STRANGE HOTEL

by Eimear McBride

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
(www.fsgbooks.com)
2020, 153 pages, $25

ISBN 978-0-374-27062-9

Click here to purchase

She has no name, but a heck of a disappointing past. She is endlessly part of a reality in which she is a hotel guest, wandering from one strangely-named room to another, adrift in some king of emotional Sargasso Sea.

In the hotel, she meets a man and, like similar relationships in her checkered life, doesn’t know quite what to make of him. She wants to will herself to be happy, content and, sometimes, very satisfied, but the realities of basic hotel living keep her away from attaining it.

So like the five stages of grief, she heads from denial all the way through to acceptance, of sorts, while meandering through all of her life’s bizarre and unexplained circumstances.

McBride’s novel, like the film, “1917,” is one long Chapter 1 narrative that offers the reader no natural break. STRANGE HOTEL is just one seamless stream-of-consciousness: bewildering and confusing at times, mundane at others, until somehow it drastically realigns itself and becomes clear. So if you enjoy a good “stream” read, STRANGE HOTEL may be for you.