Strange Hotel

And what does my will think of me now? Probably that it’s tired of this tone. Of relentlessly reshuffling the deck of pseudo-intellectual garble which, if I’m honest, serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence.

And what does my will think of me now? Probably that it’s tired of this tone. Of relentlessly reshuffling the deck of pseudo-intellectual garble which, if I’m honest, serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence.

“She has no interest whatsoever in France. The subject is unbroachable with her. She disregarded it as best she could on the train from Nice. She did not absorb her cab ride here. With this indifference, of course, she has defeated herself: tomorrow will mean the acquisition of a map”

“For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed. I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day”

“I move. Cars move. Stock, it bends light. City opening itself behind. Here’s to be for its life is the bite and would be start of mine”

My first two novels feature young protagonists who are at the mercy of their impulses, and of experience more generally, but this time around, I was writing a woman old enough to be able to assert control over how she reacts to the outside world. In fact, her aim is to keep the world, and memory itself, at a distance, which is the reason behind the far more formal – perhaps even overly formal – register of Strange Hotel.

That night I heard a story that might have made me run. I learned how the body I loved and touched had lived another life. Pitilessly, physically. In its recountment, guiltily. Even when younger, brokenly, in similar ways to mine”

I am beholden to no past, that much is clear. I am the last one standing in so many memories. Will I decide there can be more again? Or will I procrastinate at this door until the end of my days? Or will I choose to remember that there are some things I already know how to do?

I do think that my books are very intertwined. And Strange Hotel could be the story of Eilis twenty years later. But there are reasons she’s not named. That’s not set in stone.

Spending time in a place in which you have no personal stake breeds a peculiar kind of contemplativeness and makes it harder to evade any sense of existential isolation you may be prone to experiencing.

My first two novels feature young protagonists who are at the mercy of their impulses, and of experience more generally, but this time around, I was writing a woman old enough to be able to assert control over how she reacts to the outside world. In fact, her aim is to keep the world, and memory itself, at a distance, which is the reason behind the far more formal – perhaps even overly formal – register of Strange Hotel.

The 20th century European legacy was far more on my mind during the writing, particularly Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Von Aschenbach’s rootlessness and paralysis in the face of his own ruined mortality has always exerted a powerful sway over my imagination and this seemed the moment to give that influence an opportunity to play itself out. Work in translation has always been central to my reading and having the influence of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils on The Lesser Bohemians, and Mann[‘s Death in Venice] on Strange Hotel, completely ignored in favour of the old Irish reliables gets quite irritating.

McBride has an aversion to exposition. “It just doesn’t interest me to write it,” she says. “I just don’t care. The things that count to me are the things going on inside. Things that hit.” These are strewn across her novels: moments of humiliation, desire or violence, the thrill and terror of intimacy, smells, sounds, déjà vu. “There are things that invade you, that you can’t control, no matter how protective you are. There are things that will just go through all of that. Those are the things I’m interested in catching.”

But she is also frustrated by a “backlash” reasserting the literary merit of conventional fiction, the kind that you can “enjoy reading or skimming. I have a problem with those books being treated as serious literature. That annoys me, a lot.”

"...Probably that it’s tired of this tone. Of relentlessly reshuffling the deck of pseudo-intellectual garble which, if I’m honest, serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence."