'If one is prepared to do the one thing one is drilled out of doing from earliest childhood – simply please oneself – there is no reason why one should ever be unhappy again.' 'Or perhaps entirely happy,' Edith replies.” 'One can be as pleasant or as ruthless as one wants,' Neville argues. “In Hotel du Lac the timorous, middle-aged romantic novelist Edith Hope, sent into exile by her friends for reneging on her wedding promise to dull, dependable Geoffrey, has her moral probity challenged by the suave voluptuary Philip Neville. In an interview that appeared in the Telegraph, the book is described thus: Hotel du Lac came out in 1984, which is the year I graduated from high school. She came late to writing, 53 when she wrote her first book, and I’m 52.

Perhaps I am just at the right age to read Brookner. As one enthusiast of her work says in the NY Times: “It should be boring, but it’s invigorating to see the most quotidian things through Brookner’s intelligent eyes.” This doesn’t seem much, but it sets the tone perfectly, it offers us a vista, which is immediately smudged out. But who knows what it is that draws one to a book at a certain time.īrookner has me at the first sentence: “From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey.” I feel a bit stupid for not having read her before now, especially since I have a friend with impeccable taste who’s been telling me to do so for years. This is my first, and I know I’ll be binge-reading many more of them. Many of you will have read it, and maybe read all of Anita Brookner’s 24 novels. Thankfully, I took some photos of this book I’m so in love with, before it snowed. But there’s always next week for that, and there’s always Instagram. I could be writing about the snow we’ve had in Edmonton, and I’ve taken a lot of photos of the stuff.

Author hotel du lac