A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:

Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:

the complete review - fiction

Hotel World

by
Ali Smith

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B+ : varied, clever novel, with some excellent flashes

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Generally very positive -- with a few emphatic exceptions

  From the Reviews:

• "Hotel World is one of those rare books that are simultaneously sad and hopeful. Smith maintains a rhapsodic pace that slackens, very slightly, only toward the end of the narrative." - Brooke Allen, The Atlantic Monthly
  
  
• "Our relationship with the five women is frustratingly superficial. Maybe Smith was trying to make a point about our failure to connect with the world during the short time we have on this planet before we check out." - Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph
  
  
• "Avoiding any semblance of plot, Smith prefers to follow the wild daydreams and complex interior lives of her characters, and to pursue her own playful ideas and imaginings. And, somehow, she pulls it off magnificently." - Jerome Boyd Maunsell, Evening Standard
  
  
• "(T)he story is handled very knowingly. In fact, I have never seen the tenets of recent literary theory (the impossibility of the coherent subject, or substantive character, for instance) so cleverly insinuated into a novel. (...) For all its radical virtues, many readers will find Smith's a difficult book to swallow." - Giles Foden, The Guardian
  
  
• "Smith's sidelong approach to plot produces an overall effect of a pebble dropped into water, echoed in recurrent images of fallings both physical and emotional. (...) She is an extremely readable, easy-flowing writer, and one of the subtlest and most intelligent around. Hotel World is essential reading from a writer confirming herself as a major talent." - Carol Birch, The Independent
  
  
• "Though the work features only one authentic ghost, the remaining characters might as well be apparitions, so deadened and dispirited are their tales. The result leaves one wondering what all the fuss in England was about. (...) Hotel World frustrates and disappoints." - Bernadette Murphy, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "This is a disturbing, many-layered book (.....) Ali Smith's writing is haunting and acute. (...) Hotel World might have been depressing were it not for the invigoratingly sharp writing." - Vicky Hutchings, The New Statesman
  
  
• "Where British reviewers see ambition, subtlety and wild imagination, all I can detect are leaden whimsy and mechanistic storytelling. Hotel World turns out to be a thin piece of work." - Michael Upchurch, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Smith is so deft with language that it's easy, at first, to mistake Hotel World for an exercise in style." - Charles Taylor, Salon
  
  
• "Hotel World is compelling, however, precisely because it suggests shifting yet coherent perspectives rather than simplifying lives into rigid, inert realities. Most impressively, Smith has mastered sophisticated literary techniques, which never intrude or bog down a delectable narrative of human perception and rumination. (...) (A) damn good read." - Alexandra Yurkovsky, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "Hotel World is a not a novel for reading in stolen snatches in public places. It demands first to be read aloud -- there are voices which have to be heard to be heard -- and then to be read again -- the story, insofar as there is one, pulls you round in the sort of circle which only begins to take shape when you've walked it more than once." - Claudia FitzHerbert, The Spectator
  
  
• "Though not all the voices are as mesmeric as Sara's, each is enriched and enforced by the author's ability to find life where there is death and language where there is silence." - Melissa Katsoulis, The Times
  
  
• "For the first time this talent, glimpsed and admired in earlier work, has been structured into a world-view; fragmented, tenuous, allusive, sparse -- a provocative view of the world in which we must live and die." - Ruth Scurr, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "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

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

       Hotel World focusses, largely, around a hotel -- part of the Global Hotel chain. In six sections, temporally titled (from "Past" through "Future Conditional" to "Present"), the overlapping stories of five characters are told.
       The book opens with the story of a chambermaid at the hotel -- nineteen year old Sara Wilby, as we later learn. Sara recently died, plunging down a dumbwaiter shaft to her death. Dead she may be, but she isn't gone yet. Indeed, she finds: "Because now that I'm nearly gone, I'm more here than I ever was." Sara tells the story of her accidental death, and her peculiar, shifting after-life state. Smith does much of this section exceptionally well: the book is worthwhile for this alone.
       There is unfinished business in Sara's life, too: a watch, for example, she brought to get repaired -- a momentous event in her life, though she did not act as fully on it as she might have.
       And then there is that nagging question the dead Sara can't get an answer too: how long did the fatal fall take ?
       Other figures dominate the following sections, including a homeless woman, given a room in the hotel, a journalist, and Sara's sister. In different styles Smith presents their take on the events (which none of them fully comprehend).
       Finally, Smith closes the circle, in the beautifully realized concluding chapter.

       There is a fair amount of experimentation in Hotel World, as Smith uses a number of styles and approaches. Not everything is successful -- and there are sections that can be quite tiresome -- but parts are exceptional (the first and last sections, in particular). Parts of the tale, like some of the consciousnesses, are murky, but there is a good story here too.
       Worthwhile.

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

• Anchor Books publicity page
• Luchterhand publicity page
• Shortlisted for the 2001 Orange Prize

• BBC News
• Daily Orange
• Daily Telegraph
• The Guardian
• iVenus
• The List
• The New York Times Book Review
• RainTaxi
• The Richmond Review
• Salon
• San Francisco Chronicle

• Ali Smith at Literature Matters

• The Accidental
• Girl Meets Boy
• The Whole Story

• See Index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

       British author Ali Smith was born in 1962

- Return to top of the page -

© 2001-2012 the complete review

Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links