I picked up Ali Smith's Hotel World as I was waltzing out of town, alone on a long trip for work, first to take a flight to Nice, and later to take a train across La France to the Atlantic coast side of things. (To be honest, no waltzing was involved, just sweating and banging my shins on stuff).
In any case, I cracked open the slim Hotel World as soon as I nestled down into my purple velour seat upon the TGV, which was literally rattling from the Côte d'Azur towards Paris. From then, I was captive: I couldn't put it down, even for the hour I was in Paris (I'm a dummy), nor could I stop reading as my train continued to hurtle down south, through endless sunflower fields.
What in the whole wide world is better than Eloise? Or: Eloise, the best hotel book of all time.
There's something in common between Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel and Stefan Zweig's The Post Office Girl. They give us hotels that are entire worlds: their corridors house luxurious accommodations as well as morgues, writing rooms, grand ball rooms, and entire social orders. But each also appears as a little sort of eddy in a river of war washing across an unhappy world.
It doesn't matter if it's the Ritz, a Motel 6, or the Heartbreak Hotel itself, a hotel room is never a home. It's just a transitory space filled with ghosts, free shower caps, and your own thoughts, to be purposed as circumstance demands - be it love, crime, consoling a heartbreak, escape, a good night's sleep, or work.
This month, in the midst of our holiday, we take a turn for the contemplative - the brooding type of contemplative, to be exact; the type that comes from a hotel's particular mixture of freedom and loneliness, like unmixed hot and cold water from two taps - to collect a small bouquet of hotel songs for you.
Herewith the first of several recommendations for your summer reading: books featuring hotels, in all their glamorous, complicated, and luxurious (or down-and-out) glory.
First up is a classic you may already have on your bookshelf, but that is well worth a re-read for its silent backdrop of imposing facades, marble staircases, and brass bars, never mind the war and wasted youth: Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned.
As I write this, the temperature in Berlin is speeding along towards 100 degrees and the sky is hazy and unpleasant with the type of scorching heat I normally associate with, say, Texas parking lots, or maybe the sixth circle of Hell. While I'm being sure to stay hydrated and immobile, I'm also cooling my mind by visualizing myself in various beautifully climatized situations: darkened movie theaters, a quiet porch on the edge of some breezy body of water, and - in particular- luxury hotel lobbies.
