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World Hotels - Hotel World
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List Price: $13.95
Our Price: $11.16
Your Save: $ 2.79 ( 20% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Anchor
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780385722100
ISBN: 0385722109
Label: Anchor
Manufacturer: Anchor
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2002-01-15
Publisher: Anchor
Release Date: 2002-01-15
Studio: Anchor
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Editorial Reviews:
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Woooooooo-hooooooo.
Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.
Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense of love. Blending incisive wit with surprising compassion, Hotel World is a wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A totally unique, difficult and ultimately deeply moving book
Comment: This book is really difficult to review. It is not a book that you just pick up and read for fun. The literary structure is all over the place (e.g., there is an entire 35+ page chapter without a single period); it is totally nonlinear, each chapter starting out with a totally new main character; and there are no quotation marks used at all (a la Jose Saramago). And yet, this book hit me to the core with a heartbreaking emotional punch. In each chapter, Smith starts out in a whirlwind style that eventually leads to a strongly compelling accounting of a particular, important incident. If you are open to "alternative" literature, if you wish for more creativity in you reading, and if you allow yourself to give in to Ali Smith's "World" you should be highly rewarded and deeply moved. I shed tears like a baby near the end of this book, but in a really, good life-affirming way.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Welcome to the Global Hotel
Comment: This book was almost like five short stories all connected to a central plot, with varying voices and styles. The first narrative is told by the spirit of a girl, Sara, who died falling down the dumbwaiter shaft of a hotel. A homeless woman who skulks around the hotel and the street surrounding tells the second part. The third is told by an employee of the hotel and the fourth by a journalist who is a guest of the hotel. The final, emotional account comes from Sara's sister. While each voice has its own distinct style, they are all written as a stream of consciousness. Some are more choppy in their thoughts than others, and some, especially Sara's sister, run one thought in to another. It was an interesting, quick read, different than I initially expected. Like other reviewers, I tend to go for straight plot, but Ali Smith's writing kept me captivated.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A favorite book
Comment: This is the only book I have ever read that when I finished the last page, I turned back to the beggining a read again. And I enjoyed it even more the second time through.
On the other hand, I've recommended it to people whose opinion I trust who couldn't understand it at all.
I highly recomend Hotel World and think it was a wonderful read, but if you need to understand where you are and what's going on when you read a story, this may not be for you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Death by Dumbwaiter........."Woo-hooooooo"
Comment:
Sara Wilby's tragic death, spiralling down in a dumbwaiter, begins with the voice of Sara's 'gossamer ghost'.
We see her desperate to understand what just happened.
Her death affects other women bound up in this rather curious ghost tale. And then each, in turn, relates their personal story.
Hotel World is a story of the power of time, how quickly time can turn us from living to dead, sane to mad, happy to sad, secure to homeless, rich to poor, healthy to sickly, and how we swim through the fog of finite time.
Time is omnipresent and of great importance to the story.
Life can end in a heartbeat!...Live freely and passionately in the time you inhabit...now, the present!
The heaviness of the prose gave this work the sensation of swimming through metaphors that could not be rushed. One had to come up for air from time to time to continue the breaststroke forward.
Ms. Smith plays quite skillfully with words that are at times so amusing and clever that I had to stifle a chuckle. It's hard not to delight in the ingenuity of this novel, despite wanting more plot, more character development, more cohesiveness in sentence structure.
Customer Rating:
Summary: it does have an impact on you
Comment: A strange thing with this book. Apart from the first chapter which literally blew me away, I didn't particularly enjoy reading it. I thought it tedious, unecessarily confusing, not captivating enough. The last chapter especially, the one with no punctation marks, was nothing short of a nightmare, and anyway nearly all interest had fizzled out by the time I got there.
Now that I've finished it though, it just won't leave my mind. Images from it keep coming back to me. Sometimes I feel like it's allowed me rare glimpses into worlds I will never get to know, not because I don't want to but because it's practically impossible.
I was really harsh on the book at first because it gave me such a hard time, but now it's been more than a week I've read it and I'm still thinking about it, and that's a good sign surely?
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