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.)