5 " Hurry up Darling....we are late....we are due to have brandies with Beckett, Modiano and Cusk " stars !!

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. This was released May 2020. I am providing my honest review.

Jaidee, my love, he whispers, did you find this book intriguing because we read it together in a very ordinary hotel suite while drinking sparkling rose with a bit of cassis ? Perhaps I did as I looked at you and wondered if I had the means, and I lost you that I could be the Irish woman in this novel.

Jaidee, my love, you would be a sopping mess. Yes I truly would for many years but I would gladly drink in the hotel room with this lassie and her metacognitive meanderings would help me access not only my deep pain but also your beloved face, warm baritone and silky chestnut hair. I would lose lose myself in her loss to assuage my own grief. She might take me and dispose of me like she did to the man in Prague or Oslo or Austin or she might just masturbate next to me.

Jaidee, my love, you are lost in her words, her circular excuses and her lovely parfum. Yes, yes I am but I love hearing her thoughts and I can feel the mattress rumble as you read my sweet dear love and I would wander like she does if you left.

Jaidee, my sweetheart, put on your burgundy velvet jacket as we must hurry as we are meeting Beckett and Modiano and of course your effervescent Cusk for brandies. Shhhh I will hold your hand....

A friggin masterpiece....thank you Ms. Eimear McBride !

This novella might be for others, but I’m just not the target audience for it. It’s an endless chapter and the story kind of goes nowhere so it’s hard to focus on and care about past the last sentence you’ve read.

Wow this book is breathtaking and haunting in equal measure. The eloquence and evocativeness contained within these pages is stunning and one of a kind. Gripping and chilling from the first page to the last.

Really Interesting; Not Interesting At All

"I am the last one standing in so many memories."

About halfway through this novella I decided I needed a break. Like the main/only character I considered my options in terms of drink, cigarettes, sex, more booze, and more sex, (each with a big side of aimless, nameless regret). Anyway, instead, I decided my reading experience would be much improved, or at least better informed, by looking at various reviews of this book. I learned something useful, which I am happy to share with you.

There are two distinct audiences for this book. One is the group of people who have read McBride's other books and adore them. The second group is comprised of entirely new readers. (I'm in that second group.) Those in the first group either loved or hated this book, but they all had strong reactions because they all had substantial backgrounds against which to measure "Strange Hotel". Some readers teased out the connections between this vague novella and earlier books, (finding references to previous characters and the like), or even found connections with what they knew of McBride's own life. Love it or hate it, they at least had some way to connect to this book and some perspective from which to view it. If you're in that first group, well,have at it and good luck.

However, if you are in the second group, and are new to McBride, you face more of a challenge. Many people found the heroine's musings pointless, self-indulgent, and tedious. Fair enough. After all, there is no plot, no action, no drama, and a barely there main character. (As I say, you are in group two, so you can't port over knowledge from other McBride books.) For the remaining minority, it seems to me that the way to enjoy this book is to just enjoy it sentence by sentence as a writing, or an academic, exercise. There are many elegant, nicely phrased, ironic, cool, or devastatingly sardonic lines and bits of business. I fall into this category. I admired a lot of the writing and was taken by many apparently careless, but obviously intended, asides and throwaway musings. I was especially taken by the last paragraph, which in some sense confirmed what I suspected about what was going on.

So, lots of ways to react to this. You might want to take a page from the heroine's playbook and treat the entire novella as the reading equivalent of a one night stand. It seemed like a good idea at the time, offered some moments of pleasure, but afterwards, upon sober reflection, felt rather empty and pointless. But we'll always have Paris. And an MFA candidate could have fun writing an essay about use of the word "brown".

(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

As a fan of all Eimear McBride's novels, I completely expected to love this book. I was devastated when I didn't.
The main character lacked the appeal, complication and charisma that McBride's characters usually exhibit, The story itself was uninteresting, even though the potential to make this a great novel was clearly there. It seemed like McBride wasn't willing to take it far enough to the edge, to push harder and give us that unforgettable protagonist. The book is sadly disappointing.

The writing style caused me some challenge. Written in the third person, and switching to the first person toward the end left me wondering if there was a significance that I failed to identify. That the story was written as one continuous chapter confused me and it took quiet a while to latch on to the concept. I referred to the short summary while well into the book in order to get a sense of the flow.

McBride’s Strange Hotel is deeply reflective and thought provoking, and offers a new perspective on her writing. Loved it. Will be recommending when comes into paperback in store.

