(Which, I mean, I’m assuming Mandel wrote this one mostly during 2017 through 2019 and it was released in March 2020, so…understandable perspective shift, yeah?) While Station Eleven contains a thread of optimism about human culture and persistence (and that’s what I love about it), The Glass Hotel feels so much bleaker. Give me a place with no people in it, because I will never fully trust another person again.
Give me the walk to the village through the woods in summer, give me the sound of wind in cedar branches, give me mist rising over the water, give me the view of green branches from my bathtub in the mornings. Give me quiet, he thought, give me forests and ocean and no roads. The novel traces the kaleidoscope of people impacted by the Hotel Caiette’s existence, by Paul’s existence, by Vincent’s existence, and above all by Alkaitis’ pyramid scheme and its eventual collapse. Alkaitis meets her while she’s on shift as a bartender for the Hotel Caiette (which he owns), a shimmering hotel with large glass windows located in a remote part of Vancouver Island. Vincent, meanwhile, has felt self-reliant but also somewhat untethered since her mother’s death. Paul has struggled with heroin addiction since his mid-teens, and the novel traces the ups and downs of that lifelong struggle. Paul and Vincent have never been close: Paul’s father left his family for Vincent’s mother, and Paul failed to act as a steadying hand for Vincent when her mother tragically drowned. Like Station Eleven, this book hops back and forth through time, examining the ever-widening circle of people whom Alkaitis and Vincent impact. The two arcs intersect through Vincent, who eventually becomes Jonathan’s second wife (well, not technically his wife, but wife for all intents and purposes). The puzzle of The Glass Hotel follows two major story arcs: the troubled relationship between half-siblings Vincent and Paul, and the downfall of Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy man who runs a successful pyramid scheme. While Mandel’s newest work is a fantastic read and I promise to talk about it in its own right, the two make for a fascinating comparison. I dove right into The Glass Hotel immediately after rereading Station Eleven for the fourth time. In The Glass Hotel, as in Station Eleven, the puzzle pieces only reassemble into that portrait again in the novel’s final few pages. She likes to assemble a portrait of multiple human lives meshed perfectly together, break that portrait up into jagged but intersecting pieces, and then scatter those pieces across the table. John Mandel excels at creating puzzles out of human stories.
0 kommentar(er)
