Hotel World: Ali Smith

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This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Penny is a guest at the hotel. She is a journalist for The World. She has to stay there but is not happy about it. Hotels were such a sham. She was bored out of her mind. She does have some interaction with two other people: she hears a noise outside her room and sees someone trying to unscrew something off the wall (only later do we learn who and why). She tries to help and then gets help from another guest, who we know is Else. The activity is all somewhat mysterious. Penny even later accompanies Else on a walk around the town. Duncan – He was the sole witness to Sara's death. As the novel's only dominant male character, Duncan appears in each story within the novel. He too is moved to an emotional state of depression after witnessing the tragedy. Including Duncan in each of the novel's stories, Smith seems to imply that these stages of grief may affect mere observers too, that these stages are not exclusive to family or close personal friends of those who have died. Q: Hotel World‘s main character is a young ghost named Sara, whose bodily death is vividly reimagined at the start of the novel. How did you get the idea to write this novel from the perspective of a ghost? Have you written about or been interested in ghosts before Hotel World? There is unfinished business in Sara's life, too: a watch, for example, she brought to get repaired -- a momentous event in her life, though she did not act as fully on it as she might have.

Hotel World by Ali Smith | Waterstones

Life can end in a heartbeat!...Live freely and passionately in the time you inhabit...now, the present! Q: Hotel World, which was first published in the United Kingdom, garnered much critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the 2000 Orange Prize. Many of the critics, when discussing Hotel World, hypothesize about why you set the novel in a hotel and what it (the hotel setting) symbolizes. Care to answer that yourself? Acclaimed as a truly inventive novel, Hotel World received much praise for its unique storyline and distinct formal choices. Garnered as a rare novel filled with hope and despair, Hotel World’s characters, linguistic choices, and thematic elements are what have set it apart as a genuinely modernist -- and some would argue postmodern -- piece of literature.Muriel Spark says “remember you must die” (in her 1959 novel Memento Mori) meaning people should appreciate life to its full potential because it will one day end. This quote ties into the theme about the passage of time, and is also reminiscent of Smith's recurrent “remember you must live.” Hotel World is everything a novel should be: disturbing, comforting, funny, challenging, sad, rude, beautiful.-- The Independent (London)

“Woooo Narrative Empathy and the Deconstruction of Convention

In six sections, temporally titled (from "Past" through "Future Conditional" to "Present"), the overlapping stories of five characters are told. But everyone has a story, and stories have a way of bumping into each other and creating other stories.....ad infinitum. Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. In her highly acclaimed and most ambitious book to date, the brilliant young Scottish writer Ali Smith brings alive five unforgettable characters and traces their intersecting lives. This is a short novel with big themes (time, chance, money, death) but an eye for tiny detail: the taste of dust, the weight of a few coins in the hand, the pleasurable pain of a stone in one's shoe . . .The heart of Scottish writer Ali Smith may belong to good old-fashioned metaphysics — to truth and beauty and love beyond the grave — but her stylistic sensibility owes its punch to the Modernists. She’s street-savy and poignant at once, with a brutal sense of irony and a wonderful feel for literary economy. There’s a kind of stainless-steel clarity at the center of her fiction. . .”— The Boston Globe Ali Smith's remarkable novel HOTEL WORLD....is a greatly appealing read. Smith is a gifted and meticulous architect of character and voice." The Washington Post There are five characters, two relatives, three strangers, but all female. There is a homeless woman, a hotel receptionist, a hotel critic, the ghost of a hotel chambermaid, and the ghost's sister. These women tell a story, and it is through this story that unbeknownst to them their lives and fates intersect. The catalyst of their story is the Global Hotel. Courageous and startling. I doubt that I shall read a tougher or more affecting novel this year. Jim Crace"

Ali Smith’s Numismatic Modernism About Change: Ali Smith’s Numismatic Modernism

Elspeth Freeman – an older homeless woman suffering from tuberculosis, she daily sits on the streets begging the people passing by to “spare some change.” When first introduced to the reader, Elspeth is referred to only as Else. The character of Else signifies anger, the second stage in the grieving process. Themes of lesbianism (discovery, acceptance of said discovery), death, grieving, time, homogenous societies and class (as illuminated by the setting in a luxurious hotel) are explored. That this story line was exploded out into five POVs each told in first person narrative—the ghost of the teenage girl, a homeless woman who ends up helping the younger sister, the receptionist at the hotel on the night the younger sister visits, a yuppie journalist staying at the hotel who also ends up helping the younger sister, the younger sister—did not for me make it any more than what it was: at best a superficial examination of the struggle to accept oneself and/or the struggle to cope with a devastating loss. Ali Smith does not, of course, do happy. Her characters, mainly women, struggle with life in some bleak area of the UK. Men are at best necessary evils and often harmful and unpleasant, whether as husbands/boyfriends or bosses or other authority figures. In this book, there is really only one vaguely sympathetic man and that is Duncan who was with Sara when she tried her dumb waiter stunt and who, as a result, has mental health issues, hiding out in the Left-Behind Room (i.e. Lost Property Office), with everyone trying to cover for him but even he remains a shadowy figure.

the other, younger woman begging flees from Lise’s approach, Else eagerly steals all the money she has left behind. A 20 year old girl dies when she plunges to the bottom of an elevator shaft while playing around in a hotel dumbwaiter. That doesn't sound like a premise for an exceptional novel, but in Ali Smith's hands that's exactly what it becomes. There are five viewpoints here, including that of Sara herself, as she recalls her death and the days immediately before and after. Her younger sister gets a say, as does the desk receptionist at the hotel, and a homeless woman and a young female reporter. The latter two women never knew her at all.