewers (the real ones, not us hobbledehoys lurking under our Goodreads rock). She likes to be experimental. Or she does in this novel, anyway. Unfortunately "experimental" techniques provoke the train-spotter in me. Oh, I say to myself, there's some James Joyce. And here's Virginia Woolf. A soupcon of B S Johnson, and - yes ma'am - a nod to Donald Barthelme. Ali Smith drags in some heavy comparisons, thereby, and doesn't do herself any favours. This there...more

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Jun 03, 2008 Savvy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Death by Dumbwaiter........."Woo-hooooooo"

Sara Wilby's tragic death, spiralling down in a dumbwaiter, begins with the voice of Sara's 'gossamer ghost'.
We see her desperate to understand what just happened.
Her death affects other women bound up in this rather curious ghost tale. And then each, in turn, relates their personal story.

Hotel World is a story of the power of time, how quickly time can turn us from living to dead, sane to mad, happy to sad, secure to homeless, rich to poor, healthy t...more

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Sep 15, 2008 Trin rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, scottish-lit, queerlit

The lives of five women intersect at a hotel in an unnamed English city. This is the kind of book for which the term literary fiction was invented: Smith is totally getting her Virginia Woolf on, with steam-of-consciousness being just the tip of the iceberg. There were parts that I found really quite moving—the opening section is told from the point of view of a ghost, and I am sucker for stuff like that—but often I found all the stylistic fanfare frustrating. After a certain point, it makes me...more

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Feb 23, 2008 Nathan James rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: ughmakeitstop

The plus side is that its probably my favorite book that's even been on the Booker Prize short list.

The bad side is that's not saying much.

Let me just start with 31 pages of unpunctuated stream of conscience writing. I was actually going along all right until I hit that character's chapter. I lasted three pages and skipped to the end. If I wanted to read something that was supposed to just alter my emotions, I'd read poetry. Just tell me the frickin story.

Then the last chapter was this nebulous...more

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May 15, 2013 Anna Toniato rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

" RICORDATI CHE DEVI VIVERE":Un fantasma che cerca di trattenere il più a lungo possibile le sue ultime sensazioni prima di sparire per sempre, una barbona perennemente alla ricerca di spiccioli e con una fissazione per la poesia, una receptionist che a causa di una strana malattia riesce a ricordare solo i jingle pubblicitari, una giornalista rampante, bugiarda patologica e terribilmente curiosa e una ragazzina che cerca di fare luce sulla morte della propria sorella maggiore. Sono queste le pr...more

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Apr 07, 2013 Lauren Highton rated it 4 of 5 stars

Woooooooo-
hooooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into the dark into light what a plunge what a glide thud crash what a drop what a rush what a swoop what a fright what a mad hushed skirl what a smash mush mash-up broke and gashed what a heart in my mouth what an end.
What a life.
What a time.
What I felt. Then. Gone.
(intro to Hotel World by Ali Smith)

What a — jumble of words, great stonking mess, trying too hard, emulating Woolf?, what an ominous start to a novel (oh god, will...more Woooooooo-
hooooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into the dark into light what a plunge what a glide thud crash what a drop what a rush what a swoop what a fright what a mad hushed skirl what a smash mush mash-up broke and gashed what a heart in my mouth what an end.
What a life.
What a time.
What I felt. Then. Gone.
(intro to Hotel World by Ali Smith)

What a — jumble of words, great stonking mess, trying too hard, emulating Woolf?, what an ominous start to a novel (oh god, will it all be like this?)

Hotel World (Ali Smith) is just one of the books on my postmodernism module. It has been been presented to us as a perfect example of postmodernist literature. It plays around with form, language, reader expectations. The novel is divided into five sections: five very different voices, connected by one tragedy, the death of a teenager in a large, chain hotel. The voices are each their own– but also, the language is twisted, manipulated, to suit each one.

I went into the novel highly skeptical, feeling that the plot sounded promising but the execution, from the offset, was gimmicky and would get tiresome quickly. In fact, the opposite was true. My skepticism fell away, quite completely. The language wasn’t played around just for the sake of it, it was conscious, sure, I mean it had to be, but it had its place. It had its own peculiar rhythm, and that is displayed best in Sara, the dead girl’s, narration. As a ‘ghost’ she longs for sensation and feeling, and she remembers them best of all. She describes, above, her death, though we don’t know it initially. It is all sensation–not the fear. She blots that bit out. She then goes on to describe missing, of all things, the feel of a stone in her shoe. It would be constant sensation.

