‘Hotel Splendid’ by Marie Redonnet   (1986) – 113 pages            Translated from the French by Jordan Stump

The Splendid Hotel is not splendid anymore. It is rather decrepit now.

The unnamed main character in this novel now runs the Splendid Hotel. Her grandmother started the hotel and it was quite successful in its time. But now that she, the granddaughter, runs the hotel it is plagued with problems. The lavatories are continually becoming blocked, and she has to unblock each one of them. It doesn’t help that her sisters Ada and Adel flush things down the toilets that they are not supposed to. The roof leaks, and the wood is rotting, becoming porous. The guests and her sisters are often beset with mysterious diseases, probably due to the nearby swamp. Rats are a problem at the hotel also. And the two kooky sisters create problems with the other hotel guests.

The hotel continues to have severe problems even when the railway company sends geologists, then engineers, and finally a work crew to build a railway directly in front of the hotel. Our hotel manager hopes and expects a lot more guests will stay at her hotel after the railway is built. Meanwhile the railway personnel staying at the hotel provide some revenue. The railway people need to figure out how to traverse the big swamp next to the hotel with their railroad track.

This entire novella is written in an extreme sparse short-sentence prose style as follows:

“Ada doesn’t understand Adel. She has no compassion. Ada’s behavior pains Adel. Ada does everything she can to keep Adel down, without seeming to. Adel crumbles in front of Ada. Ada triumphs. I am right to say that I really don’t know my sisters. Their behavior never fails to surprise me. I can never predict their reactions. I am a long way from understanding my sisters.”

I am torn between considering this extremely plain and simple style as mesmerizing incantation or as rather a bore. ‘Hotel Splendid’ did hold my interest, but I could only read a few pages at a time.

Somehow I kept reading on of this woman hotel manager’s plight with her two sisters Ada and Adel at this decrepit hotel situated at the edge of the swamp, even though it was pretty much the same litany over and over and over and I knew there wasn’t going to be much of a payoff.

Only near the end did I realize that the condition and deterioration of the Splendid Hotel could be read as a metaphor for growing old. That puts this entire novella in a different light.

Grade:    B