Hotel World: Ali Smith

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Ali Smith possesses the perfect characteristics of the short story writer: rigorous self-discipline in the planning process, an eagle eye for condensing detail, a capacity for using the personal and individual to suggest universal truths and a skill for hinting at a wider world beyond the story, all of which can be seen in her three major collections of short stories Free Love and Other Stories (1995), Other Stories and Other Stories (1999) and The First Person (2008). Life can end in a heartbeat!...Live freely and passionately in the time you inhabit...now, the present!

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

Ali who? Hotel what? Even for people who follow contemporary British literature, neither the name nor the title meant a lot. They do now. HOTEL WORLD makes a striking impression. It's a challenging, often bleak but affecting journey through the lives of four young women united by the death of another . . . What an introduction to Ali Smith.

Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the most. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window. Courageous and startling. I doubt that I shall read a tougher or more affecting novel this year. Jim Crace" Nineteen year old Sara Wilby has just started work at the Global Hotel as a chambermaid and dies in a rather unfortunate way there. Her dead teenage narrator is “floating around” and slowly losing her earthly ties. She is forgetting vocabulary and wants to find out how she fell before it is all too late. She knows this “thing” fell to the ground and killed her and as a result she attempts to have conversations with Sara down in the grave. Drat, I really hate it when I love a work so much because then I cannot get the natural flow of the wording. I had the same problem with Lawrence Durrell and The Alexandria Quartet, my favourite book. A masterful, exuberant novel from the acclaimed author of How to be both and the ongoing Seasonal quartet

Ali Smith - Literature - British Council Ali Smith - Literature - British Council

In this voice from beyond the grave Ali Smith has created the perfect literary ghost imbued with a powerful sense of wonder at the minutiae of everyday sensuality and her beautiful, vivid descriptions are reinforced by a sharp, unsentimental tongue. The Times (London)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 Three books in and it’s official: I’m in love with Ali Smith. If you’d told me two years ago that I would love books written in a stream of consciousness style I’d have laughed in your face. I didn’t think it would work for me, and I can totally see why it doesn’t work for some others, but oh my, work it does!!

Hotel World Summary | SuperSummary Hotel World Summary | SuperSummary

To me this is a book of associations and benefits from a hermeneutic reading in its simple methodological sense. I hope to avoid being apophantic, jargon heavy, or avuncular, but I have a feeling that is precisely my tendency. So, sorry if you read this. The fifth section of the novel titled “Future in the Past,” is entirely Clare's memories on the life and death of her sister Sara. Yes I did initially think this book was bad and I had indeed been sorely tempted to throw it out of the window but what a dreadful mistake that would have been. Sara Wilby – a teenage hotel chambermaid who has fallen to her death in a hotel dumbwaiter. She is the daughter to her parents Mr. and Mrs. Wilby, and also older sister to Clare.

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. Hotel World was quite the experience. Ali Smith certainly has talent asking with her unique writing style and a recognizable author's voice. The synopsis for it actually gives great insight into the core of this novel: I very rarely DNF a book. This was my first by Ali Smith. It started out as a five star, or close to five star read, which is why I'm disappointed, to say the least. Ali who? Hotel what? Even for people who follow contemporary British literature, neither the name nor the title meant a lot. They do now. HOTEL WORLD makes a striking impression. It’s a challenging, often bleak but affecting journey through the lives of four young women united by the death of another . . . What an introduction to Ali Smith. Ambientado en el Londres del siglo XX, cinco extrañas, un fantasma y su hermana, una huésped, la recepcionista y una joven indigente, estas serán las cinco protagonistas de esta historia, que cruzan sus vidas en una noche en el hotel World.

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For the first time this talent, glimpsed and admired in earlier work, has been structured into a world-view; fragmented, tenuous, allusive, sparse -- a provocative view of the world in which we must live and die." - Ruth Scurr, Times Literary Supplement Because it started out so strongly, I would consider reading another by her, but if it's going to be incoherent psychobabble, you can count me out. 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. Smith uses unique characteristics for each woman giving her novel the feeling of being an observation on society.

Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in." Quello che più mi piace di Ali Smith è come scrive. Sempre. Le storie sono raccontate in modo originali, con delle strutture narrative estreme. Smith's sidelong approach to plot produces an overall effect of a pebble dropped into water, echoed in recurrent images of fallings both physical and emotional. (...) She is an extremely readable, easy-flowing writer, and one of the subtlest and most intelligent around. Hotel World is essential reading from a writer confirming herself as a major talent." - Carol Birch, The Independent