Das Unterwegssein gehört zu Vincents Leben. Schon früh verlässt die junge Frau ihre Heimat, nachdem ihre Mutter nicht mehr nach Hause kommt. Als ihr Vater stirbt, kehrt sie zurück und fängt einen Job als Barkeeperin im Hotel Caiette an. Dort lernt sie Jonathan Alkaitis kennen, einen New Yorker Investor. Sie ahnt nichts von seinen dunklen Machenschaften…

„Das Glashotel“ ist ein Roman von Emily St. John Mandel.

Meine Meinung:
Der Roman besteht aus drei Teilen, die insgesamt 16 Kapitel umfassen, die sich wiederum aus mehreren nummerierten Abschnitten zusammensetzen. Erzählt wird aus wechselnden Perspektiven, zum Beispiel in der Ich-Perspektive aus der Sicht von Vincent. Die Geschichte beginnt und endet 2018, aber spielt zwischendurch in den 1990er-, 2000er- und 2010er-Jahren. Sie springt zwischen den Zeiten hin und her. Einheitliche Angaben am Anfang der Kapitel helfen bei der Orientierung. Auch die Schauplätze variieren. Der Aufbau ist recht komplex und erfordert ein sorgfältiges Lesen, funktioniert jedoch gut.

Der Schreibstil ist eine der Stärken des Romans. Er ist atmosphärisch stark, eindringlich und manchmal sogar ein wenig poetisch. Weil er anfangs recht fragmentarisch wirkt, fiel es mir zunächst schwer, in das Buch zu finden. Die Geschichte konnte mich aber zunehmend für sich einnehmen.

Der Roman hat erstaunlich viele Protagonisten. Die Charaktere sind authentisch und reizvoll ausgestaltet. Sie bleiben allerdings etwas fremd. Die meisten sind zudem keine Sympathieträger.

Inhaltlich ist die Geschichte durchaus kreativ, facettenreich und interessant. Es geht um die Schicksale unterschiedlicher Menschen. Deren Verbindung, die ich hier nicht vorwegnehmen möchte, wird nach und nach deutlich.

In den ersten beiden Dritteln der fast 400 Seiten gibt sich der Roman bisweilen ein bisschen sperrig. Besonders gelungen, überraschend und überzeugend ist für mich allerdings der dritte Teil.

Der deutsche Titel wurde erfreulicherweise wörtlich aus dem Englischen („The Glas Hotel“) übersetzt. Trotzdem ist er etwas irreführend. Das Cover finde ich leider gar nicht ansprechend, allerdings passender.

Mein Fazit:
Mit „Das Glashotel“ hat Emily St. John Mandel einen Roman geschrieben, der sowohl in seiner Struktur als auch wegen seines Inhalts ungewöhnlich ist. Eine nicht immer einfache, gleichwohl jedoch lohnende Lektüre.

This is a book that requires both patience and concentration. The opening, which is a kind of verbal stop-motion animation sequence of Vincent falling, apparently to her death,  is very dramatic, completely lacking in context and not that easy to follow in an audiobook, seems like the author snapping her fingers at the reader and saying: 'Sit up and pay attention. If you miss something, that's not my fault.'

What follows is less a narrative than a collage with the occasional time-stamp for observations that are out of sequence. Each scene is vivid and accessible but any expectation of a linear narrative, or even a story driven by a narrative, is constantly frustrated in a way that suggests that we're all too cool to want something as mundane as a beginning, a middle and an end.

Sitting behind Paul's eyes, Vincent's half brother, and sharing his sense of never being able to get his life together, of living with a feeling of impending doom which he is unable to convince himself he does not deserve, is intense and uncomfortable.

Vincent (why does the main female character have a boy's name and why does no one in the book ask that question?) quickly becomes both central to the story and enigmatic. Paul resents her or at least her apparent ability to flourish even when things look as if they're not going well for her but can't be relied upon to see her clearly. We know that there is 'Vincent and the tragedy of Vincent, which is an entirely separate entity' but we don't know the specifics of the tragedy beyond the early death of her mother. We see her etch graffiti on a school window, although we don't know why or what it means, and then we see graffiti etched onto the glass at the hotel Vincent works at but we don't know who did it or why or why the staff and guests in the hotel find it so upsetting (maybe they've lived very sheltered lives?)

