Hotel World
Ali Smith, 2001
Knopf Doubleday
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385722100
Summary
Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.
Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense of love. Blending incisive wit with surprising compassion, Hotel World is a wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Inverness, Scotland, UK
• Eduation—University of Abderdeen; Cambridge University
• Awards—Whitbread Award
•Currently—lives in Cambridge, England
Ali Smith is a Scottish writer who won the Whitbread Award in 2005 for her novel, The Accidental. To date, she has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times and the Orange Prize twice.
She was born to working-class parents, raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD that she never finished.
She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She then became a full-time writer and now writes for The Guardian, Scotsman, and Times Literary Supplement. She lives in Cambridge, England, with her partner filmmaker Sarah Wood.
Works
Smith is the author of several works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World (2001), which was short-listed for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize in 2001. She won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002. ♦ The Accidental (2007) won the Whitbread Award and was also short-listed for both the Man Booker and Orange Prize. ♦ Her 2011 novel, There But For The, was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize and named as a Best Book of the Year by both the Washington Post and Boston Globe. ♦ How to Be Both (2014) was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Her story collections include Free Love, which won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award, and The Whole Story and Other Stories.
In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In 2009, she donated the short story "Last" (previously published in the Manchester Review Online) to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the "Fire" collection. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/20/2014.)
Book Reviews
In this voice from beyond the grave Ali Smith has created the perfect literary ghost...imbued with a powerful sense of wonder at the minutiae of everyday sensuality...and her beautiful, vivid descriptions are reinforced by a sharp, unsentimental tongue.
Times (London)
Where British reviewers see ambition, subtlety and wild imagination, all I can detect are leaden whimsy and mechanistic storytelling. Hotel World turns out to be a thin piece of work, one that fails to deliver on the promise implicit in its title—for, rather than explore the entire world of a hotel, with its broad array of guests, staff and casual visitors, Smith concentrates on a handful of characters who seem hostile to the very notion of professional hospitality.
Michael Upchurch - New York Times
To her considerable credit as a writer, Smith manages to have her characters approach these grim subjects in moods of humor and unselfconscious bumbling, which makes Hotel World a greatly appealing read.
Chris Lehmann - Washington Post
The heart of Scottish writer Ali Smith may belong to good old-fashioned metaphysics—to truth and beauty and love beyond the grave—but her stylistic sensibility owes its punch to the Modernists. She's street-savy and poignant at once, with a brutal sense of irony and a wonderful feel for literary economy. There's a kind of stainless-steel clarity at the center of her fiction.
Boston Globe
Hotel World is compelling...precisely because it suggests shifting yet coherent perspectives rather than simplifying lives into rigid, inert realities. Most impressively, Smith has mastered sophisticated literary techniques, which never intrude or bog down a delectable narrative of human perception and rumination. Apart from establishing Ali Smith as a novelist with the skills of a Martin Amis and Samuel Beckett combined, Hotel World is a damn good read
San Francisco Chronicle
[In] Smith's hands, this slender plot serves as an excuse for a delightfully inventive, exuberant, fierce novel of which the real star is not the dead Sara, or any of the living characters, but the author's vivid, fluent, highly readable prose. Hotel World was a well-deserved finalist last year for two prestigious British prizes: the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize.... I can't begin to paraphrase all that this dazzling book conveys about humanity and mortality.
Margot Livesey - Newsday
Featured are five women whose lives (and a death) overlap at the Global Hotel, a generic establishment in an unnamed city in England.... Smith's narrative style varies with each character and is generally exciting and quite successful, although some readers will find the acrobatics tiring. The connections she makes between the characters across class lines and even across the line between life and death are driven home in a beautifully lyrical coda.
Publishers Weekly
A heartfelt and introspective ghost story, Hotel World begins at the end and works backward and then meanders some in between.... [C]haracters come together in a tender, moving story of innocence, love, and kindness. Highly recommended. —Lisa Nussbaum, Dauphin Cty. Lib. Syst., Harrisburg, PA
Library Journal
A...verbally high-speed tale of a girl's death that may touch some but will seem mainly airy to others..... The pieces do finally come together, yet all remains oddly mechanical, no matter how many words and pages accumulate, and accumulate, and accumulate. One feels as though Smith were taking as long as possible on as little as possible to make things seem as important as possible.
Kirkus Reviews
Book Club Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Hotel World:
1. What is this book about? Start by asking what major issues Ali Smith examines. Be sure to consider the title. (Actually, this is a question you might want to return to later on.)
2. Follow-up to Question #1: Why does Smith center her novel around the ghost of a dead girl? Why death...and why ghost? What is Smith exploring?
3. What does Sara hope for when she remarks...
What I want more than anything in the world is to have a stone in my shoe...so that it jags into different parts of the sole and hurts just enough to be pleasure.
Or when she says, "A mouthful of dust would be something." How does Sara's yearning suggest the novel's thematic concerns? (Notice the homophone, sole/soul.)
4. Speaking of homophones—Smith peppers her text with clever wordplay. Go through the novel and pick out some examples, such as Else's "rebegot" and Lisa's "rebiggot." Can you find others?
5. Follow-up to Question #4: Reviewers have commented on Smith's remarkable facility with words, her wit and playfulness. Yet questions have also been raised as to whether her style is all surface gloss...or whether she mines deeper issues. What's your opinion?
6. Presumably Sara's death is accidental, stemming from a dare with a young porter. Yet there is also a hint of suicide. What do you think? And if it is suicide, would it make a difference in how you think about the novel?
7. What is Lise's illness all about? Why does she invite Else to spend a night at the hotel? (Don't overlook the wordplay in the two names—Lise/Else.)
8. Why is Lise so enraged about both the hotel and Penny? What do they represent to her? Are they deserving of Lise's hostility?
9. Consider Else as a character. What does her watching TV through other peoples' windows suggest about her (thematically or otherwise)? What about her elisions—was it heard for you to understand her speech? Did you find it humorous or irritating? What do we come to learn, or suspect, about Else's past?
10. Why does Smith set the novel in a hotel? How does the setting work as the book's central metaphor? Think of people checking in...and out of a hotel...every hour, every day. What else does a hotel suggest?
11. Follow-up to Question #10: Think about the hotel as a specific corporate entity. What does the "Global Hotel" suggest about the values and practices of contemporary society? In what way, then, is this novel a social critique?
12. Talk about the ways in which Claire reacts to Sara's death? Why does she collect her dust and trophies, dress up in her uniform, and try to work out how many seconds it took for her to fall to her death. Is Clare's reaction normal or obsessive? Do you find her presence in the novel morbid or endearing...or what?
13. Think about how Clare forms the link between the other characters. Is this story really hers? In what way is she instrumental in the novel's achieving a sort of stasis at the end?
14. Talk about the section titles and their meaning: Past, Present Historic, Future Conditional, Perfect, Future in the Past, and Present. Clearly these are references to time. Where else is time mentioned? What is its importance to the novel?
15. Trace the stages of grief in the novel, particularly as represented through the characters.
16. As a postmodernist, Ali Smith has sprinkled her "text" with postmodern theory: indeterminacy of words; fragmentation of consciousness and experience; impermanence; tenuousness of cause-and-affect...and of life in general. Can you locate those ideas in Hotel World?
17. Finally, do you like this book? Did you enjoy reading it?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)