Hotel du Lac: Anita Brookner: 118 (Penguin Essentials, 118) Paperback – 18 May 2023

Another enjoyable read. Some strong characters mixed with a sad under story.It's definitely worth a read & I would buy another Anita Brookner novel.

Edith Hope has been banished because she has disgraced herself in the eyes of her friends. She is to spend time in the respectable Hotel du Lac in Switzerland, to think over her faults and come back a better, or at least a more repentant, person – a little like a child sent to bed with no supper. At the hotel, now sparsely inhabited at the end of the season, she finds other women, all too seeming to be in some form of exile. There’s Monica, wife of a rich man who has sent her to the hotel to recover from an eating disorder so that she can fulfil her duty to give him an heir. He has made it clear to Monica that she either produces a child or he’ll divorce her. There’s Mme de Bonneuil, an old lady whose deafness leaves her isolated from joining in with the conversation of the other guests. She has been dumped in the hotel by her son at the insistence of his wife, who doesn’t want the old woman to live with them. And there’s Mrs Pusey, a lady so well turned out it’s hard to judge her age, and her only daughter Jennifer, ditto. Mrs Pusey is a rich widow and spends her empty life travelling from place to place, shopping in exclusive little boutiques. Into this unlikely harem comes Mr Neville, all ready to be the cat among the pigeons…The characterisation of the women throughout the book is cold and cruel, even of Edith who is our first person narrator. Perhaps we are supposed to assume that it is Edith who despises womankind to the point of misogyny, but I felt the contempt was flowing from the pen of the author. While all of the women are suffering in one way or another from society’s restrictions, I felt that they were portrayed in such a way as to suggest they deserved all they got. To be fair, the men don’t come off any better – no one behaves in a way to make them in the slightest bit appealing or sympathetic, or even interestingly hateful. This meant it was hard for me to care about what happened to any of them. However, the writing is very good and there are some interesting and quite humorous insights into the emptiness of the lives of women unwillingly without men, which kept me going.Largely it’s a sort of anti-romance. Edith is herself a writer of romantic novels under a pseudonym, and her story to some degree mirrors that of the traditional heroine seeking true love. But the mirror is distorted, and Edith knows she has found her true love but can’t have him. She writes long letters to her lover, David, and it’s through these that we gradually learn what her disgrace was. The book was published in 1984, when I was a bright young thing, and I must say that it feels out of date for its time. So much so that I kept wondering if it was supposed to be historical fiction set, perhaps, in the 1950s, but apparently not. We soon learn that David is a married man, basically happy with his wife but equally happy to have a bit extra on the side from the willing Edith. This isn’t the banishment-scandal – which I won’t reveal – but it is what leads to it. I’ve never had much sympathy for the difficulties adulterers create for themselves, which probably goes a long way to explaining my dislike for Edith. And the scandal, when it is finally revealed, made me like her even less. Call me judgemental! The time difficulty is that while I can quite imagine a woman being sent into social exile in 1950 for such a breach of the conventions, I simply can’t imagine that reaction in the 1980s. Gossip and disapproving looks, yes, but exile? No.Although I’ve made it sound as if I hated the book, I didn’t. I hated the messages that seemed to be coming off the page of women as useless, spiteful, envious, duplicitous, etc., but I enjoyed the reading experience. The characters might be unlikeable but they are nevertheless well-drawn. I felt Edith was damaged, though I didn’t think she had been given a strong enough reason for this, and there is a real sense of her loneliness – her inability to form relationships at any level of depth with either men or women. I wanted to tell her that, rather than acquiescing in her exile, she’d be better to find some new friends. I hoped she was going to realise that hankering after someone else’s husband wasn’t the best life choice she could make – I wanted her to experience an epiphany and go home wiser, and with a more positive outlook on life. So while I was reading, I was invested in the story. But when it ended, quite frankly I could have thrown the book at the wall. If you want to know why, you’ll have to read it. Perhaps you won’t react the same way – most people seem to feel more kindly towards her.Having had time to think about it, I reckon if this had indeed been a historical novel set a few decades earlier I’d have liked it much better. It just doesn’t feel right for the 1980s. It feels, perhaps unfairly, as if Edith is an alter-ego for Brookner, and that Brookner is really dissecting the society that prevailed when she was Edith’s age, which would indeed have been roughly the ’50s or ’60s. And perhaps if it had been set in that earlier time, I’d have been able to convince myself that Brookner was giving us a clever picture of society’s misogyny in that era, rather than inadvertently revealing her own. 3½ stars for me, so rounded up.

The writing is very subtle and skilled and I enjoyed the inner dialogue and the sharp comments. A world was carefully created - although I was amazed to find that we were in the 1950s rather than the 1930s. Overall though I was disappointed. Despite the inner uncertainty and the analysis of unhappy people, the plot fell away. A lot of introspection ending in….well, ending where the book started.

This is the very amusing masterpiece of a major writer and can be enjoyed on a number of levels.It's particularly interesting in its depiction (matched by her A Start in life) of a single woman's successful and comfortable affair with a married man. In real life we are so bombarded with newspaper reports of hysterical jealousy even suicide, the analysis of the heroine's longterm affair, triumphing over two near - marriages, is both touching and credible, deep love trumping neediness.Both these marvellous books deal extensively with 2 generations: the protagonists plus parents. It's interesting that while many major writers deal very successfully with the present and the older (parents' generation), none succeed with the present and younger (children's generation). Is this because we obsess over the legacy of our parents' treatment while patronisingly passing over that of our children?The only major authors to pursue their characters into a future generation (Trollope: The Duke's Children and Galsworthy 's later Forsyte novels) produce a gallery of deeply unconvincing cardboard.At its root Hotel du Lac combines a hugely enjoyable portrait of hotel life with an explicitly tortoise/hare analysis of who wins the race of love v marriage. One to read and re-read.

I enjoyed the book very much. It is an engaging story of a woman writer who has been exiled by her friends after a misdemeanour that becomes clear as the plot develops. She is staying in a French hotel where there is an odd assortment of clientele which are acutely observed by Edith, all of whose characters are well drawn by the author Anita Brookner, and all with their own reasons for being at the hotel. Edith, herself, is an intriguing character, a rather grey woman of indeterminate age with low self esteem but with a seemingly passionate but well hidden side to her which we discover through her letters to her lover David back in England. There is an interesting development near the end of the book and then a final twist at the end which keeps the reader's interest to the final page.