Book Review: Hotel World, Ali Smith

Hotel World, Ali Smith

My rating: 4 stars

Remember you must live. 

Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. 

Hotel World takes us through a night in the life of five people’s very different worlds. It’s luxurious for some, but a long drop for others. Cash or credit? 

I picked this one up in Scoobs in Bath (yes again on my 22nd birthday book crawl). This is my third Ali Smith book, and what a divine pleasure it is to spend time in her words again. 

We begin with Past: 

We’re in the head of a dead girl, Sara, who fell from a dumb waiter in a hotel. We see different selves within the narration. We see her, her living self, and the corpse in the grave: “I can make no dent in anything. I have nothing left to break.” (8)

We see her lose touch with language as she slips further from the living. She forgets the words for things: “I want to ask her the name again for the things we see with. I want to ask her the name for heated-up bread.” (26)

Next we have Present Historic: 

We are in the 3rd person, with Else. She lives on the street outside the hotel. She observes the street, watching a girl stand and stare at the hotel. She watches the way people step around her. She holds in coughs: “When Else breathes, when she moves, it feels like broken glass.” (50). She observes language: “She doesn’t need vowels either […] She imagines the pavement littered with the letters that fall out of the half-words she uses.” (47). 

A receptionist offers to let her stay in the hotel, so she comes in & lives in wonder of the world where people pay for a room for one night. “Now she is in the hotel bath, looking at the taps.” (74). And she leaves the taps on. 

Next, we move on to Future Conditional:

We have Lise, who worked at the hotel. The receptionist who snuck Else in for the night. She lies on her bed, with a chronic illness that doesn’t allow her to move. She loses her train of thought, & can’t complete the forms she needs. She compares her new existence in the room she is confined to: “How small this world has become. How huge that world is.” (89). 

Next, we move to Perfect:

We meet Penny, who works as a journalist, writing an article about the hotel. She is very calculated & external in her personality: “Penny wouldn’t want to offend the woman in case the woman was somebody. The woman could be anybody.” (151). 

She ends up helping a girl open the wall where they covered the dumb waiter Sara fell down. She searches for some sort of distraction, some way to help, but selfishly. She walks around with Else, the homeless girl, just for something to do. They peer through people’s windows: “It was foul, & it was queasily exciting, this humdrum digestive-system exotica of others’ lives.” (163). 

Next, we see Future in the Past:

We move on to Clare, Sara’s sister, the girl who opened the wall to see the dumb waiter her sister fell from. She wants to know what happened, she is the person her sister left behind: “I talk to her all the time now we never used to talk at all hardly ever but now all the time I can’t get my head round it if someone is dead they can be more alive than they are when they’re actually like alive” (210). 

Finally, we reach the Present: 

This entry feels like the town speaking at the end. One of my favourite extracts of the whole book. 

“A Marks & Spencer carrier bag snagged by the wind on a fence can call the ghosts of a thousand middle-aged ladies back to linger by the jumpers & cardigans once more, wandering the aisles & fashions of the not-yet-open store, yearning to finger the wool of the sleeves of the new winter lines if only they could, to hold clothes up against them again & to smell the scent of the new, with the ghosts of their husbands waiting by the door, arms folded, bored, eternally impatient.” (226). 

A good book, an interesting read. It took me a hot minute to get into it, but with all of Smith’s words, the magic pours over you.