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Cargando... The Glass Hotel: A novel (edición 2020)por Emily St. John Mandel (Autor)
Información de la obraThe Glass Hotel por Emily St. John Mandel
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. At the center of this novel is Jonathan Alkaitis, a Bernie Madoff-type figure whose massive ponzi scheme is, we know as soon as we meet him, about to collapse and land him in prison. Although his centrality is not at all obvious at first, as the story starts somewhere else entirely, with someone who sure looks like he's going to be the main character but then mostly fades out of the narrative for a very long while. The whole thing, really, is structured like this. Changes of POV, jumping back and forth in time, characters who weave in and out of each other's lives in chaotic and often glancing ways. Even having read Station Eleven, where the author does something very similar and pulls it off amazingly well, I find myself thinking that this structure should not work. It should feel disjointed, unsatisfying, perhaps even confusing. And yet, it reads absolutely smoothly and it all comes together into something I found really compelling and strangely beautiful, with characters I completely believed in and some quietly complex themes. It's kind of amazing. ( ) Having previously read the author’s Sea of Tranquility and Station Eleven, I was looking forward to this relatively short work of literary fiction and was not disappointed. This work fleshes out a character thread previously found in Sea of Tranquility, Vincent, the consort of Jonathan Alkiatis. Jonathan is a Bernie Madoff of sorts, running a vast pyramid scheme. The novel bounces back and forth between several characters and time lines before wrapping up nicely in the end. Vincent goes from being an itinerant bartender to living a life of unimaginable luxury before returning to her previous state, working in the kitchen of a container ship. The author mixes in several other compelling characters who exist on the fringes of the financial fraud. As in her previous novels, the author displays an uncanny ability to capture and keep the reader’s attention while crafting a beautifully written piece of work. Also, like her previous work, it is very short, and easily consumed in 3-4 sittings. (Print:3/24/2020; 9780525521143 Knopf; 320 pages) Audio: 3/24/2020; 9780593151037; Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group; duration 10:35:26. (Film: No, but I’m hoping with time, there will be.) SUMMARY/ EVALUATION: I selected this book due to it’s being in Goodreads list of top nominations for 2020’s Best Reads—I tried to pick one from each category, and it was really based mostly on which one a library had in it’s collection and if it was currently available. This one might also have been the cover though. Yes, I’m well aware of the adage not to judge a book by it’s cover, even more so after learning from Andy Weir that an author has no say in the cover (not to say he had any complaints)—it’s all the publisher’s choice, but I still do it.
It’s a beguiling conceit: the global financial crisis as a ghost story. As one of Alkaitis’s employees reflects of a swindled investor: “It wasn’t that she was about to lose everything, it was that she had already lost everything and just didn’t know it yet.” But Mandel’s abiding literary fascination is even more elemental: isn’t every moment – coiled with possibilities – its own ghost story? Isn’t every life a counterlife?... All contemporary novels are now pre-pandemic novels – Covid-19 has scored a line across our culture – but what Mandel captures is the last blissful gasp of complacency, a knowing portrait of the end of unknowing. It’s the world we inhabited mere weeks ago, and it still feels so tantalisingly close; our ache for it still too raw to be described as nostalgia. “Do you find yourself sort of secretly hoping that civilisation collapses ... Just so that something will happen?” a friend asks Vincent. Oh, for the freedom of that kind of reckless yearning. The Glass Hotel isn't dystopian fiction; rather it's "straight" literary fiction, gorgeous and haunting, about the porous boundaries between past and present, the rich and the poor, and the realms of the living and the dead.... This all-encompassing awareness of the mutability of life grows more pronounced as The Glass Hotel reaches its eerie sea change of an ending. In dramatizing so ingeniously how precarious and changeable everything is, Mandel's novel is topical in a way she couldn't have foreseen when she was writing it. The question of what people keep when they lose everything clearly intrigues Mandel.... By some miracle, although it’s hard to determine what it’s about, The Glass Hotel is never dull. The pleasure, which in the case of The Glass Hotel is abundant, lies in the patterns themselves, not in anything they mean. This novel invites you to inhabit it without striving or urging; it’s a place to be, always fiction’s most welcome effect. Mandel is a consummate, almost profligate world builder. One superbly developed setting gives way to the next, as her attention winds from character to character, resting long enough to explore the peculiar mechanics of each life before slipping over to the next.... The disappointment of leaving one story is immediately quelled by our fascination in the next.....what binds the novel is its focus on the human capacity for self-delusion, particularly with regards to our own innocence. Rare, fortunately, is the moral idiot who can boast, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” The complex, troubled people who inhabit Mandel’s novel are vexed and haunted by their failings, driven to create ever more pleasant reflections of themselves in the glass. This latest novel from the author of the hugely successful Station Eleven forgoes a postapocalyptic vision for something far scarier—the bottomless insecurity of contemporary life.... Highly recommended; with superb writing and an intricately connected plot that ticks along like clockwork, Mandel offers an unnerving critique of the twinned modern plagues of income inequality and cynical opportunism. [ Pertenece a las series editorialesKeltainen kirjasto (540) Tiene como guía/complementario de referencia aPremiosDistincionesListas de sobresalientes
Una novela cautivadora sobre el dinero, la belleza y los fantasmas del pasado. Vincent es camarera en el hotel Caiette, un palacio de cristal y madera de cinco estrellas en la isla de Vancouver, donde su madre desapareci? cuando ella era una ni?a. El due?o del hotel, Jonathan Alkaitis, le da una propina a Vincent y eso marca el inicio de una vida juntos. Sin embargo, la aparici?n de un inquietante mensaje en el ventanal del hotel pondr? en peligro la felicidad de la nueva pareja. Trece a?os despu?s, la misteriosa desaparici?n de una mujer en alta mar se entrelaza con el descubrimiento de una estafa piramidal y arrastra las vidas de Vincent y Alkaitis a un remolino que ninguno de los dos podr? controlar y donde nada es lo que parece. Entre barcos, rascacielos de Manhattan y la naturaleza salvaje de la isla de Vancouver, los personajes se mueven como fantasmas en este deslumbrante retrato de la codicia, la reconciliaci?n con el pasado y la b?squeda del sentido de la vida en un mundo ca?tico.--
Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass and cedar palace on an island in British Columbia. Jonathan Alkaitis works in finance and owns the hotel. When he passes him his card with a tip, it's the beginning of their life together. That same day, Vincent's half-brother, Paul, scrawls a note on the windowed wall of the hotel: "Why don't you swallow broken glass." Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note from the hotel bar and is shaken to his core. Thirteen years later Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship. Their lives paint a picture of greed and guilt, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of our pasts No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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