Category Archives: 05. A Century of Women

A Century Of Women – 1920’s

I have fallen behind in reviews for both of my Century projects, so I’m going to be posting quick, short, multi-book posts until I catch up. Which will probably be never.

I haven’t quite finished up the 1920’s yet, with 1920, 1921 & 1928 still open. This year, I’ve finished books for 1923, 1925 & 1928.

Anderby Wold
by Winifred Holtby
Rating: ★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1923
Genre: fiction
Pages: 278
ReRead?: No
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of women

Mary Robson is a young Yorkshire woman, married to her solid, unromantic cousin, John. Together they battle to preserve Mary's neglected their beloved farm, Anderby Wold. This labour of love - and the benevolent tyranny of traditional Yorkshire ways - has made Mary old before her time.

Then into her purposeful life comes David Rossitur. Young, red-haired, charming, how can she help but love him? But David is from a different England - radical and committed to social change. As their confrontation and its consequences inevitably unfold, Mary's life and that of the calm village of Anderby are changed forever.

I finished Anderby Wold, published in 1923, in February. I am a huge fan of Winifred Holtby’s South Riding – so much so that I have been considering rereading it. I didn’t like Anderby Wold nearly as much as that one, although it was still an enjoyable read. In some ways, it felt like an obvious precurser to South Riding, set in the same sort of a location and with similar, if less well-defined, characters. Anderby Wold was Holtby’s first novel, but feels like a mature novel nonetheless.

There are also connections to be made to the work of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte’s lesser known book, Shirley, both of which focus on the changes that industrialization and modernity bring to small, rural British farming communities.

Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: May 14, 1925
Genre: classic
Pages: 197
ReRead?: Yes
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of women

In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with far-away remembrances. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices she has made, hesitantly looking ahead to growing old. Undeniably triumphant, this is the inspired novelistic outline of human consciousness.

I just finished Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway last week, so it is fresh in my mind. Published in 1925, it takes place on a single day in June (June 18 seems to be the day that has been designated as Dalloday), so I decided to re-read it on its centenary. I didn’t finish it one day, which is apparently a thing, where people read Mrs. Dalloway contemporaneously with the times that are vaguely identified within the novel by the ringing of Big Ben. I had forgotten how much of the novel is spent away from Clarissa Dalloway, in the lives of other characters as they move through London.

I have not read a lot of Woolf’s work. I’ve previously posted about her first novel, The Voyage Out, and I’ve read her (second most) famous novel To The Lighthouse, although it’s been years.

Reading Mrs. Dalloway really worked for me this time. I often struggle with stream of consciousness, but with this reading, I was really able to let go of my need for linearity and plot and just immerse myself in the words. It has inspired me to seek out more Woolf over the next few years.

Young Anne
by Dorothy Whipple
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1927
Genre: fiction
Pages: 292
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

Young Anne (1927), was Dorothy Whipple’s debut novel. It is about the first twenty years of a girl’s life: she lives at home mostly looked after by the kindly Emily, goes to school, falls in love and finally marries someone else.

Young Anne is Dorothy Whipple’s first and most autobiographical novel.

I can never go wrong reading Dorothy Whipple. This was my third of her novels, after The Priory (my favorite so far) and Because of the Lockwoods. There is something about her books that are completely engaging to me; each time I have started a Whipple, I haven’t been able to put it down until I finish the last page. This is true even when her books are very long – I spent five hours on my couch reading The Priory. Young Anne was my least favorite of the three so far, but was not an exception to this rule.

Young Anne is Whipple’s first novel, published in 1927, and is a bildungsroman of the title character who seems to be a bit of a stand-in for Dorothy herself. We follow Anne from childhood, through first love, first job, and marriage to a much older and wealthy doctor.

I feel like I could read all of Whipple’s novels in about two weeks, they are so engaging. But, if I were to do that, then I would have entirely run out of Whipples and have no more to anticipate. So, instead, I am spreading out the reading. I actually own one of them, Someone at a Distance, which is sitting on my book cart, waiting for me to pick up.

1959: Uncle Paul by Celia Fremlin

Uncle Paul
by Celia Fremlin
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1959
Genre: suspense
Pages: 249
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

While sisters Meg and Isabel relax with their children on their seaside holiday, their older half-sister Mildred moves into the cottage where her bigamist husband Paul was arrested for the attempted murder of his first wife. First published in 1959 this psychological thriller follows the women as Paul's release from prison makes them ever more unnerved.

