Book Review: Strange Hotel
Book Review: Strange Hotel
I recently read Eimear McBride’s novella, Strange Hotel (2020, Farrar, Straus, Giroux). McBride is a young Irish writer committed to sharing her perspective on women. I was curious to read it after I heard her interviewed on Brooke Warner’s podcast, Write-Minded.
I anticipated an easy read since the book is small ( 5.5 “X 8”and 147 pages). It wasn’t. The nameless narrator exists as the only character. I was shocked to find myself drowning in the story after two pages. After I read the whole book, I didn’t love it and it didn’t excite me. It bothered me.
The story is about a woman who is struggling as she ages. She travels to five European cities, each time finding herself in similar hotel rooms, bedding a stranger without emotion, and pondering own existence. She struggles with her awareness, reminisces, mourns an old unnamed lover, argues and disagrees with herself. She struggles with the tension between what was and what is. Thankfully, she contrasts this by her use of sensuous fleshy words to describe her casual sex with men in her hotel room. Although much of the narration is inside her head, philosophically exquisite, and personal, I loved her description of it as existential overindulgence.
At first, Strange Hotel seems to be stream of consciousness, but it is not. It is a fragmented whirlpool nearly frozen by analysis. I wasn’t compelled to read it; I felt vacuumed into the narrator’s head. She seemed disembodied, ethereal and her thoughts seemed to churn inside an impenetrable bubble. I found few opportunities for empathy and I found myself alternately bored and irritated. And, still, I kept returning to it!
I thought perhaps the experience was difficult for me to read because of the third person close POV and because of the POV, the experience was claustrophobic and uncomfortable. But there was something else I couldn’t put my finger on. What was it about this story that made me close the cover with ‘Whew, glad that’s over’ and the next day open the book with resignation, ‘Here I go again.’? I felt exhausted as she watched herself from afar, noticed, observed then paused mid-air to let an idea germinate then explode. She, a meta-observer, analyzed and synthesized from every possible angle and I do mean every. I could only read two or three pages before I needed to come up for air.
The book haunted me until it dawned on me that the woman and I are more alike than different, not in circumstance, but in experience of Self. She thinks her way obsessively around each moment. I do that well too. But, these days, that kind of mental activity wears me out. I think it’s telling that I found myself humming “What’s it all about Alfie?” in between readings.
About three pages before the end, the narrator abruptly shifted to first person which bumped me big time. After thinking about it, I decided it was the writer’s way of reassuring me, as the reader, that the narrator was going to be ok. Out of her head, as an “I”, she became a real person – although never named.
In summary, I found the book’s intimate interiority interesting, but way too intense for my sensibilities. Nonetheless, I would love to know others’ experience of this intriguing book.