You see the pattern here? The book is a puzzle, presented almost kaleidoscopically and written in code.

So, I'm a little conflicted at the moment.

The writing is very engaging and encourages me to move from scene to scene and work out what they meant later and tell myself that that's what I do in real life, so what's the harm?

On the other hand, storytelling style is so mannered it feels on the edge of taking the piss  -  a literary equivalent of Damien Hirst's annoying $12m stuffed shark and I wonder whether the effort put into decrypting the code and assembling the jigsaw pieces will be worth putting up with such a self-consciously arty conceit.

I'll stick with it for another hour or so and then decide.

The UK has been in Lockdown since 23rd March so this is my sixth Friday in Lockdown and I think there are another six ahead.

By now, my daily walks make me understand how the animals felt as they paced their territory on the Mappin Terraces in the London Zoo at Regent's Park, The visitors don't see a cage but the animals know that they're not free.

Saki wrote a story about the cages we live in an choose not to see called "The Mappined Life". Like most of his work, it's very short but very memorable. You can find the story HERE

So I'm coping with my Mappined Life by making my escape into books that take me far away from here.

I'm partway through the first two books, 'One Word Kill' and 'City Of Windows'. The audiobook version of 'The Glass Hotel' was released yesterday and I'm keen to get to it.

Set in England in 1986 Mark Lawrence's new YA book, the start of a new series, tells the story of a D&D playing, teenage boy, dying of cancer, who gets the chance to save the first girl he's ever gotten to talk to like she's a real person. 

It's not a cosy book - too much clear thinking and physical pain and too many encounters with nasty people for that - but it's a hopeful book, as long as you believe in the power of imagination and advanced mathematics.

Robert Pobi's thriller is also that start of a new series. Set in modern-day Manhattan, it tells the story of a hunt to find a sniper who is killing law enforcement officers. The shots are almost impossible to make. The victims don't seem to be linked and the sniper's motive is unclear.

The real focus of attention in the remarkable Lucas Page - maths genius, university professor and former FBI Agent who has rebuilt his life around his new wife and their adopted or fostered children, after an incident in which he lost an arm, a leg and an eye. Now he's been drawn back into the sniper hunt.

It's a fast-paced, robustly-written thriller that keeps my mind fully occupied when I'm in it and makes me smile when I leave. 

I loved Emily St. John-Madel's 'Station Eleven'. It did unconventional things with a story about a plague killing off so many people that the survivors had to reshape their civilisation. (suddenly, that doesn't seem at all far-fetched).

In 'Glass Hotel' I'm hoping she'll do something equally interesting with the thriller genre.

I love a great cover and I feel that this one definitely has one. This novel sounded interesting yet when I first started to read it, I was a bit confused.  With alternating time periods and a variety of characters, it took a bit for me to get everything straightened around.  As the story began to take shape, I soared through the pages.  

Meeting Jonathan, I thought he was one of those individuals who was too-big-for-his-britches (I think I’m beginning to sound like my grandmother now).  He came off as being too sophisticated and suave and he was using that to his advantage.  I know some people like these types of people but me, I run the other way.  Anyways, Jonathan owns the Hotel Caiette which is a 5-star hotel and I thought he basically, used this hotel as bait.

Jonathan, claiming to produce high results in the finance world, begins to climb up the ladder and build-up his clientele with his former bartender, Vincent on his arm.  Afterall, he needs to keep up his image, when dealing with high-end clients. 

As Vincent places the ring on her finger, she’s ready to step into some new shoes and get out from behind the bar at Hotel Caiette.  The commitments that they made to each other had me shaking my head. It made me wonder if I would do what she did, was it really worth it?

I don’t know much about Ponzi schemes but Jonathan sure is a smooth operator as he works the players.  He has quite a few individuals working beside him, making everything run smoothly and it made me wonder who knew what he had up his sleeve.

From making drinks to wearing elegant evening gowns, Vincent’s jump in social class is quite an adjustment for her and one that I’m not sure she enjoyed every day. I enjoyed it when she was able to be herself.

As I get further into the book, each page that I turned, I wonder if and when, things would go sour.  I was just waiting for the ball to drop.

I want to thank Knopf Books and Goodreads for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.  I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway.

