Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. In her highly acclaimed and most ambitious book to date, the brilliant young Scottish writer Ali Smith brings alive five unforgettable characters and traces their intersecting lives. This is a short novel with big themes (time, chance, money, death) but an eye for tiny detail: the taste of dust, the weight of a few coins in the hand, the pleasurable pain of a stone in one's shoe.
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[Wooooo - hooooooooo - what a fall what a soar what a plummet]***
(Penguin Books Ltd, 25 April 2002, paperback, 236 pages, bought from @AmazonUK, set text for @OpenUniversity course starting October 2019)
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Ali Smith is starting to grow on me. I read some of her books a few years ago and they left me cold (i.e. The Accidental). However, I've really enjoyed her Seasonal Quartet. I'd heard a lot of mixed reviews of Hotel World so felt a big apprehensive about reading it. This is a short book but that doesn't mean its light or can be rushed through. Smith deals with big ideas and big issues over a condensed space. Smith uses a sort-of stream-of-consciousness style. I adapted quite quickly as I've seen authors use this style more extreme with no clear punctuation of pauses, just huge chunks of text which I can't be bothered with. Smith uses punctuation and the only thing I really noticed is the paragraphs and sentences are a bit longer than usual. There is one chapter neat the end where there are no pauses or breaks and just pages of unbroken text. This is for a purpose but the style took a couple of pages to adapt to. I just found this quite intense and enjoyable. I liked the fact each character gets their own chapter of section as it were to tell their take on events. This is worth sticking with.
