Strange Hotel, Author: Eimear McBride, Publisher: Faber & Faber
Toh Wen Li
A woman in her early 40s moves from one nondescript hotel room to another - in Avignon, Prague, Oslo, Auckland and Austin.
Who is she? What is she running from? These and other questions linger in the air of Eimear McBride's Strange Hotel, which is as frustrating as it is strange.
For 160 pages, the reader is left to inhabit the interior of the protagonist's mind as she erects barriers between herself and the men who drift in and out of her life.The woman sleeps with some of them and turns away others, casting glances at them through spyholes and doors cracked ajar.
Strange Hotel is written in a style that might be described as a kind of stream of consciousness: "Door. Scratched dull lock. Put in. Turn the key. Fail. Joggle. Lean into. Be firm. Try again now. Try again, again. And, on another try, there. She's in."
This may call to mind Anna Burns' Man Booker Prize-winning Milkman (2018), Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport (2019) and McBride's own acclaimed A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing (2013).
While McBride's earlier books were remarkably original - with prose so supple one could feel the sentences spawning themselves into being - Strange Hotel's stream, so to speak, has run dry.Reading this novel is an immersive, if slightly claustrophobic, experience in which one runs into walls of text such as: "The intractable belligerence of this - her memory - is what she's come to hate.
How it seems to insist on a future her past has already generated. No corrections. No deviations. Or, more concisely put: A coherent path for a conciliated self - for which she lacks sufficient new evidence to justify a change."
At its best, Strange Hotel is a clever exploration of memory and longing. There are some provoking turns of phrase - "pain shooting its ferns up into her arm" - and it is fitting that the woman's feelings of "entombment" should mirror the reader's sense of being shut out.
But there are also moments when the writing lapses into a kind of indulgent self-communion - such as when a lover makes an "exit stage left - pursued by his huff - into the bathroom"; or when the woman shrinks from "requesting directions in her tense-less French. It galls".
In the hotel in Prague, the narrator talks about defenestration, which in turn recalls the famous line from John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire: "Keep passing the open windows."
There are few such "open windows" in McBride's novel. At least not until a moment of clarity in the final pages when the narrator, in a self-reflexive turn, admits to "relentlessly reshuffling the deck of pseudo-intellectual garble which, if I'm honest, serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence".This is a breath of fresh air, but not enough to stop the reader from wishing he had jumped out earlier.
The writer is a book critic
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