In this highly charged novella we receive hints as to the life of an unnamed woman over a period of over 35 years. Given as a series of vignettes based in hotel rooms around the world – Paris, Prague, Oslo, Auckland, Austin and London – they apparently refer back to a traumatic experience in a Paris hotel room when the narrator was a teenager. Seemingly the later visits – whether deliberately sought out or not – are repeating variations on the original stay. These not just trip memories of the original event, but are mentally and emotionally processed through increasing age and experience. But in hotels she sees herself as living in “time out of time”. Overall we are told she survives by carrying on as if life is an “isolated incident”.
But to her it is clear that memory is a burden she carries every day. Because this is a “personal” view of a person on their own reacting to the minutiae of specific days of her life this monologue could possibly be described as tending to the over cerebral or analytical. Wordy and emotionally extreme it could otherwise be regarded as a carefully written manifestation of high anxiety or the impact of trauma. The reader is taken to a very private place, and as McBride is a very visceral writer, that is certainly uncomfortable to be in, or read.
But the physical travel of the narrator is matched by her emotional journey. She passes through public places and when alone is left with her thoughts. The world is to her a harsh place. Some choices can be made only once. She has come to believe that she shouldn’t dare to “want” things. The length of her mental journey is much longer than her physical; but over the years she is starting to think that she is extending the version of herself and that she might be reaching a more secure place. This will allow her to choose if she wants to do more with her life or choose to merely “remember” the things she already knows how to do.
Taken as a whole this is not a comfortable read. Climbing into the brain of a person who is profoundly emotionally disordered by their experiences can create anxiety in any reader who has had harder memories tripped by the tale. Even if was not abnormal to be so intimately intrusive into the life of a stranger. McBride is such a convincing writer that the story and narrator seem so real that the reader can to be taken to a similar place of their own, leaving them with memories of their own experiences. Because this novel deals with such personal matters so convincingly it may not be to the taste of all readers. Others might find that he route travelled might be more affirming.

After slogging my way through over fifty percent of this book I decided I was wasting my time. There is just nothing in this book worth reading. A total bore and simply an exercise in futility. What Eimear McBride was thinking by publishing this drivel is beyond me. She is a very talented writer who in no way proves it here. Sadly, I abandoned the book.

This books seemed like a woman with a mental disorder randomly stuck in her life. I could not connect with this novel at all and struggled to read it.

I loved Eimear McBride's two previous novels (A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians), and for the most part, I loved them because of their charged and creative use of language and their gut-punch of emotional connection; the love was visceral, organ-deep. With Strange Hotel, the writing is still unconventional but this time is more formal; cryptic and cerebral. In contrast to the young women in her first two novels, the main character in McBride's latest is met in middle age (the author has even acknowledged that this unnamed woman could be considered one of her earlier characters, grown), and whether the more formalistic atmosphere is meant to reflect the lifestage of the character or the author's own maturation, the effect was distancing. Turns out, I read with my viscera and I want them to get punched. To be clear: Strange Hotel is still well-crafted – intelligent and purposeful – and the three stars I've awarded it reflects this book's ranking against the author's previous novels; Eimear McBride is no paint-by-numbers artist, and while I wanted more of the same of what I thought I could expect from her, I can't be upset that she flexed her talents in a different direction. I will happily read whatever she comes up with next.

There is but little context in McBride's latest novel. A woman checks in a series of hotels worldwide, drinks, has casual sex. There is nothing else, but a lost love in the past. It is dense, claustrophobic and verbose in language. That makes it difficult to engage with the narrator in the beginning, but stay on track, read on, because McBride's style gets more poetic when the narrator examines love and lost.

It makes for a slow, intense and remarkable read!

Thank you to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I am not a big fan of stream-of-consciousness writing so I didn't finish this.

I received this free ebook from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

This is a fascinating idea for a book, and I was intrigued by the blurb of this novel. The book follows a woman, who we discover through her stream of consciousness is visiting a number of hotel rooms throughout her life and through different countries.

I was intrigued by this novel, I was excited to discover more about the woman and her life as I read the novel, however, we didn’t actually find out much about the woman at all. In general, the novel was much too vague to be enjoyable. I wanted to find out more about the woman and her life but that didn’t happen. Actually large portions of the novel didn’t make much sense at all, and felt unnecessary to the novel.

I enjoyed the self-reflection that being alone in a hotel room can invoke, and this novel was claustrophobic and gloomy which I quite enjoyed. But as I didn’t really discover anything and honestly it felt like a bit of an actual waste of time reading the novel. Thankfully the novel was short, so it didn’t take long to get through, but perhaps with more pages it would’ve actually been a better book!

Overall I was a bit disappointed by this novel, it was ok but it didn’t deliver what I was hoping for.

Please release me. I am trapped in a series of dreary hotel rooms with a character who is driving me claustrophobic with her preoccupations (men, cigarettes, booze, sex, the past) and impossible language. This is my first McBride. It may be my last.

