I have been mostly away from home since the month began, and I decided I’d do this very in-theme read to kick it off.
Are there many books set in Vevey, Switzerland? I doubt it. But one of them is Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, winner of the 1984 Booker Prize, which was already sitting on my shelves waiting for its moment. So I took it with me on the plane, took it with me on some lake side walks.
The Grand Hotel du Lac is a historical 5 star boutique hotel near Lac Léman, in Vevey (Ve-vê, not Vi-ví). Vevey itself is a small village with not much going on (if you know, you know), so I was immediately intrigued on why a book would take place here and not be a toxic workplace fanfiction of sorts.
Hotel du Lac (the book, not the place) feels old timey in a way that perfectly fits the setting.
This is a very introspective novel about Edith Hope, a novelist who believes to physically resemble Virginia Woolf, whose social circle knows nothing either of her occupation nor of her love life. She arrives in Hotel du Lac to spend some time away, supposedly to work on her latest novel, and quickly observes (and judges) the people who are also lodging there. She cannot quite relate, she dissociates, she withdraws; her secret pains and desires (her wish for love and happiness) are never made known to the others, only to the reader. Hotel du Lac itself matches her in being both discrete and selective of its clients. Edith hates the hotel, however, and feels trapped by the mountains in the landscape.
But maybe it’s her circumstances that trap her. Edith opted out of married life on the same day of her wedding, so her friends sent her away to think about her life choices, while the drama dies down and her reputation is reestablished. What they don’t know is she didn’t wish to marry that one particular person because she has an affair with a married man who is not often available to her, and she wants no other; and while in Switzerland, she tries to forget him all the while writing letters to him.
My idea of happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening, every evening.
Edith’s observations of the other lodgers are both interesting and amusing, rich and self-absorbed. She is visibly lonely and cannot quite fit in, either back at home or with these people, who invite her only so she can listen to them, not judge them or take an actual part in their conversations or lives. There is an old widow with a grown, unmarried daughter she is very close to, a very thin woman with a dog, a deaf elderly lady left there by her son’s new wife… none of these are exactly her friends. Then, there is Philip Neville, who knows her secret of being a novelist and even asks her to marry him, even though they just met.
He conducts himself altogether gracefully. He is well turned out, she thought, surveying the panama hat and the linen jacket. He is even good-looking: an eighteenth-century face, fine, reticent, full-lipped, with a faint bluish gleam of beard just visible beneath the healthy skin. A heartless man, I think. Furiously intelligent. Suitable.
The life waiting for her back home is not thrilling… so why not?
This book does not have a lot of events or plot to speak of, but it is a really good character study, introspective and realistic, as melancholic and discrete as its protagonist, and its ending shows us the truth that the quiet and discrete don’t often win at life.
If you’re in Portugal, you can get another edition via wook, in English, as it is currently unavailable in Portuguese.
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