Hotel Splendid

By Marie Redonnet

Book Overview

Like traveling a very long, very dark tunnel into a blinding bright beautiful light--Kirkus

H tel Splendid recounts the daily life of three sisters who live in a decrepit hotel on the edge of a swamp. The narrator, the youngest of the sisters, struggles to preserve the hotel in the face of insurmountable dilemmas: the decay of the building, the indifference and illness of her sisters, the remorseless expansion of the swamp. Confronted with dissolution and death, she displays a tireless persistence that is nearly as mysterious as it is moving.

This is one of three novels that are the first works to appear in English by Marie Redonnet, one of France's most original new authors (the other novels are Forever Valley and Rose Mellie Rose, both also available from the University of Nebraska Press). Translator Jordan Stump notes that these books "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common." In all three novels, Redonnet has said, "it is the women who fight, who seek, who create."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803289537
• ISBN13: 9780803289536
• Release Date: September 1994
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 130 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 4.8" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

an astounding prose poem of a novel -- a masterpiece!

This small novel is a piece of magical, verbal music. Repetitions -- literal, imagistic, melodic -- wind about the reader like silk rope. It's a one-sit read -- a beautiful, shocking ride into the world of these women and our world in both the largest and the smallest senses. And French to the hilt. Everyone should experience this book.