The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel, Dylan Moore

Audiobook

English language

Published March 24, 2020 by Books on Tape.

(5 reviews)

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis's billion-dollar business is really nothing more than a game of smoke and mirrors. When his scheme collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.

In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.

15 editions

nicknicknicknick@bookwyrm.social reviewed The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

The Glass Hotel

4 stars

1) The new century was a new opportunity, he'd decided. If they survived Y2K, if the world didn't end, he was going to be a better man. Also if they survived Y2K he hoped never to hear the term Y2K again.

2) There were aspects of the fairy tale that Vincent was careful not to think about too much at the time, and later her memories of those years had an abstracted quality, as if she'd stepped temporarily outside of herself.

3) Her life in those days was so disorienting that she often found herself thinking about variations on reality, different permutations of events: an alternate reality where she'd quit working at the Hotel Caiette and returned to her old job at the Hotel Vancouver before Jonathan arrived, for example, or where he decided to get room service that morning instead of sitting at the bar and ordering breakfast, or where he did sit at the bar and order breakfast but he didn't like Vincent; an alternate reality where she still lived in the staff quarters of the Hotel Caiette, serving drinks to wealthy tourists all night, years passing. 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, other Vincents engaged in different events. [...] Imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn't been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed.

4) An unsettling thought while standing in line for the commissary: when he dies in prison, will he die in the counterlife too?

5) [The] line, for Oskar, had been crossed eleven years earlier, when he'd first been asked to backdate a transaction. "It's possible to both know and not know something," he said later, under cross-examination, and the state tore him to pieces over this but he spoke for several of us, actually, several of us who'd been thinking a great deal about that doubleness, that knowing and not knowing, being honourable and not being honourable, knowing you're not a good person but trying to be a good person regardless around the margins of the bad.

6) "I know what you mean," Leon said. "It's the surprise that bothers me, personally, the way everyone I talk to seems shocked by the downturn in the industry." "Yeah, so, true story, one of our colleagues pulled me aside today, I'm not naming names, and he said, 'I just can't believe what's happening to our industry, can you?' And I'm trying to be patient with these people, I really am, but I had to ask him, which part is surprising to you? Let's break this down. What is it you can't believe, exactly? That people don't want to buy goods when the economy collapses, or that people don't want to ship goods that nobody's buying?"

7) Leon knew that he and Marie were luckier than most citizens of the shadow country, they had each other and the RV and enough money (just barely) to survive, but the essential marker of citizenship was the same for everyone: they'd all been cut loose, they'd slipped beneath the surface of the United States, they were adrift.

Marty reviewed The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

A sprawling exploration of delusional characters

3 stars

Content warning Set against 'Station Eleven', slight spoilers for both ahead

A slow and meandering exploration of an assortment of characters' lives falling between awkward, delusional and detestable. Meandering also, unfortunately, in the worst way. Unlike Station Eleven, which used its early shifting view-points to introduce a broad range character perspectives and juxtaposed social dynamics for a relatively early narrative subversion such a thing never occurs here.

And where Station Eleven continued to ever narrow towards its ultimate strands of storytelling, reigning in its scope to keep up tension, no such attempt is made here. As a book it feels less tight, more mundane - which may indeed be the intention and part of the appeal for some.

That being said, the actual word-smithing of St. John Mandel I find continuously evocative and occasionally bleakly poetic. While I personally feel like the prose here tries to punch above its weight for poignant observations it also, at times, manages to evoke an undercurrent of rage against systematic issues over solely individual choices which is appreciated.

Ultimately, having also read Station Eleven without any prior knowledge on content or context, I would hesitate to recommend this book over it, though I recognize my strong impression of the former may have colored my expectations here.

NB The audiobook read by Dylan Moore is a treat, perhaps my preferred way of experiencing the book.

quaad@bookwyrm.social reviewed The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

This book infuriated me but i still finished it.

2 stars

Content warning maybe spoilers or not but just in case

I gave up on this once but decided to finish it because of supposed easter eggs that connected this to Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility. It turns out there were common elements, but they seemed more like recycled incidental characters and situations than some kind of connective thread. we get a quick peek at the author of the Station Eleven graphic novel, working on it, maybe.

I think Mandel is a very good writer; her descriptions are compelling and she creates characters that have the potential to become interesting. but they don't. She tries to give minor events dramatic significance that doesn't really play but the central event of the story falls flat. Pages and pages are devoted to bland, amoral mediocrities while the few sympathetic characters get a few short passages. oh, and ghosts ()?

Sharyl reviewed The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Beautiful life study...

4 stars

This novel is a creative and well-written blend of real and imagined stories involving the Bernie Madoff scandal and an interesting female protagonist named Vincent Smith. I enjoyed it very much, and admire the nonlinear storytelling style that was laced with mystery. I absolutely recommend it.

Koven Smith reviewed The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Strangely compelling

4 stars

I felt like I never really understood what this book was about the whole time I was reading it, and yet I found it strangely compelling. I got sad as I saw the end of the book approaching. I think I'll be returning to this one.

Subjects

Fiction, mystery & detective, general
Missing persons, fiction
Fiction, psychological
English literature