I think it works because the whole being dead thing, the ghost thing, it’s so tired. Perhaps it’s weird to say that, because death, like love I guess, is timeless. But ghosts then–ghosts, of which most of us are skeptical, and of which we have no substantial proof, but instead reams and reams of it in popular culture: film, novels, even reality TV. But Smith leaves it up in the air. Being a ghost is never directing addressed, though to be honest it’s plain as day. Sara, though, does not turn up with some cryptic message or moral to put across to loved ones left behind. She doesn’t have some half-formed heaven-like realm she’s stuck in or reluctant to go to. There’s none of that. If there are ghosts, I reckon they’d be like this. More memory than anything. Almost like residue of a life left behind. Conscious, but not lucidly so.

I came to see the book as quite beautiful, and quite poetic. The language is just packed full of feeling, and despite my initial reservations, isn’t generally superfluous. It all seems necessary to me: it has that admirable knack of creating images in your head that you recognise from your own thoughts and identify with.

Above all, Hotel World is an interesting read. The characters are interesting. Their interactions are interesting, linked by tragedy and chance. I guess this is part of real life. I think this is partly Woolf’s legacy here (though that is somewhat the influence of having just read Mrs Dalloway). The way people’s lives are presented as threaded together, and especially the novel’s ending–illuminating on the lives of people who are in the street or those of whom we’d come across earlier–reminded me of Mrs Dalloway, though also, actually, of the film Amelie. I doubt it’s a new concept, but it’s definitely modern, treating the minor characters as potential major characters, not differentiating as much, and seeing tangents or threads of stories that could go on and on and on. And you really do feel, even as Sara slips away, that it could just keep going on, as life does.

http://lrhightonwritingsreviews.wordp...(less)

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Mar 03, 2013 Lance rated it 2 of 5 stars

Gotta' say, this book dragged on, for me.

I picked Hotel World up upon my partner's suggestion; and no offense intended towards my partner, but the book read, in my opinion, like it was written for a pubescent audience of white suburban nihilists.

The plot winds around the intersecting lives of a few characters, with alternating protagonists. Throughout the story, the reader has a hazy, fly-on-the-wall perspective, which is freshly executed, if nothing else. Still, by the end of the novel, I was...more

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Oct 02, 2011 MJ Nicholls rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: hoots-mon, novels, distaff

Another astonishing piece of work from Ms. Smith. Is there anything this writer can’t do? I have domestic duties and a rumbling stomach at present, so this review might be brief, and gushing. But here goes.

I love Ali Smith. I love Ali Smith because she moves me, and being a man, I’m not supposed to be moved by books. I’m supposed to be stirred by the raging masculinity of men in battle: the sound of gunfire in the crisp Vienna air as heads rain down upon the blood-soaked streets. But no. This pi...more Another astonishing piece of work from Ms. Smith. Is there anything this writer can’t do? I have domestic duties and a rumbling stomach at present, so this review might be brief, and gushing. But here goes.

I love Ali Smith. I love Ali Smith because she moves me, and being a man, I’m not supposed to be moved by books. I’m supposed to be stirred by the raging masculinity of men in battle: the sound of gunfire in the crisp Vienna air as heads rain down upon the blood-soaked streets. But no. This pink-covered novel moved me to bits, and I am proud of the fact.

Split into six sections marked by a separate tense, Hotel World uses a corporate hotel and the accidental death of Sara Wilby as a pull for its five characters, establishing a style and structure used in her later novels The Accidental and There but for the. Each section varies in rhythm, style and narrative position, opening with Sara’s ghost conversing with her corpse to get the scoop on her death. Crouching in a dumbwaiter (a lift shaft for tea trolleys), Sara plummeted to a horrible death aged twenty.

Entangled in this tale is the predicament of homeless woman Else who plots to steal money from Sara’s sister Clare, crouched outside the hotel in a state of incoherent grief. She is invited in by Lisa (third character who later is stricken with a debilitating disease) and then hounded by the unpleasant Penny (fourth character: a journo seeking a scoop in Else). Each section immerses the reader deeply in these characters’ worlds, each drawn to this grim hotel with their own motives, problems, tenuous links to life.

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.

Outrageously good. Books are rarely as skilful nowadays. Smith is a singular talent.(less)

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Aug 21, 2011 Courtney Johnston rated it 3 of 5 stars

Another swooping, gurgling, lyrical outpouring from Ali Smith. It's interesting to compare it to Girl Meets Boy - another birdsong of a book, another example of switching between narrators, another example of women who speak through weaselly marketing words. But 'Hotel World' for me has a sense of an exercise - tell the stories of five overlapping characters so the reader sees what connects them, even if they do not - and it felt slightly laborious as a result.

