From the moment I started reading Ali Smith's Hotel World, I loved it. I'm going to mostly focus on the first section for brevity's sake, but the entire novel's wordplay and use of speech was awesome to read. The lyricism of the first paragraph after the first of the "Wooooooo-hoooooo" sequences was completely absorbing. The lack of punctuation and word choice made me feel like I was falling. I loved the consistent use of the word "fall"/"fell" and allusions to height. It reminded me of where this journey all started (or ended). The alliteration also captured my attention right from the start: "small, sharp stone", "Imagine an itch", "coast down corridors", "quite quality floors", "hovered above the hoover". And have you ever encountered a more glamorous description for dust than "grey and vintage"?
I found the forgetting of words and the sparing of words brilliant. For instance, skipping to the second section with Else and her phrase, "Spr sm chn?" was extremely poignant to me. It doesn't really matter what Else says, does it? Her presence and cough turns people off, they decide whether they'd give her something or not before they really reach her. As far as forgetting words, I refer to Sara's spirit forgetting words and not having her senses. As she loses her senses, she loses the words. The first time we are given this is when she has forgotten the word "eyes": "Seeing fires. Seeing grass. Seeing birds. Their wings. Their beady . The things they see with. The things we see with, two of them, stuck in a face above a nose. The word's gone". She can describe eyes perfectly, refer to birds' eyes, but can't get the actual word, just as she'll never be able to actually see again.
Wordplay. Sara says, "I will miss my fall that ruined me, that made me wooo-hooooo I am today" - the fall is consuming even her language. She refers to the dumbwaiter saying that "the shaft is still there suspended behind the stairwell with its grave promise...", the use of "grave" with promise just hits you when you read that. The dead body of Sara speaks to her spirit and tells her of the day she died. She says, "I fell in love. I fell pretty hard... I expected all my life to fall for some boy" as well as, "Falling for her had made me invisible" - the fall is now even consuming her former self.
I could keep going for a long time - but I just loved the novel in seeing the styles of each character and the unique words and wordplay that Ali Smith used.
Something I don't really get: Throughout every character there are constant references to mouths or swallowing. What's that about?
Indeed, Smith's linguistic dexterity can be totally absorbing and exhilarating. And to my mind she invites us to read her language as a kind of verbal object that she manipulates--visually, structurally, and materially. This manipulation allows the language to correspond to the other things (like bodies) that are also manipulated in the novel.
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