I was pointed in the direction of Celia Fremlin by a friend’s Goodreads timeline. It was honestly the cover that made me sit up a take notice – and when I read the plot summary, I was completely sold. I ended up buying a 3 book set of the Faber & Faber reprints, which includes this one, The Hours Before Dawn and The Long Shadow. So far, I’ve only read Uncle Paul. All of the covers are wonderful.

I don’t quite know where to slot this book, genre-wise. It’s not really a crime/mystery. It’s also not really a thriller. It’s fairly suspenseful, but in a 1950’s and 1960’s way, not in a 2020’s way. The pacing is fairly slow, and the ending took me by surprise, but didn’t shock me.

The main character is Meg, the youngest of three sisters, who is basically summoned to the English coast by the middle sister, Isabel, because the oldest sister, Mildred, seems to have taken leave of her senses by renting a dumpy, remote cottage where her imprisoned (bigamist) husband, Uncle Paul, attempted to kill his first wife a decade or so prior. So, yeah, that’s quite the set up.

Meg is a career girl, with a new boyfriend named Freddy, who behaves in some frankly bizarre ways throughout the course of the book. We really aren’t to know what to make of him. And the middle sister, Isabel, is also married to a man in the Navy, and about whom she seems to know basically nothing. Meg seems to be the only character with even a lick of sense or independence.

Once the characters are all assembled at the coast, the suspense begins to build because no one is talking about Uncle Paul, but everyone is thinking about him. Has he been released? Is he looking for revenge on the three sisters who seemingly betrayed him? Is Freddy Uncle Paul in disguise? Is Isabel’s husband Uncle Paul in disguise? Is everyone losing their ever-lovin’ minds (the answer to this is yes).

If you cross Elizabeth Taylor (the author, not the actress) with Patricia Highsmith, you might end up with Celia Fremlin. If that sounds intriguing, check her out.

1968: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem
by Joan Didion
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1968
Genre: essays
Pages: 256
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America— particularly California—in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

I haven’t read very much non-fiction for this project, which might be a bit of an oversight. However, when I was looking for a book for 1968, I noticed that this one qualified.

I have not read much by Joan Didion and have always been vaguely bemused by her cultural importance because her body of work seems insubstantial to me. I did read her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking last year for a book club that ended up getting cancelled, and, while I didn’t dislike it, I didn’t find it to be some sort of grief rosetta stone, worthy of the hype.

So, I went into this with minimal expectations. And, overall, that’s about where I ended up. There were certain essays that really resonated – I especially liked the one about keeping a notebook.

“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do… on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there…”

I thought that the title essay was very good, although the poem that lent it the title is better. The essay about Hawaii, I found weird, and ill-fitting to the collection overall.

The essays that touched on L.A. in the 1960’s were the most interesting to me, from a purely historical perspective.

“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”

And quotes from her piece on the Santa Ana winds have been everywhere recently, with the fires in L.A.

“It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself; Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

Anyway, I remain somewhat bemused by her cultural importance, but Didion can definitely construct a sentence.

Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith

Deep Water
by Patricia Highsmith
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1957
Genre: mystery: silver age (1950-1979)
Pages: 271
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

In Deep Water, set in the quiet, small town of Little Wesley, Patricia Highsmith has created a vicious and suspenseful tale of love gone sour. Vic and Melinda Van Allen's loveless marriage is held together only by a precarious arrangement whereby, in order to avoid the messiness of divorce, Melinda is allowed to take any number of lovers as long as she does not desert her family. Eventually, Vic can no longer suppress his jealousy and tries to win back his wife by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder — one that soon comes true. In this complex portrayal of a dangerous psychosis emerging in the most unlikely of places, Highsmith examines the chilling reality behind the idyllic facade of American suburban life.

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn and domestic suspense don’t exist without Patricia Highsmith.

OK, maybe that is an overstatement – after all, it’s entirely possible that someone not named Patricia Highsmith would have come up with domestic suspense had she not published Ripley, Strangers on a Train and a book like Deep Water. Nonetheless, there is a through-line between Patricia Highsmith and books like Gone Girl.

Patricia Highsmith does not screw around, but she does mess with the reader’s head. And no one that I’ve read describes murder with so much visceral banality. When someone is murdered on the page in a Highsmith book, it is so extraordinarily disturbing – explained with clinical detachment, but also with rapt attention to the physical details and experience of murder.

Deep Water is the exploration of a man who is slowly cracking, but the facade is so resilient and convincing that it takes about 300 pages for him to completely unravel. The ending is utterly unavoidable and still shocking.