The first chapter is an exception....more

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May 09, 2013 Sydney Shuster rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: women-writers, literature

How do you rate a book that's technically beautiful and presents five distinct voices but you don't enjoy reading it? I had an argument with my partner about this. He said, 'You don't like it. Rate it a 1 or a 2.' But I couldn't bring myself to do it. The words were engrossing and interesting. Yet I kept checking the pages to see if it was over soon and how close I was to finishing it. Can you praise a book and at the same time wish you had read something else out of your huge to-read pile inste...more

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Jul 30, 2011 kathryn rated it 3 of 5 stars

I went a little back and forth if I liked this, so that is why the 3 stars. It is beautiful in parts for sure(the prose and language), but each chapter is written in a different style and I couldn't get in to the book as well because of it. All the styles are a form of stream of consciousness and some I really didn't like,but they did give you a closer feeling with the character. The premise is of a hotel that sort of has connected these 5 lives and you get their stories and how the people are c...more

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Jun 21, 2011 Carol rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary-fiction

This stylish literary novel takes place in and around the Global Hotel one day in early winter and centers around five women, all of whom are spending time in the hotel under varying circumstances. One is the ghost of a young chambermaid who died there, one is a homeless woman whose regular begging spot is outside the hotel, one is a business traveler staying there, one is a receptionist on the night shift, and one is the sister of the dead chambermaid. The five of them intersect in interesting...more

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Jan 06, 2011 Travis rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2007

Like The Accidental, this is rather...experimental. There were some parts I liked less than others because of that, but I do love her prose and really enjoyed the story.[return][return]The section that I found difficult to read was the sister's. I get what she was trying to do and it did work really well in getting her (Claire? was that her name?) state of mind across, but it was hard to read for such a long period. I kept losing my place because there was nothing, no periods or anything to grou...more

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Apr 11, 2012 Andrea rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Hard to rate such an uneven novel.... Inspired 5-star passages co-exist with tedious 1-star diatribes. So, I guess 3 stars is about right.

It would be unfair not to mention the author's daring risk-taking throughout the different sections: when the experiments work, the results are surprising (and even a bit intoxicating, Eureka!); but when they don't....well, let's just say that they fall as hard and heavy as lead in a dumb waiter. The 'future in the past' chapter, with its painful punctuation p...more

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Sep 03, 2010 Gregg rated it 2 of 5 stars

This novel centers around a group of women whose lives are connected by a particular hotel in England. Each chapter focuses on a different character including a dead girl, her sister, a homeless woman, an invalid, a hotel worker, and more. The book has an experimental quality which I found annoying, especially the 36 page chapter which was written like one continuous stream of consciousness sentence without a single punctuation mark. Getting through that chapter was like pulling teeth. There was...more

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Jan 01, 2011 Mike rated it 3 of 5 stars

Living in Thailand, I sometimes read books because

a) I can get my hands on them

and

b) They are in English

Such was my justification for embarking upon this book. It was not what I expected after unwisely judging it by its proverbial cover. I expected something lighter, perhaps comical, but this book delves into the shadow areas of loss, depression, suicide and homelessness. The author treads bravely into this territory, and I did find certain parts of the book to be touching, particularly the sc...more

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Aug 11, 2009 melydia rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book is distilled insanity. It's told from the more or less stream-of-consciousness points of view of five women whose lives intersect in a certain hotel: a dead teenager trying to remember her past, her sister working through her grief, a self-absorbed journalist, a bed-ridden invalid, and a barely coherent homeless woman. I wish I could explain the plot, but there really isn't one - just snapshots of life that happen to overlap a bit. That said, it was kind of a fun read in places. The gh...more

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Aug 25, 2009 Matthew rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: gay-fiction

This is the third piece from Ali Smith I've read, and I've liked each piece slightly less than the one before. Hotel World starts out with a bang (or a crash, as the case may be), but it never follows through.

There isn't a story here. At least not really. This is much more akin to a character study. Each section -- there are six -- is told via the stream-of-consciousness of one of the five female protagonists. As I've said in other reviews, stream-of-consciousness is best left for character stud...more This is the third piece from Ali Smith I've read, and I've liked each piece slightly less than the one before. Hotel World starts out with a bang (or a crash, as the case may be), but it never follows through.

