Love Hotel

Abstract

Eric Hayot On Literary Worlds Oxford University Press In a work of particular relevance to WLT, Hayot puts forth his argument for the redefinition of modern literary history. He dissects the division of literature into bordered “worlds,” circumscribed by lines of culture, style, and authorship. This study of global literary aesthetics incorporates politics, philosophy, and pop culture to propose a paradigm shift in literary thought. July–August 2013 • 63 Annie Ernaux A Man’s Place Tanya Leslie, tr. Seven Stories Press Ernaux’s brief autobiography appeals to familial sentiment and poignant nostalgia as its author explores her changing relationship with her father. She follows his evolution from peasant to shopkeeper and the pitfalls of status, education, and language that accompany his supposed growth. This edition includes an enlightening introduction by Francine Prose. Nota Bene Christine Montalbetti. Love Hotel. Paris. P.O.L. 2013. isbn 9782818017852 The narrator of Christine Montalbetti ’s latest novel is a French writer who has decided to spend a few months in Kyoto in order to work on a book, an “uncertain novel” he can only imagine, for the moment at least, in rough profile. Two or three times a week, he meets Natsumi in the Love Hotel, a windowless, neutral site whose abstraction from the world that surrounds it constitutes much of its charm. Natsumi is curiously passive and mute in the early pages, but when she begins to speak it becomes clear that she’s a gifted storyteller, much like Scheherazade. The tales that she tells are mostly ones she had heard as a child, from her father, for instance, or from her grandmother. The stories are dynamic and mutable; they come in multiple variants and new versions. Never less than fantastic, they never fail to fascinate the narrator. The Love Hotel is an ideal setting for tales such as these because it is conceived to facilitate fantasy of all kinds. Spirits, ghosts, and specters inhabit it, just as they inhabit the stories that Natsumi tells. Some of those spirits have names—Akanamé, Nura, Makuragaeshi—while others are anonymous. Some of them are beneficent ; others are dreamers, dancers, or tricksters. Some of them are amusing ; others exert “all the tyrannies of which ghosts are capable.” Whether Natsumi herself belongs to their ranks is an open question; what is abundantly clear is that in her presence, the narrator plunges into a world of fable. He comes to understand writing (in one of its dimensions at least) as a cocoon that one weaves around oneself , something that isolates the subject as efficiently as any of the rooms in the Love Hotel. Yet he is not quite sure whether the Love Hotel is a sanctuary or a prison, nor whether Natsumi is his muse or his jailor. Perhaps it doesn’t matter because people tell stories quite regardless of circumstance —even on March 11, 2011, the day toward which this novel points, a day that began peacefully enough but ended in the Fukushima disaster. Warren Motte University of Colorado Marie NDiaye. Ladivine. Paris. Gallimard. 2013. isbn 9782070126699 Marie NDiaye’s new novel, with perhaps the most complex plot of any of her works, tells a story of four generations , taking place over more than fifty years. The novel begins from the perspective of Clarisse Rivière, whose life has been shaped by her refusal to admit to those she knows, especially Richard, her husband, and Ladivine, her daughter, that her mother, Ladivine Sylla, is a poor black seamstress. She has taken the name Clarisse to sound more bourgeois, but to her mother, whom she visits secretly, she will always be Malinka. After twenty -five years, her husband leaves her. The perspective changes to that of the daughter, who occasionally sees her mother. After Clarisse has been brutally murdered by a lover she has accepted into her house and even introduced to her own mother, her daughter tries to understand what has happened. Ladivine feels she is being watched by a brown dog, with whom she identifies, and into whom she presumably turns. ...