The Sleeping Beauty by Elizabeth Taylor

The Sleeping Beauty
by Elizabeth Taylor
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1953
Genre: fiction
Pages: 226
ReRead?: No
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of women

A subtle love story by one of the most accomplished writers of the 20th century

Vinny Tumulty is a quiet, sensible man. When he goes to stay at a seaside town, his task is to comfort a bereaved friend. Vinny is prepared for a solemn few days of tears and consolation. But on the evening of his arrival, he looks out of the window at the sunset and catches sight of a mysterious, romantic figure: a beautiful woman walking by the seashore. Before the week is over Vinny has fallen in love, completely and utterly, for the first time in his middle-aged life. Emily, though, is a sleeping beauty, her secluded life hiding bitter secrets from the past.

This was my third book by Elizabeth Taylor (the mid-century British author, not the movie star) – I’ve previously read Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (March, 2020) and A Game of Hide and Seek (January, 2019). Elizabeth Taylor makes me think of a slightly more acerbic version of Barbara Pym. There is definitely some acid there, but it is carefully masked.

In August, 2020, I noticed that Virago had issued kindle versions of Taylor’s novels, and that they were very reasonably priced. I thought it was probably a sale price, so I bought 7 of them: The Sleeping Beauty, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (I already owned the paperback, but what the heck, the kindle version was less than a cup of coffee), Blaming, A Wreath of Roses, At Mrs. Lippencotes, In a Summer Season and the Collected Short Stories. The prices don’t seem to have gone up since then, but I’m not sorry I grabbed them, and intend to read them all.

I have liked all three of the novels that I have read so far, and would really struggle to rank them. Elizabeth Taylor excels at characterization, and I always feel as if I really know her characters by the time I close the book. I’m rooting for all of them – even the ones that I didn’t really like (well, hello there Isabella), the ones who do stupid shit (good morning, Vinny), but especially the ones who really seem to deserve to find some happiness (Emily, Laurence, how are you?).

Like Barbara Pym, she seems to write very quiet plots, without much in the way of action. In spite of that, though, her books move forward in a compelling way. No one would call an Elizabeth Taylor novel propulsive, but, honestly, that’s one of the things I like most about mid-century women’s fiction. There is some tension in this book, but it’s a quiet sort of tension – no murder, no mayhem, no car chases. Still, the stakes are high, and, by the end, I was fully committed to these characters.

Autumn by Ali Smith

Autumn
by Ali Smith
Rating: ★★★½
Series: Seasonal Quartet #1
Publication Date: October 20, 2016
Genre: fiction
Pages: 264
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women, booker prize

Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819.

How about Autumn 2016?

Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.

Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.

Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. This first in a seasonal quartet casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history-making.

Here's where we're living. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic.

From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.

For many years, from the time that I was probably 18 until about 20 years ago, when I was just shy of 40, I read tons of literary fiction – my reading was split pretty evenly between literary fiction and mysteries. In my late 30’s, though, I went on a romance reading binge that lasted for two or three years, and at that point I essentially quit reading contemporary lit fic and have read almost exclusively genre fiction and/or classic/vintage fiction since then. The romance phase was short lived, but the anti-lit-fic phase had staying power.

I can’t exactly say why, but if I had to speculate it is because I grew weary of the great literary fiction theme of late-middle aged men and their obsession with their waning virility.

However, somewhat strangely, I’ve found myself drawn back in the direction of literary fiction – especially literary fiction by women (I am still impatient with literary fiction by men). I picked up Autumn both because I needed a book for 2016, but more importantly because I have a bookish friend who really loves Ali Smith. She is probably a big deal in England, but I had never heard of her.

It’s strange, but in a good way. It’s quite stream of consciousness, and can be difficult to follow. The frame of the story is, basically, a young woman named Elisabeth and her friendship with her very elderly neighbor, Daniel Gluck. Daniel is (now) a centenarian, and is in a coma. Elisabeth is visiting him in the hospital. Within this frame we have Daniel’s memories of his life, Elisabeth’s memories of Daniel, and digressions into Pauline Boty, a British painter and founder of the British pop art movement in the 1960’s, Christine Keeler and the Profumo scandal, and how both of them impacted Daniel (directly) and Elisabeth (indirectly).

The time period of the book is immediately after the Brexit vote, which occurred on 6/23/2016, so there are references to that political conflict.