There isn't a story here. At least not really. This is much more akin to a character study. Each section -- there are six -- is told via the stream-of-consciousness of one of the five female protagonists. As I've said in other reviews, stream-of-consciousness is best left for character studies, because it allows you to feel the narrator more than any other type of literary device, and this book is no exception. The five women come alive (which is ironic, since the first narrator is literally dead and the other four are dead in some metaphoric way), but coming alive isn't always a good thing. The women range from extremely likeable (like Sara Wilby, the literally dead girl of the first section) to more or less detestable (like Penny, the ad agent from the fourth section). With each new section and each new woman, I liked the book less and less. (The exception to this is the sixth and last section, which has an omniscient third-person narrator, and is some of the most beautiful, thought-provoking writing I've read.)

The very last stream-of-consciousness section is Clare Wilby's, the sister of the dead Sara Wilby, and it is extremely, extremely difficult to read. Smith may have taken stream-of-consciousness one step too far here in this section, because words are thrown in at random, there is absolutely no punctuation and very little capitalization, and virtually no logic. (Personally, my own stream of consciousness writes with correct capitalization and punctuation and never throws in random words... but then again, I'm a Grammar Nazi who's sister has not just died, so... ) In any case, I found this section rough to read but worth it, and it should not be skipped over simply because of its increased difficulty. You made it this far, you can make it the whole way through!

Ultimately, I'm still an Ali Smith fan, and I liked this book, though it's not my favorite. It's got some very memorable characters, and Smith does some extremely creative things with language and meta-textuality, and she writes "pure" stream-of-consciousness better than the best of them. Not a beach read by any stretch, but well worth the time you'll put into it.(less)

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Mar 03, 2012 Stacy rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: writers, short story lovers

An inspired work of literature! I was introduced to Ali Smith while studying creative writing in England and am happy she was recommended to me. 'Hotel World' is an adventure in experimental writing styles, displayed in several short stories that all depict characters whose lives collide in some way with the Global Hotel. It is easy to see how the different characters are linked, but it isn't until the end (the second to last story, to be specific) where it all really seems to come together. Tha...more

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Jun 20, 2012 Laura rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Ali Smith is at it again (or, for one of the first times, since this is her second novel, preceding There But For The by a decade) with a multiple character narrative. The characters are related here, though sometimes peripherally, by a young hotel maid (the first narrator of the novel) who has died a bizarre and accidental death. Some of the characters, though, are more closely related to the hotel itself, which made the hotel, at least for me, become a kind of silent character.

Although I don't...more

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Jan 05, 2009 Kate rated it 4 of 5 stars

Ali Smith's experimental writing is brilliant - I can see why it might turn some away, but if you're willing to appreciate her love of language (and share such a love yourself) then you are going to love her as an artist even more. Beyond her craft, I felt the story itself hit me in all the right places; personally, the tragic love story of the deceased teenager was almost identical to an experience of my own, and seeing an author addressing such a situation with the kind of honesty that Smith u...more

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Nov 13, 2012 Cheyenne Blue rated it 4 of 5 stars

Ali Smith, you've done it again.

I should know by now. I read your stories, I see the care you've taken with your words, how you build you characters. I see the deliberate literary styling, and I nod along, thinking that I enjoy your books, but I don't enjoy them that much, as there's a slowness, a stillness to your writing that fools me into thinking I'm not invested.

And then I get to, oh, maybe two thirds of the way through, and I think I'll put the book down, try something else, because it's n...more

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Oct 25, 2010 Travis Allison rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Apr 01, 2012 Cia rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-for-lit

Rather enjoyable, relatively speedy read, although perhaps not one to read while exhausted. Quite easy to miss little details. Characters and prose mostly engaging- the Wilby girls' sections can be a little irksome for those of the grammar-nazi persuasion, however perhaps only a minor, cosmetic detail. Connections between the characters and changing narratives executed wonderfully.
Very much reminiscent of Virginia Woolf. Definitely one to be read again- doing so likely to produce different read...more

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Jan 20, 2009 Claire rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, short_stories, booker

This book is made up of six interconnected tales about women. I wish the second through the fourth had been cut.

I loved the opening story told by the first girl's ghost. It felt like a good retelling of Our Town by Tom Robbins. The next three women don't add anything great. Then comes the sister's piece, and it is touching. The last story is wonderful in so many ways. I loved the snippets of people's lives in the end piece.

