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Sep 17, 2011

Paul rated it:

A very slow, mournful novel set in an end-of-season hotel which may - just may - be a metaphor or sumpin. Everything happens in slowmo - walks, meals, coffee, tea, cakes, clothes (pages of those), more walks, mothers, daughters, gloomy memories, walks, talks, a small dog, gauntness, autumnal colours, pallor, crepuscularity, more damned walks, more wretched meals, the god damned dog again, more clothes, and on p 143 this:

"my patience with this little comedy is wearing a bit thin" More...

8 comments like (15 people liked it)

May 07, 2009

Cynthia rated it:

This book cut WAY too close to the bone for me. I can't decide if I want to read everything she's ever written or banish her forever.

21 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Eric rated it:

A quite book, beautifully so. The simple prose is deceiving--the book is not simple, but elegant and superbly crafted. The words wrap you like the mist that weaves in and out of the landscape. A story of an older woman on a vacation alone. Loved it.

Anyone who has ever contemplated or experienced the noisy quiet that happens when you are by yourself but surrounded by others who are all there together.

Please read it.

1 comment like (7 people liked it)

Jan 29, 2012

CoffeeBook rated it:

Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner surprised me. The first forty or so pages, while beautifully written, were a tad tough to meander through at times. But then, oh then, all of a sudden, and at some point I can't recall, I was quite happy -- it pulled me in and although it's a quiet and contemplative story, it was really quite interesting and I felt at home with it.

Edith Hope is a romance writer who writes under another name -- she's accomplished, but to be honest, she writes about feel More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 28, 2008

Josie rated it:

About how being coupled allows one to relax and behave badly, and the good behavior expected of single women. The main character is brittle and lonely, and the tenor of everything is like "overcooked veal" but still there is something about the way the character feels uncomfortable in the world, the way she is constantly constructing an edifice to protect herself from it, that is universal. There is also a remarkable perception about the ways women engage in frippery to exclude men, More...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Feb 11, 2009

Stephanie rated it:

In college, the women in the Chamber Singers group I belonged to sang:

"An ape, a lion, a fox and an ass,
Do show forth man's life as it were in a glass.
For apeish they are till twenty-and-one,
And after than lions till forty be gone.
Then wicked as foxes till three-score-and-ten,
And after that asses, and so no more men."

I can think of no comparable rhyme for women. Traditionally, a woman's life is divided into three stages: the maide More...

4 comments like (3 people liked it)

Apr 07, 2011

bobbygw rated it:

Beautifully written, intelligent, reflective, understated and elegiac in tone, with a pervading sadness that runs throughout the novel and her characters' lives - perhaps something that could be said of much of Brookner's fiction? - this is a charming and thoughtful novel focused on Edith Hope, a successful middle-aged novelist of romantic fiction (though a realist about the world of the living, she never denies her heroines the mythical joys of true romantic journeys and endings), who comes to More...

0 comments like

Apr 28, 2010

Doug rated it:

A thoroughly readable novel which won Brookner the Man Booker prize in 1984. The heroine is a romance novelist exiled to an exclusive bed-and-breakfast sort of affair in Switzerland during the off-season, to lick her wounds and recover from a recent breakdown of sorts she has recently suffered which has probably cost her her reputation and may even affect her relationship with her publisher.

At the resort she meets a small collection of memorably drawn characters (the other guests) a More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 31, 2009

Tony rated it:

Brookner, Anita. HOTEL DU LAC. (1984). ****. This was Ms. Brookner’s fourth novel, and won the Booker Prize in its year of publication. As seems to be the case with her books, the protagonist is a woman, Edith Hope. She is “in disgrace,” and has been hurried off to a proper Swiss hotel, Hotel du Lac, to think things over and take charge of her life. She is a writer of romance novels under a pen name and has done very well at it. We don’t learn what her ‘disgrace’ is until about halfway t More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 16, 2009

Sara rated it:

"Hotel Du Lac" is at once a sad and celebratory novel. I never think of it as celebratory, as Edith the main character doesn't seem the type to celebrate, but in her own way I believe this story ends with her version of just that. By all conventions, Edith is a sad woman, writing romance novels to fill the void in her life that should be filled by a husband, children, etc. The novel is written from Edith's perspective and it does seem at first that even she believes herself to be beyon More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 10, 2009

Larry rated it:

I like Brookner's writing for its intelligence. I sometime struggle with some of her perspective as the female voice of the prime character in her novels but overall I think she provides a unique insight into the female character being feminist and anti-feminist at the same time if that makes sense. I was promted to pick it from the library by the recent article in The Observer on the Brooker Prize and the books which won that, in some opinions, shouldn't have won. This is an easy read and its More...