All across the country, people called each other cunts. All across the country, people felt unsafe. All across the country, people were laughing their heads off. All across the country, people felt legitimized. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people said it wasn’t that they didn’t like immigrants. All across the country, people said it was about control. All across the country, everything changed overnight. All across the country, the haves and the have nots stayed the same. All across the country, the usual tiny per cent of the people made their money out of the usual huge per cent of the people. All across the country, money money money money. All across the country, no money no money no money no money.

Sounds exactly like the first (and second) election of Donald Trump.

Autumn is the first book in Smith’s “Seasonal Quartet.” My TBR list is so absurdly long that I cannot even begin to speculate when, or even if, I will get to Winter, Spring and/or Summer.

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

Bluebird, Bluebird
by Attica Locke
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Highway 59 #1
Publication Date: September 12, 2017
Genre: mystery: modern (1980-present)
Pages: 320
ReRead?: Yes

A powerful thriller about the explosive intersection of love, race, and justice from a writer and producer of the Emmy winning Fox TV show Empire.

When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules--a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.

When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders--a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman--have stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes--and save himself in the process--before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt.

A rural noir suffused with the unique music, color, and nuance of East Texas, Bluebird, Bluebird is an exhilarating, timely novel about the collision of race and justice in America.

This is the first book in the Highway 59 trilogy by Attica Locke, featuring Darren Mathews, a black man and a Texas Ranger. Locke is a screenwriter as well as a novelist – she was a writer on the Fox series Empire – and it definitely shows in this book. It fairly crackles with tension and visitual imagery and would make an incredible piece of streaming television in the Bosch tradition.

Set in Lark, Texas, a small town the piney woods of east Texas, the main character is a deeply conflicted man, torn between his sworn duty as a peace officer and the reality of the racism that entirely infects the culture around him. He becomes involved in the investigation of a black lawyer from Chicago, who was murdered in Lark after he was blamed for the murder of a local white woman, that reaches back into a violent and racist past.

Mathews meets the wife of the murdered lawyer and stubbornly persists in an investigation that everyone, including his superiors in the Rangers, would just as soon he left alone. And his badge cannot protect him as he continues to dig around in the lives of the people living in Lark, who would also prefer that he return to Houston and leave them to their new Klan gatherings and meth dealing. As the investigation unfolds, there are wheels within wheels turning, and it has the potential to cost him everything, from his badge to his marriage to his life.

There are three books in Locke’s trilogy – Heaven my Home and Guide Me Home. The final book was published in September of 2024, and I just haven’t had time to get to it yet.

Some Luck by Jane Smiley

Some Luck
by Jane Smiley
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Last Hundred Years: A Family Saga #1
Publication Date: October 7, 2014
Genre: historical fiction
Pages: 395
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different yet equally remarkable children: Frank, the brilliant, stubborn first-born; Joe, whose love of animals makes him the natural heir to his family's land; Lillian, an angelic child who enters a fairy-tale marriage with a man only she will fully know; Henry, the bookworm who's not afraid to be different; and Claire, who earns the highest place in her father's heart.

Moving from post-World War I America through the early 1950s, Some Luck gives us an intimate look at this family's triumphs and tragedies, zooming in on the realities of farm life, while casting-as the children grow up and scatter to New York, California, and everywhere in between-a panoramic eye on the monumental changes that marked the first half of the twentieth century. Rich with humor and wisdom, twists and surprises, Some Luck takes us through deeply emotional cycles of births and deaths, passions, and betrayals, displaying Smiley's dazzling virtuosity, compassion, and understanding of human nature and the nature of history, never discounting the role of fate and chance. This potent conjuring of many lives across generations is a stunning tour de force.

I’m going to be leaning in to my Century of Women project in 2025, because I’d really like to finish it. I picked this book for 2014 using the Orange Prize/Women’s Prize website, which has a nice search function (you can find the search page here). It’s searchable by prize year & genre, as well as an author search. The Women’s Prize started in 1996, so there’s almost 30 years worth of women’s fiction on offer.

I read A Thousand Acres by Smiley close to its publication in 1991 – of course I did. It seemed like everyone was reading it at that point. I also read a very early little murder mystery of hers, Duplicate Keys, which I also really liked. Somehow, at that point, she just sort of fell off my radar. I’ve occasionally thought about going back and picking up some of her books in the interim, but it got away from me.

I remember liking the notion behind Some Luck, and the other books in the trilogy when I heard about them around the time of publication. I am a sucker for historical family sagas, and, as well, I was born in Nebraska, so the idea of following a midwestern farm family through the decades appealed to me.

