Hotel Iris: A Novel
- ISBN13: 9780312425241
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
A tale of twisted love, from the author of The Diving Pool and The Housekeeper and the Professor In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man’s voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and she sees in this man something she has long been looking for. The man is a proud if threadbare translator living on an island off the coast. A widower, there are whispers around town that he may have murdered his wife. Mari begins to visit him on his island, and he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at eas… More >> Hotel Iris: A Novel
May 13th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
Ogawa has a way of burrowing deep in to the thoughts and motivations of difficult, sometimes violent, sometimes perverse people, and making you understand them. This is by far her most compassionate book. Rating: 5 / 5
May 13th, 2010 at 3:25 pm
I absolutely loved this book! I saw it on the shelf at the Public Library and thought that it would make a nice, quick, read for a weekend at 176 pages. Little did I know that the book had a secret sado-masochistic side to it. I thought, from the description, that the girl would end up learning some tragic secret from the translator and forge a friendship with him or help him defeat his demons. I had no idea that she was this damaged and that he would use this to his own twisted advantage. I adore when a book surprises me and this certainly won the prize for repeated surprise! Rating: 5 / 5
May 13th, 2010 at 5:50 pm
The prose and story telling style of Hotel Iris is the just as elegant and compelling as The Housekeeper and the Professor but the story is much, much weaker. You want to keep reading, the author has that way about her, but this story amounts to nothing. It starts in a seaside hotel, that a young girl and her mother own and run when a prostitute creates a commotion and she and her customer are thrown out. The girl is fascinated and attracted to the voice, the commanding voice, of the customer. She is attracted before she even sees him. From there they start a relationship that is anything but common, and while this had me quite intrigued for 90% of the book, it just ends abruptly and in my view goes nowhere. The Housekeeper and the Professor had a bit of an abrupt ending, but that story and those relationships were developed much more before the ending of the book. Needless to say there is no one in this story you will like, or really be all that interested in. I think things really go downhill when the girl has a tryst with the man’s nephew..where did that come from? And more importantly where the heck was the author trying to go with it?
Very disappointing, lets hope the next book returns to form. Rating: 3 / 5
May 13th, 2010 at 6:16 pm
“Hotel Iris” is an enjoyable novella, up to a point. I was OK with the first sado-masochistic scene, but the subsequent ones were too much for me, and I wonder if they were really necessary. The events were necessary, but was the detailed description?
The protagonist has been scarred by her upbringing to the point that she has this masochistic tolerance, but she is not passive, despite the picture she presents to the world; e.g. she is willing to confront the maid and get the upper hand. There is much about this work that reminds me of a Chekov story, with characters like the mother and the maid, the life story of the translator, perversion aside, and the quaintness of the setting.
Rating: 4 / 5
May 13th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
The beautiful cover of this slim novel, an hotel bedroom window looking over a wide sea, suggests a gentle romance — something fleeting, a little sad perhaps, but tender. Ogawa’s previous novel, THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR, about the affection between an old man, a young woman, and a child, leads one to expect a similar beauty here. And when this novel begins to sketch a tentative, courteous friendship between a lonely girl of seventeen working in her mother’s seaside hotel and a much older man, one settles in for a bittersweet novella of romantic initiation such as might have been written by Elizabeth Bowen or Anita Brookner.
Wrong! But also right. For no matter where the story goes (and it takes us into some strange territory indeed) it retains some of those qualities of eager innocence, a bud that opens in the span of a single summer. But nothing about the book prepares the reader for the R-rated content. The girl, Mari, first encounters the older man (simply referred to as “the translator” since he ekes out a living translating from Russian) when her mother throws him out of the hotel after a noisy row with a prostitute. Bumping into Mari some days later, he is apologetic and almost old-fashioned in his meticulous courtesy; we assume that this was a one-time occasion that will not be repeated. But Mari, it seems, was equally attracted by the man’s power and sense of danger. More than once, she lets him take her to his home on an island a short ferry-ride from the town, and all that happens there is embraced by her as much as by him.
Some readers may be disturbed by the explicit action. But the truly disturbing aspect is the clarity of the author’s insight into Mari’s mind. Ogawa refuses the easy categories of predator and victim. Short though the book is, she achieves an exquisite balance between innocence and experience that turns a four-star subject into a five-star achievement. I cannot help thinking that she must have taken Thomas Mann’s DEATH IN VENICE as her model, inverting its viewpoint and moving it to Japan. She has written a worthy homage, if so. Rating: 5 / 5