Language appears to hold redemptive powers, but ‘frankly,’ McBride writes, ‘she finds it exhausting, interrogating her interrogation’. In the rooms, the woman’s attention alternates between the hotel rituals of placing her case in the waiting luggage stand, laying out her coat, ‘learning which switch is which’, and her internal monologue, recording the atoms as they fall upon the mind, deeply critical of any patterns which may emerge there. And recollection is limited to what happened moments before: anonymous sexual encounters in these anonymous rooms. Other people are present mainly in their absence lived life is always a recollection. This is in part due to the radical asceticism McBride has adopted with regard to context: there basically isn’t any. But Strange Hotel lacks Walsh’s wry insights into the unheimlich relationship between the hotel and the self, between place and displacement. Its conceit, though, is most strongly reminiscent of Joanna Walsh’s recent non-fiction-ish books Hotel (2015) and Break.up (2018). Courtesy: Faber & Faber photograph: Sophie BassoulsĪn unnamed woman leaves an unhappy relationship, travels abroad, spends nights in a series of nondescript hotel rooms, sometimes has sexual encounters with men, tries not to think about the past.Įimear McBride’s Strange Hotel, her third novel, has its roots in a tradition of ‘woman abroad in a hotel’ books such as Katherine Mansfield’s In a German Pension (1911), Jean Rhys’s Good Morning Midnight (1939), Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac (1984) and Emma Tennant’s Hotel de Dream (1976).

Hotel du lac anita brookner analysis