I really enjoyed Some Luck – the Langdon family was interesting and well-drawn, and dedicating one chapter to each year was a nice way to showcase the changes in the community and the family. Some Luck covers the years 1920 through 1953, immediately post-WWI through the Korean War. It focuses on the patriarch – Walter – and the matriarch – Rosanna – of the Langdon family, their six children: Frank, Joe, Mary Elizabeth, Lillian, Henry and Claire Anna, and their farm in Denby, Iowa.

I’m unlikely to use the later two books in the trilogy, Early Warning and Golden Age, for this project, although I do plan to read them at some point, so I can find out what happens with the Langdon family as the century progresses.

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes

In a Lonely Place
by Dorothy Hughes
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1947
Genre: mystery: golden age (1920-1949), noir
Pages: 206
Project: a century of crime

Postwar Los Angeles is a lonely place where the American Dream is showing its seamy underside—and a stranger is preying on young women. The suggestively named Dix Steele, a cynical vet with a chip on his shoulder about the opposite sex, is the LAPD's top suspect. Dix knows enough to watch his step, especially since his best friend is on the force, but when he meets the luscious Laurel Gray—a femme fatale with brains—something begins to crack. The basis for extraordinary performances by Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in the 1950 film version of the book, In a Lonely Place tightens the suspense with taut, hard-boiled prose and stunningly undoes the conventional noir plot.

I read this one at the end of March, 2023. I was lucky enough to score a copy of the Library of America edition of Women Crime Writers of the 1940’s for my kindle when it was on sale for $2.99. My edition contains: Laura, by Vera Caspary; The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis; In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes and The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay. I have read Laura and In a Lonely Place so far.

In a Lonely Place was also adapted for a well-regarded noir film in 1950, starring Humphrey Bogart. I’ve never seen it, although I understand that the film deviates substantially from the book. I had planned to pair the film with the book, but never managed to do it.

I highly recommend the book. It feels like it was groundbreaking – noir written by a woman, where we spend the entire book inside of the head of the killer, during a time when women were expected to be purely decorative. Yet, somehow, it’s the women of the book who strike the sparks in the narrative. Dix Steele, the main character, is a void.

Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum

Grand Hotel
by Vicki Baum
Translated from: German
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1929
Genre: fiction
Pages: 270
ReRead?: No

A grand hotel in the center of 1920s Berlin serves as a microcosm of the modern world in Vicki Baum’s celebrated novel, a Weimar-era bestseller that retains all its verve and luster today. Among the guests of the hotel is Dr. Otternschlag, a World War I veteran whose face has been sliced in half by a shell. Day after day he emerges to read the paper in the lobby, discreetly inquiring at the desk if the letter he’s been awaiting for years has arrived. Then there is Grusinskaya, a great ballerina now fighting a losing battle not so much against age as against her fear of it, and Gaigern, a sleek professional thief, who may or may not be made for each other. Herr Preysing also checks in, the director of a family firm that isn’t as flourishing as it appears, who would never imagine that Kringelein, his underling, a timorous petty clerk he’s bullied for years, has also come to Berlin, determined to live at last now that he’s received a medical death sentence. All these characters and more, with their secret fears and hopes, come together and come alive in the pages of Baum’s delicious and disturbing masterpiece.

I’m looping back to write up posts on books that I’ve assigned to one of my projects but never reviewed. I actually read this one over two years ago, in November, 2022. The only thing I wrote about it (on Goodreads) was: What a strange and compelling book.

One of my favorite bookish podcasts (The Mookse and the Gripes, for anyone who is interested), did an episode on hotel books, which mentioned this book. Hotel books are unique in that they will often bring together characters who, otherwise, would never cross paths. They are like balls on a pool table, hitting one other and changing trajectories. A hotel novel is an ensemble experience, taking place in lavishly decorated lobbies and dingy hotel rooms.

This book is an excellent examplar of the hotel book, with a collection of disparate characters that includes an aging ballerina, a doctor who has suffered an injury, a playboy thief, and a humble book keeper who has been told he is dying and has decided to experience one big blow-out before the end of his life.

Vicki Baum was Jewish, born in Austria. She emigrated to the United States in 1932 and became a U.S. citizen in 1938, dying in Los Angeles in 1960. Her books, originally written in German, were banned by the Third Reich in 1938. In response, she began publishing in English, and she worked as a screenwriter in the 1930’s and 1940’s.

She apparently wrote a sequel to The Grand Hotel, Hotel Berlin, set in the same hotel, in 1943. It doesn’t appear that one has ever been available in English.