The women Edith encounters seem actors in their own life. Ending up in the hotel off-season, the introverted, mousy and middle-aged Edith cannot avoid getting entangled into the small circle of a few other, mostly female guests still staying in the hotel, floating on the dull soporific waves of ennui and passivity, observing their staid, calmly rippling existence with her writer’s keen and sharp eye. Well….Perhaps these moderate and modest dreams (perhaps shared by quite a few of us readers, regardless of gender and whether in a romantic relationship or not?) permit to categorise Anita Brookner’s protagonist Edith Hope as a romantic.Īuthor of romantic novels Edith Hope (penname Vanessa Wilde) finds herself sent off by friends to an exclusive, old-fashioned Swiss hotel, so she can reflect on her sins and stay out of the picture of attention for a while after she has caused some scandal (nature of which is scrupulously kept from the reader until half-way the book). An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather.
No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. Somerset's Toronto launch for Metcalf-Rooke w.'I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love.
It’s slow-paced and dry, with most of the ‘action’ – though I hesitate to call it that – happening at an internal level. This is a quintessential ‘novel of manners’, with its narrative voice quietly analyzing and judging everyone’s words and actions. Neville, with whom Edith strikes up a queerly anemic sort of romance. Pusey and her daughter Jennifer, as well as the mysteriously alluring Mr. These guests include the uber-materialistic Mrs. Her time at the hotel is supposed to be a kind of ‘probation’ for her, but the mousy, self-absorbed, frayed cardigan-wearing Edith cannot help observing the other guests at the hotel and creating long, ruminative narratives for them in her head. It tells the story of aging spinster romance writer Edith Hope and how she has fled London to a hotel on a lake in Geneva after abandoning both her groom-to-be at the alter and the married man with whom she’s been having a listless affair. Lawson is bang on when he says that nothing much happens in Hotel du Lac.
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