Had we given those three in-between stories a miss, this would easily be...more

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Oct 04, 2012 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Having been impressed by Ali Smith's prizewinning "the accidental" (the title has no capitals) and novella "Girl meets boy", I went back to an earlier novel "Hotel World". Shortlisted for the Booker and Orange prizes of 2001, it does show great promise, although not an altogether easy read. The story of five interconnecting characters is each related in turn. The accidental death of chambermaid Sara, the beggar Else on the street outside, Lise the receptionist, Penny the guest and traumatised si...more

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Oct 18, 2012 Marc Nash rated it 3 of 5 stars

I ended up being a bit ho-hum about this. 5 dislocated female voices all linked in to the same chain hotel where a bizarre accident has claimed the life of the first voice, hovering as an unreconciled ghost. Whiel all 5 voices were genuinely different from one another, all were a tad similar in their being deracinated: the dead girl, a homeless waif, a journalist/writer who can't settle to anything and craves fresh experiences, the bereaved sister and the hotel's alienated receptionist. There is...more

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Dec 20, 2012 Chaitra rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: booker-prize-nominees, orange-prize-nominees, read-in-2012, ali-smith, scottish-literature, set-in-england, stream-of-consciousness, ensemble, set-over-a-day, literary-fiction, contemporary-fiction, humor

Hotel World grabbed me from the get go, even though stream of consciousness is not really my thing. Perhaps a stream of ghostly conscience is something that floats my boat. In any case, for a novel that has the vaguest hint of a plot and subsists on words words words words, this was phenomenal.

The framing sections of the books have to do with a pair of sisters, one of them dead. Sara Wilby, a champion swimmer going places, who has just fallen in love with a woman, surprising herself, plummets p...more Hotel World grabbed me from the get go, even though stream of consciousness is not really my thing. Perhaps a stream of ghostly conscience is something that floats my boat. In any case, for a novel that has the vaguest hint of a plot and subsists on words words words words, this was phenomenal.

The framing sections of the books have to do with a pair of sisters, one of them dead. Sara Wilby, a champion swimmer going places, who has just fallen in love with a woman, surprising herself, plummets plunges swoops crashes down in a dumbwaiter of the Global Hotel where she's chambermaid. It's been six months since the event, and her ghost, while it can tread on air and appear to random people has been losing things - reds, greens, blues, the things that people see with, even the word for the contraption she plummeted down in. By contrast, her body can tell her tales, even though it isn't very happy to remember. As she floats around for what will be her last day of haunting the earth, she's in turn haunted by a question. How long did her fall take?

This is the question that her younger sister, the sixteen year old grieving Clare, tries to answer, by heading to the hotel and timing the fall of objects she throws down the dumbwaiter shaft. Their life (and death) intersect with a number of other ladies, within the Global Hotel, Else, Lise, Penny, on a cold winter's night that is Sara's last. Else is a homeless woman who shelters for a night within the Global, who seems to come from a happy, solid home. Lise works at the reception of Global, she is a caring woman who both offers Else a vacant room for no charge, and steps up and comforts the sobbing Clare when she turns up trying to measure her sister's fall. Her story is told in two parts, the other being six months down the line from the Sara's last day, when Lise lies on the bed, sick and unable to move without immense pain. Penny is the odd one, a journalist stuck in the Global, writing its publicity, she comes across Else and decides to write a human interest piece about her once she knows she's homeless. Penny has an internal monologue in her head, constantly spicing up everything that occurs, in true tabloid journal form.

I liked this book. One of the things I admire in SoC, even though it's hard to read, and takes time to digest, is the abundance of words, of vocabulary. It's true of this book, especially in the first section, where words are all that are left to Sara's ghost. During the course of the section, heartbreakingly, we see her lose that too. I loved the sections with Sara, with Else and with Penny. I loved Clare too, but Clare took a bit of getting used to, as this particular section doesn't seem to have any periods. But Clare depicts grief, for a sister that she may have loved, but one who she wasn't close to when she lived. It's raw, emotional and truer than the other sections, all while not being sappy. Clare's worth a re-read. Even though it deals with grief and loss and transience of things, it's not a downer. It's very funny, though I didn't find it to be "wildly funny of the ha-ha-ha kind" as some reviews describe it. My one less star is because of the last section which deals with random ghosts before coming to a point that's relevant to what has just passed. I didn't think that chapter was really necessary. Clare was a good enough stopping point.

It's a good book, an experimental book, sure, but one I would think mostly succeeds. It just needs a little time and patience. 4 stars.(less)

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About Ali Smith

Ali Smith is a writer, born in 1962 in Inverness, Scotland, to working-class parents. She was raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge, for a Ph.D. that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia, she talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year and ho...more

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Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis (Canongate Myths)

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Quotes from Hotel World

“There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.” — 10 people liked it

“We all know our dates of birth but . . . every year there is another date that we pass over without knowing what it is but it is just as important it is the other date the death date.” — 8 people liked it

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Hotel World

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