0 comments like

Jun 18, 2011

Jennyreadsexcessively rated it:

So much to reflect on with this Booker Prize winning novel. Edith, a romance novelist, is hiding out at the Hotel Du Lac in Switzerland until the furor over her earlier rash decision has quieted down. The hotel is populated with the most eccentric characters and Edith is fascinated by the women she meets. The novel questions whether Edith, a shy, mild-mannered woman, needs to loosen up a bit and be more assertive in order to find love and fulfillment. The novel's resolution was just perfect and More...

0 comments like

Aug 05, 2011

Methodtomadness rated it:

A very quiet book, which nevertheless seethes with the sublimated emotion of women fundamentally outside of the marriage market of their day. Brookner's protagonist, the almost too-obviously named Edith Hope, sees herself as a kind of Virginia Woolf (an apt comparison in some ways, even to the tone of the writing in places), but Brookner's prose is less spare than Woolf's, and her character ultimately is more raw, more emotionally open, and even more sensible. Although a quick read, this isn't More...

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Apr 12, 2011

Maria rated it:

Edith Hope é uma escritora de romances de amor mas, ao contrário das suas heroínas, ela própria é completamente azarada em matéria romântica. O único homem que ama, o seu amante, é casado e pai de filhos e assim deseja permanecer.

Depois de uma tentativa falhada de refazer a vida com o solteirão Geoffrey, desiste no próprio dia do casamento e é aí que a amiga Penelope decide mandá-la para o Hotel du Lac a fim de passar férias e repensar a sua vida, tentando, de certo modo, afastá-la do More...

0 comments like

Feb 04, 2011

Lisa rated it:

This was this month's book group title and most of them hated it -- now, considering I am the youngest one in the room by several decades I was surprised that there were a few of us who really did like it. It was written in the early 80s and some of the attitudes didn't translate well -- meaning that I just didn't get the reason Edith believed what the idiots who called themselves her friends said to her about "her last chance" and all that baloney with her "scandal". But i More...

0 comments like

Jul 25, 2010

Jenny rated it:

I read that this book was a classic and picked it up at a used book store some time ago. I didn't know if I was in the mood for it, but it was slim, so I figured it would be a quick read.

Despite the fact that the book was published in 1984, the story has an elegant feel to it and reminds me of books written closer to the turn of the 20th century. There is no technology and because of the hotel's remote location, I have a sense it was meant to be a timeless plot.

The charac More...

0 comments like

Jul 25, 2009

James rated it:

Moonrise over the lake, no matter if it's a pale one as I expected here, is always interesting. The moon is dependable. It regulates and comforts and completes our day in a satisfying way. So we notice it at first, how it balloons up plumply or slices the sky as a crescent. But once it's arrived we know its curve and features too well. We tend to allow it to sail on steadily over the lake until its well-worn groove takes it above our effortless line of sight. Occasionally, though, a combin More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 28, 2008

Tracy rated it:

So I see that Henry James was reincarnated as an 80s women's fiction writer. I was ready to be very angry at this little book, but Brookner pulled it out of the ditch for me, thankfully. sometimes, i have little patience for civility in novels (as evidenced by the fact I punctuated my reading of this with Cintra Wilson's 'a massive swelling', about as polar opposite as you can get). Meaning, folks who are arranging marriages as businesses, as cerebral exercises in social climbing are so alien t More...

1 comment like

Sep 29, 2010

Tommy rated it:

The ending was interesting and left you questioning up until the last page wondering what the protagonist's decision was going to be. The book for me though was ultimately just okay. Too slow at times, sad/depressing, and the writing didn't captivate me. This could be in part because I couldn't relate as well to the issues examined though.

The book mostly explores the situations/pressures that some women from what I'm guessing was the 1950s or 60s found themselves suffering under from b More...

