Strange Hotel  – Eimear McBride (2020) 149 pages

Another day, another novella about hotels 😊

This is slightly odd review, because what I think works about this novella is also why I have reservations about recommending it. But it absolutely worked for me, so I decided to include it when I only write about books I recommend.

Eimear McBride writes stream of consciousness novels. I’m fine with this style but I know it’s really off-putting for lots of people. If you are one of those but were thinking of giving McBride a try, I would say this is not the place to start. Strange Hotel doesn’t have the verve of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing or The Lesser Bohemians. But these disclaimers aside, here is why I think it worked.

I would say Strange Hotel is a novel about grief. We follow an unnamed woman as she checks into hotels in Avignon, Prague, Oslo, Auckland and Austin. We never know why she is in any of these places. She drinks too easily and she sleeps with men she does not want to see again.

“Times have changed, she notes, as is her wont on those occasions of which, of late, there have been more than a few. Another unzipped bag, in another uninteresting hotel room, upon which she stares indifferently down at the folded clothes, or the shampoo congealing into them if she’s been unlucky which, on this occasion, she has not.”

She has a list of places she is working through, possibly as some sort of pilgrimage, possibly not.

She is both articulate and inarticulate, and the reader has to try and piece together what is going on for her. It’s not easy, and in that sense we are very much in the place she finds herself:

“Why is the world always such work? It’s harder to let the words into her body now or, maybe, out. They used to form and reform themselves in order to dole out whatever she had in mind, whatever meanings her body inclined to make them make. Now, they barely carry meaning beyond the literal wattle and daub. This does, occasionally, make her wistful for the savagery of before when, beholden to no one, the words did whatever they pleased. She wouldn’t mind going back to that.”

A lot of my job is concerned with grief and bereavement and I’ve recently experienced a personal bereavement. I think Strange Hotel brilliantly captures the disorientation, the unreality, the betweenness, the holding pattern of grief.

Hotels are a perfect setting for this theme, and stream of consciousness is the perfect style. The formality in tone that wasn’t apparent in McBride’s previous novels also captures the detachment and default behaviour the bereaved can find themselves experiencing.

I read Strange Hotel at exactly the right time, there was a lot that resonated. McBride is brilliant at what she does and she uses a difficult style expertly.

“The solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence.”