471. The Glass Hotel
Rating: ☆☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Genre: Fiction, Mystery
302 pages, published March 24, 2020
Reading Format: Book
Summary
The Glass Hotel is a fictional novel about money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise. It follows the story of Vincent, a beautiful young woman who works as a bartender at the five-star glass and cedar Hotel Caiette on an island in British Columbia, who becomes involved with Jonathan Alkaitis who works in finance and owns the hotel. The day they meet, Vincent’s half-brother, Paul, writes on the windowed wall of the hotel: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” From there, the story unfolds.
Quotes
“Memories are always bent retrospectively to fit individual narratives.”
“There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.”
“What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.”
“One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.”
“I’m no expert, but I remember reading somewhere, every time you retrieve a memory, that act of retrieval, it corrupts the memory a little bit. Maybe changes it a little.”
“It is possible to leave so much out of any given story.”
“A revelation earned only in hindsight: beauty can have a corrosive effect on character. It is possible to coast for some years on no more than a few polished lines and a dazzling smile, and those years are formative.”
“Did I say I liked working with her? I loved working with her. I considered her a friend. You know how rare it is to work with someone who loves their life?”
“It’s possible to both know and not know something.’ ”
“She’d never believed in love at first sight but she did believe in recognition at first sight, she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus.”
“It’s just one future slipping away and being replaced by another.”
“Leon would not have predicted that he and his wife would turn out to be the kind of people who’d abandon a house. He would’ve imagined that such an act would bury a person under fathoms of shame, but here on the expressway in the early morning light, abandoning the house felt unexpectedly like triumph.”
“You know what I’ve learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that’s when I realized that money is its own country.”
“In their late thirties they’d decided not to have children, which at the time seemed like a sensible way to avoid unnecessary complications and heartbreak, and this decision had lent their lives a certain ease that he’d always appreciated, a sense of blissful unencumberance. But an encumbrance might also be thought of as an anchor, and what he’d found himself thinking lately was that he wouldn’t mind being more anchored to this earth.”
“Maybe this could be enough. Maybe not everyone needs to have a specific ambition. I could be the sort of person who just goes to beautiful places and owns beautiful things.”
“But they were citizens of a shadow country that in his previous life he’d only dimly perceived, a country located at the edge of an abyss. He’d been aware of the shadowland forever, of course. He’d seen its more obvious outposts: shelters fashioned from cardboard under overpasses, tents glimpsed in the bushes alongside expressways, houses with boarded-up doors but a light shining in an upstairs window. He’d always been vaguely aware of its citizens, people who’d slipped beneath the surface of society, into a territory without comfort or room for error;”
“None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her,”
My Take
I really loved The Glass Hotel and could not put it down. Emily St. John Mandel is a very talented writer who has created compelling characters, a fascinating plot and intriguing themes. I’ve been personally recommending this book for the past month and will continue to do so.