0 comments like

Mar 13, 2011

Adam rated it:

An author of romantic novels has made a social spectacle of herself and then come away, at the insistence of her friends, for a solitary holiday in a Swiss hotel in autumn, where she spends her days among the few off-season inhabitants of the hotel, all of them lonely misfits.

This Booker Prize winner is filled with distinctive characters and fine passages about the relations of the sexes. And its subtle story arc comes together in a well-crafted flourish in the final pages, just when More...

0 comments like

Jul 02, 2011

Lisa rated it:

I would actually give this book 4 1/2 stars if I could....

One of the first things that I have to say about this book is that, in some ways, it seems to me to be very Jamesian. In fact, one of the things that I thought while reading the last 40 pages or so is that in some ways, Edith reminds me of Isabel Archer. That is, this is what would have happened, or perhaps could have happened, to Isabel had she not chosen to marry Osmond, or maybe if she hadn’t chosen to go back to Osmond. More...

0 comments like

May 28, 2010

Vincent rated it:

This book about a writer appeals to anyone who has ever written and felt sometimes like they were watching a game that everyone else was playing except them. In this case, the game is marriage and all of the involved complications of finding a mate during Europe in the 1950s or thereabouts.
The writer in this book is visiting a once fancy, now slightly fading hotel in Switzerland where old money comes to relax and get away from dirty, post-industrial cities. Although it was hard for me to More...

0 comments like

Jan 07, 2009

Carrie rated it:

This was one of the best books I have read in a while, and certainly the first Booker Prize winner that I have read lately that I actually enjoyed. It is a simple story - a woman has come to a hotel in Switzerland to convalesce, or, rather, to hide from the world for a bit, after she has acted rather badly at home in England. As she heals, she interacts with the others in the small hotel. It doesn’t sound like much, but Brookner manages to make the emotional life of this woman, and the others More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 24, 2009

Ruth rated it:

I picked this up on one of my random library forays. This is a novel about a British romance novelist who goes to stay at a Swiss hotel to wait out an embarrassing personal situation. While she's there she meets some rich people, sees the way they live, almost is seduced by one of then, learns some life lessons, etc. Maybe it was the setting or the characters' preoccupation with marriage or the specific types of male-female dynamics portrayed, but it seemed kind of old-fashioned to me even th More...

0 comments like

Oct 05, 2010

Nick rated it:

I fell in love immediately with this book about a romance novelist whose own romances -- of course -- are difficult, not to say disastrous. Brookner is a masterly writer, and she takes her time letting us get to know Edith Hope, the "writer of romantic fiction under a more thrusting name," and the terrible thing she has done. We're kept waiting for half of the book, and it's worth the wait. And the surprise love story is as compelling as anyone could wish. The third sentence of the More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 12, 2011

Susan rated it:

A mid-life woman who writes romance novels goes to a Swiss hotel to get away from choices she's made. Sharply observed and beautifully written, with flashes of wit.

"And what is the most potent myth of all?" she went on, in the slightly ringing tones that caused him to make a discreet sign to the waiter for the bill. " The tortoise and the hare", she pronounced. " People love this one, especially women. Now you will notice, Harold, that in my books it is t More...

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Jul 19, 2010

Kornela rated it:

Edith Hope has made a fool of herself over love. In hopes that she gets over it, her friends ship her off for a little R&R to the Hotel du Lac in Switzerland. Edith is resigned to go and maybe finish her latest romance novel. While there she meets an interesting cast of characters in the hotel's other guests. Observing the other guests and learning about their lives and motivations helps her make an important decision about her own life.
This won the 1984 Booker Prize, but it was my lea More...

2 comments like

Jun 16, 2010

janet rated it:

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

0 comments like

Aug 05, 2009

Swanbender2001 rated it:

In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question Why love?; It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a pseudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to resore her to her senses.
While staying at the Hotel du Lac, Edith is able to observe the More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 03, 2010

Louise rated it:

I'm a glutton for punishment. I swear I'll keep reading the Booker prize winners until I find one I CAN read.--AHA! This one is it. Not only is it readable, it's a great book. A woman's view of what women can be, long overdue even back in 1984 when the book was written. Perhaps still overdue. It's a little bit of Room With A View plus “Room of One’s Own”.

It's the end of the season so the guests at Hotel Du Lac are sparse. Edith, a romance novel writer, has been shuffled off to More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

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