Thanks to NetGalley and to Picador for providing me an ARC copy of this novel that I freely chose to review. Having read St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven almost six years ago, I jumped at the opportunity to read this one. And although the story is quite different, I loved it as well.

Despite the differences between the two novels (Station Eleven was set around and after a virus pandemic that decimated the population and caused major changes to civilization), there are some commonalities. In her new novel, there is also a major event that although not as disastrous and all-encompassing as the pandemic, it has a devastating effect on the lives of all involved, from Jonathan Alkaitis (a character inspired by Bernard Madoff), to the people working at a hotel he owned, and even his receptionist. The collapse of his Ponzi scheme works as an axis around which the rest of the plot and the elements of the story spin, although it is far from evident how all the fragments fit in together when we start reading the novel.

The formal structure of the novel feels almost magical in its perfection. It begins with the end and yes… it ends going back to the beginning, but we get three parts, changes in time frames (always marked, so it does not cause confusion) from the 1950s up to the near future, many of the characters have “before” and “after” lives, and some even create imaginary lives to cope with their dire situation, so at times it seems as if it would be impossible to pull it all together, but the author manages, and it is a delight to follow the clues and be taken in, sometimes, quite unexpected directions. The book is not a thriller per se, but there are plenty of mysteries, lots of secrets, and unexplained events, and all the individual stories are more than interesting enough in their own right to keep us reading.

There are different voices and different narrators, almost as many as characters. Most of the chapters are narrated in the third person, but from only one of the characters point of view at a time, and although at first we don’t know how they are related to each other, there is no confusion as to who is thinking what or what story we are following. There are chapters in the first person, at the very beginning and at the very end of the novel, in a style reminiscent of stream of consciousness, and also chapters that correspond to the chorus of the employees working with Alkaitis in his fraudulent investment company, where we get information about several characters at once. There are many settings, but I think the island and the Glass Hotel of the title work particularly well and function as a focal point, as a hub where many of the players meet and take on paths that will mark their lives forever. The writing is beautiful, compelling, reflective, lyrical, multifaceted, evocative, and a joy to read.

As I mentioned before, the characters are all interesting, although perhaps Alkaitis and his story will sound more familiar than most of the rest. But even he has something that makes him human and easier to empathise with than readers would expect.  Like all the rest of the characters, he has doubts, human weaknesses, he is uncertain, he loved his brother and his first wife, and he lost them both. And he is loyal after his own fashion. All the characters, even those who have nothing in common with us, have frailties and emotions we easily recognise. We might not like them, but we do understand them and can easily put ourselves in their shoes. The description mentions a few of the characters, and there are many more, but I won’t go into too much detail, because as I’ve said, this is a book to be discovered and enjoyed slowly, as it unfolds as we read. If I had to choose one, it would probably be Vincent, a girl who experiences loss at a very early age and tries many different lives for size, but all of the characters have moments of clarity, thoughts, or questions that have made me gasp, nod, or stop and think.

It’s been a long time since I read Station Eleven, but there are nudges towards it in this novel (there is a mention of a virus, and some of the characters of the previous book make brief appearances in this one), and there is no denying the similarities in the way the story is told and in the author’s style of writing. Perhaps the other book is open to a more hopeful and optimistic reading, while this one is more contemplative and personal, but I’d be hard pushed to choose a favourite (and I am convinced that I must reread Station Eleven again).

As usual, I’d recommend checking a sample of the book first, but readers must be aware that the beginning is written in quite a different style to the rest of the book, so keep reading. Ah, and there is a supernatural element in the story (I hesitate to call it magical realism, as it is a very specific and it makes perfect sense), in case you’re wondering.

It’s particularly difficult to choose a few quotes, but I’ll try:

“You know what I’ve learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that’s when I realized that money is its own country.”

“What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.”

“If another memo could possibly be sent out, this one specific to smokers: You cannot be both an unwashed bohemian and Cary Grant. Your elegant cigarette moves are hopelessly undermined by your undershirt and your dirty hair. The combination is not particularly interesting.”

“It’s possible to both know and not know something.”

A great novel that looks at truth, reality, identity, the tales and lies we tell ourselves, the nature of memory, and makes us question our priorities. Beautifully written, structurally fascinating and with engaging characters, I recommend it to lovers of literary fiction who don’t mind investing some time in a story and also, of course, to fans of the author.