Nearly all action in Hotel du Lac takes place in one single hotel, with a picturesque lake nearby, and the characters breathing in fresh alpine air and enjoying the last summer days in a truly atmospheric setting.

There is an element of cosiness to these types of novels, and the story is immediately interesting from a psychological point of view. Hotel du Lac also attempts to follow that tradition, and deals with one theme which I particularly enjoy reading about – characters’ interaction in a closed setting. I mean it in a very positive and admiring way. One may just sit back and observe the situation unfolding, and there will surely be something to observe.

From A Room with a View, A Passage to India and The Painted Veil, to These Foolish Things, the tradition is certainly there, and there seems to be no end to tragedies, dramas or humour which may arise when there is a cultural clash or when British eccentricities and manners find themselves in foreign lands. At the Hotel du Lac, Edith encounters a puzzling-to-her company until she finally meets Mr Neville, a gentleman who may finally help our hopeless heroine to gain esteem and respectability in the eyes of society.īooks on British people abroad deserve a genre of their own. Those who are after some fast-paced action in their books should look elsewhere because Hotel du Lac is a quietly powerful, almost reflective, character-driven novel at the heart of which is one embarrassingly unmarried female heroine Edith Hope, an idealistic writer, who abandons her London home for a holiday getaway to be spent in a respectable hotel-establishment in Switzerland. Clearly, after such an opening, one would expect a rich, highly-descriptive, beautifully-written observational novel of some insight, and this is exactly what the reader gets. It was to be supposed that beyond the grey garden, which seemed to sprout nothing but the stiffish leaves of some unfamiliar plant, lay the vast grey lake, spreading like an anaesthetic towards the invisible further shore, and beyond that, in imagination only, yet verified by the brochure, the peak of the Dent d’Oche, on which snow might already be slightly and silently falling”, so begins the short novel by Anita Brookner, who was the recipient of the Man Booker Prize in 1984.

“ From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey.

Anita brookner hotel du