Hotel Du Lac: A Novel (Man Booker Prize Winner) (Vintage Contemporaries)
A novel about the quiet isolation of a novelist staying at a hotel by the lake. Through conversation and inward reflection, it looks at dead ends and the possibility of starting again.
Work Information
In the quiet, the shape of a life slowly comes into view.
Hotel du Lac is Anita Brookner's novel about an isolated woman, set in a hotel by the lake. In its restrained prose, shifts of feeling and self-awareness emerge gradually.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Published
- 1995-10-03
- Pages
- 192 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.11 x 1.32 x 20.27 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780679759324
- ISBN-10
- 0679759328
- Price
- 2969 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/History & Criticism/Criticism & Theory
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • In the novel that established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new way to frame the eternal question, "Why love?" "Brookner's most absorbing novel ... wryly realistic ... graceful and attractive." —Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review When middle-aged romance writer Edith Hope’s life begins to resemble the melodramatic plots of her own novels, her friends banish her to Switzerland, where they hope the luxurious calm of the Hotel du Lac will restore her to her senses. But instead of contritely contemplating her mistakes, Edith spends her time keenly observing her eccentric fellow guests and writing unsent letters to the married lover she is supposed to be trying to forget. Before long, despite her determination to stay quietly on the sidelines, Edith attracts the attention of a worldly man who believes that they are uniquely situated to solve each other's problems. Beautifully observed and witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive.
ANITA BROOKNER was born in London and, apart from several years in Paris, was a lifelong Londoner. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. She is the author of twenty-seven books, including the Booker Prize–winning novel Hotel Du Lac . She died in 2016.
Reviews
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What is important for marriage?
A main character is a 39-year-old single woman who was exiled from home and lives a calm life in a quiet hotel in Switzerland. The first half of the story is about weird personalities and complicated lives of the customers of the hotel, which is revealed thorough conversations among them. And why she, the main character, had to be exiled is also unveiled here. In the latter half, a man who has a social status appears before her as a hotel guest, which drives her to think that "Does marriage for getting a higher social position without love brings happiness?" I think a good point of a fiction in difference to an essay is you can share the experience with the main character and enjoys the idea that what you will do if you were her. In that way you can expand your thinking ability and establish your opinion on a moral issue more firmly. This novel is not an exception because it is full of unique sense of values of each character.
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辛らつな人物描写
NHK「原書で読む世界の名作」で取り上げられていたので読みました。イギリスではかなり人気のある作家だそうですが知りませんでした。 ジャンル分けをすれば恋愛小説になるのでしょうが、主人公の女性作家の辛らつな人物描写、特に女性に対する辛らつな描写が面白い小説です。ただ辛らつなだけでなく、数箇所だけ共感・憐れみが垣間見られるのが上手いと思います。
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Horel Du Lac
新年の休みに関わらず、すぐに配達されて満足しています。 本の状態も結構です。今、読み始めたところです。
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Passionnant, ironique, foisonnant, mystérieux, une lecture qui ravit de bout en bout.
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He oído decir que es un libro aburrido, cuando en realidad, lo que es aburrido son los objetos descritos: El lago, el hotel, los personajes, que están muy bien descritos. Lo recomiendo.
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Anita Brookner is a very gifted writer with a unique style. Very spare, yet somehow manages to convey so much with few words. As an Englishwoman, she has a very sharp perspective on character and characteristics. Her stories are always different. Her observations on human nature are precise but done with a light touch.
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An absolute masterpiece! Brookner's a genius!
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Dimly conscious of this book's status as a modern classic, I bought this for my daughter's birthday last year, and picked it up to read a week or so ago. The narrator is Edith Hope, a middle-aged author of clever romance novels, who has been sent to the eponymous hotel by her friends after having done "an apparently dreadful thing" [p9] back home in London. She ruminates on (her) life and loves, whilst acutely observing each of the small number of end-of-season guests. These descriptions are confidently and cleverly sketched in (so vividly, in fact, that they'd repay close scrutiny by anyone who'd found themselves at the same hotel as the author in the years preceding this book's appearance). Written in clean, simple prose and weighing in at less than 200 pages, it's an easy, pleasant and thought-provoking read.
Related Literary Awards
- Booker Prize Edition 16 (1984) ・Winner