EXCERPT: Prague

There are more cobbles down there than you could ever wish for, she thinks, no wonder defenestration was a thing. She has no doubt, if each could speak, their mouths will yawn fantastic with history. But, in truth, hers is a beggared interest. Missives from antiquity are not why she's here and, if more rigorous motives yet remain unclear, she is at peace with that. She can be, and can choose to be, in any given place. Furthermore, she's a grown woman and no body exists to which she must report back on every instant. Too much already of that though. Far too much, she thinks, her scorn rising at the redundant aegis of her instincts. All she really wants is the dark behind her eyes and perhaps for the rain to relent.

ABOUT THIS BOOK: At the mid-point of her life a woman enters an Avignon hotel room. She's been here once before - but while the room hasn't changed, she is a different person now.

Forever caught between check-in and check-out, she will go on to occupy other hotel rooms, from Prague to Oslo, Auckland to Austin, each as anonymous as the last, but bound by rules of her choosing. There, amid the detritus of her travels, the matchbooks, cigarettes, keys and room-service wine, she will negotiate with memory, with the men she sometimes meets, and with what it might mean to return home.

MY THOUGHTS: At 20% I labelled this book strange.

In Oslo (45%), I decided to abandon this read, tired of the reiteration of her stream of consciousness, unable to make sense of, well, anything really. At this point she thinks, 'For God's sake, just get up and go.' So I decided that I would, and would not be returning.

But I woke during the night and picked Strange Hotel up again, too lazy to wander down the other end of the house and pick something up. And something changed. For the first time there was interest in her surroundings, outside her interchangeable hotel room. '...she can see to the fjord. To the promenade. To the opera house. To a damp sky behind, weakening into day.'

And we start to gather little snippets of information about her, though never her name. Her French is terrible, as a result of an unenthusiastic teacher and an endless confusion with both the tenses and the numbers. She describes herself as slightly agoraphobic, and yet she travels ceaselessly. She always requests a ground floor hotel room, not because she thinks she might jump, as she may well have been tempted when she was younger, but because she might fall. She is in her late forties, forty nine, in fact and grieving. Not for her youth. She considers her age 'a hard-won victory over the excellent carnage of being young.' She is grieving for the loss of her love. Husband? Lover? Partner? The father of their son who is not quite an adult yet. And on her endless travels, the purpose of which we never learn, she conducts her sex life rather like having dinner- sit down, eat, get up and leave.

But while in Prague, something happens, something that rocks her world a little...and as a result, she does something quite out of character.

So, what do I think of Strange Hotel? In all honesty, I don't know. I hated parts of it, I loved others. It bewildered me, it bewitched me.

🤯🤯.5

#StrangeHotel #NetGalley

THE AUTHOR: Eimear McBride was born in Liverpool in 1976 to Irish parents. The family moved back to Ireland when she was three. She spent her childhood in Sligo and Mayo. Then, at the age of 17, she moved to London.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Farr,Strauss and Giraux via NetGalley for providing a digital ARC of Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This review and others are also published on Twitter, Amazon, Instagram and my webpage

The number of times I've been in a hotel room alone I can count on one hand. It's a weird feeling, it's lonely, it's a little unsettling, and it's a sense of freedom that I've never really felt. Strange Hotel by Elmear McBride is one woman entering a hotel room and in a vague prose, thinking back on other hotel rooms, of men, of sex, of heartbreak, of pain.

Elmear McBride writes in an almost freeform style. It reminds me of my own way of thinking, of memories flying in an flying out of my mind at strange times. Strange Hotel is a book that goes beyond normal storytelling, it's freeform thinking, of one woman's mind, her thoughts, her heart. It's beautiful writing.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This is a rare pass from me. It's a narration novella. The narrator is a woman who moves from hotel room to hotel room around the world, without, it seems rhyme or reason. SHe's often alone but sometimes she has company, although we don't know who that it. She's thinking a lot about a man but not so much about her child. She drinks. Solo time in a hotel room can bring out odd thoughts but they don't really crystallize here. The writing is interesting but it didn't contribute to my enjoyment. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction- I might not have liked it but you could so give it a try.

I found this book completely pointless. I can see that many others found it a profound meditation on existential angst, loneliness and lack of connection, but for me it was just the solipsistic ramblings of a middle-aged woman going from hotel to hotel around the world having meaningless sexual encounters with random men. It’s repetitive, there’s no plot or character development, we never get to understand her motivation, the sentences are often convoluted and even if you put the effort into understanding what they mean – well, they still don’t seem to mean anything. Not for me, this one.

McBride's "Strange Hotel" is definitely a difficult book with which to engage, not unlike her previous work, but then the author herself would argue that making the reader work is the point of worthwhile literature; here, the narrator manages to not only keep the world, and memory itself, at a distance, but, perhaps inevitably, the reader as well.