Hotel World: Ali Smith

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Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the most. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window. The heart of Scottish writer Ali Smith may belong to good old-fashioned metaphysics -- to truth and beauty and love beyond the grave -- but her stylistic sensibility owes its punch to the Modernists. She's street-savy and poignant at once, with a brutal sense of irony and a wonderful feel for literary economy. There's a kind of stainless-steel clarity at the center of her fiction. . ." The Boston Globe

Ali Smith’s Numismatic Modernism About Change: Ali Smith’s Numismatic Modernism

There are five characters, two relatives, three strangers, but all female. There is a homeless woman, a hotel receptionist, a hotel critic, the ghost of a hotel chambermaid, and the ghost's sister. These women tell a story, and it is through this story that unbeknownst to them their lives and fates intersect. The catalyst of their story is the Global Hotel.That this story line was exploded out into five POVs each told in first person narrative—the ghost of the teenage girl, a homeless woman who ends up helping the younger sister, the receptionist at the hotel on the night the younger sister visits, a yuppie journalist staying at the hotel who also ends up helping the younger sister, the younger sister—did not for me make it any more than what it was: at best a superficial examination of the struggle to accept oneself and/or the struggle to cope with a devastating loss. We publish a Literature Newsletter when we have news and features on UK and international literature, plus opportunities for the industry to share. Lise is the next one we meet and she is no longer at the hotel but very ill. The doctors can find nothing wrong with her but, nevertheless, she feels particularly unwell. It is her mother, Deirdre, who comes round to take care of her. Deirdre was a popular poet (older British people may recall Pam Ayres) and Lise remembers the many LP covers with her mother’s face on them. Deirdre even wrote a poem called Hotel World:

Hotel World by Ali Smith | Goodreads Hotel World by Ali Smith | Goodreads

Faulkner's As I Lay Dying: The sections narrated by the different characters don't feel to me an attempt to capture their voices. The sections are not so much spoken by the characters. Instead they seem to be the writer allowing the reader to enter the consciousness of the characters. Smith uses unique characteristics for each woman giving her novel the feeling of being an observation on society. Split into six sections marked by a separate tense, Hotel World uses a corporate hotel and the accidental death of Sara Wilby as a pull for its five characters, establishing a style and structure used in her later novels The Accidental and There but for the. Each section varies in rhythm, style and narrative position, opening with Sara’s ghost conversing with her corpse to get the scoop on her death. Crouching in a dumbwaiter (a lift shaft for tea trolleys), Sara plummeted to a horrible death aged twenty. The fifth section of the novel titled “Future in the Past,” is entirely Clare's memories on the life and death of her sister Sara. Yes I did initially think this book was bad and I had indeed been sorely tempted to throw it out of the window but what a dreadful mistake that would have been.Heidegger: Aletheia might have been an appropriate character name. I couldn't help thinking of the being-toward-death and the being-in-the-world side of the homeless woman, the front desk worker, the sister, the journalist. When each faces each I felt briefly pulled into the clearing. All five seem generally decent people but not averse to committing bad deeds. Penny gives Else a generous cheque and then phones her bank and stops it. Lise lets Else stay in the hotel, strictly against company policy, but then leaves clients on hold and lets one of the chambermaids take the blame for Else’s damage. Else is happy to get what money she can but when The United Kingdom's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities.

Hotel World | The Booker Prizes

In this voice from beyond the grave Ali Smith has created the perfect literary ghost...imbued with a powerful sense of wonder at the minutiae of everyday sensuality...and her beautiful, vivid descriptions are reinforced by a sharp, unsentimental tongue."- The Times (London) Think of all the great hotel books. The Hotel New Hampshire, The White Hotel, Hotel de Dream. In every one of them, there’s the central metaphor of passing-through, the central theme of transience. In big focus–life plus death, in small focus–just another night in a hotel. And for example the great thirties Garbo movie, Grand Hotel, one of the first movies to use interrelated stories. Because the other wonderful thing about hotels is that they imply more than one story, that several stories happen in them at once, that there is a collison of narratives only walls apart from each other. More gifts. We visit five people who are all connected to a ritzy hotel in a city. The first died there, and is now a ghost. That chapter, which was a long one, was riveting and I loved it. I was ready to read everything this author wrote. Just then, Penny and the girl get the boards free from the wall, revealing the dumbwaiter shaft behind it. The girl tosses a few random items down the shaft, then starts crying. Else decides to keep half the coins and leave the girl the other half. Else and Penny exit the hotel together and walk around town. The second person is a homeless person who sets up nearby the hotel. Her story was less interesting, but still impactful and I was motivated to go on. Once we got to the third person, it became, for me, less and less coherent, and I decided I didn't want to put myself through it anymore.I’ve always loved the quote below by William Faulkner and it sprang to mind when I began to re-read this book. The character called Penny, a Daily Mail-type journalist looked exactly like a Daily Mail-type journalist. The dead girl herself looked like Ali Smith. Then the last chapter was this nebulous string of descriptive verse with very little to do with the 5 main characters of the story and even less to do with the Hotel from the title. Sara Wilby – a teenage hotel chambermaid who has fallen to her death in a hotel dumbwaiter. She is the daughter to her parents Mr. and Mrs. Wilby, and also older sister to Clare. I very rarely DNF a book. This was my first by Ali Smith. It started out as a five star, or close to five star read, which is why I'm disappointed, to say the least.

Writing the Contemporary: Temporality, Tenses and the (DOC) Writing the Contemporary: Temporality, Tenses and the

Ali Smith possesses the perfect characteristics of the short story writer: rigorous self-discipline in the planning process, an eagle eye for condensing detail, a capacity for using the personal and individual to suggest universal truths and a skill for hinting at a wider world beyond the story, all of which can be seen in her three major collections of short stories Free Love and Other Stories (1995), Other Stories and Other Stories (1999) and The First Person (2008).El primer relato, el primer personaje es el que mas me ha gustado, una mujer muere y su espíritu va a visitar su cuerpo enterrado para que le recuerde como murió y que paso,... parece raro ¿no? pues así es la novela entera, diferente, rara... Q: If someone was going on vacation and was bringing Hotel World to read, which other novel would you suggest that person take along as well to read afterwards as a companion piece? Why? To her considerable credit as a writer, Smith also manages to have her characters approach these grim subjects in moods of humor and unselfconscious bumbling, which makes Hotel World (shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize) a greatly appealing read in spite of the heaviness of its themes." - Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post