MAY 2020 - AudioFile
Award-winning author Eimear McBride introspectively delivers her emotionally charged novella about a middle-aged woman who frequents hotels. In a stream of consciousness style, McBride introduces listeners to an unnamed female character who checks in and out of hotels in different places around the world—such as Avignon, Austin, Auckland, Moscow, and Oslo—to run away from a past she only vaguely mentions. To cope, the unnamed character indulges in casual sex with men and smoking. The narrative is complex, but McBride’s indulgent tone, modulated voice, and on-point pacing carry it forward and make it appeal to listeners’ emotions. This poignant story of love, loss, and self-exploration will linger in listeners’ minds. A.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
03/09/2020
McBride (A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing) delivers a globe-spanning travelogue set entirely in hotel rooms in this beguiling work. Lists of cities section off the narrative; in those flagged by an x, the protagonist, an unnamed itinerant woman, has experienced a tryst. Rather than chronologically plot these encounters, McBride presents them as a runaway train of the woman’s solipsistic thought as to their significance, leaving her at odds to draw conclusions. After rebuffing one man’s advances, she returns to her room and falls asleep watching loud TV porn. Sex with one man pushes her into suicidal contemplation; sex with another cheers her enough to consider joining him for breakfast the following morning (she doesn’t). In the final scene, McBride switches from third- to first-person narration, at which point the narrator reflects on how her past choices have “absented” her from herself. The linguistic prowess found in McBride’s other books remains present, with the bravado slightly dialed down for emotional effect. McBride’s nebulous formalist structure could be described as a long prose poem masquerading as a novel. As a narrative, though, it is a half-formed thing. (May)
From the Publisher
Ms. McBride arrived as an indie-press phenom in 2013 with “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing,” a jagged, uncompromising stream-of-consciousness novel that she shopped for nine years before finding a publisher . . . The baroque tangle of the main character’s ‘inverted chats,’ as she dubs her monologues, is more interesting than yet another plainspoken confrontation with repressed trauma. Ms. McBride’s brilliance lies in her arrangements of the glorious garble of language.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“There is a constant traffic between the impulses and exigencies of the body and the looping digressions and brutal hairpin bends of the mind . . . These bare bones make Strange Hotel sound as though it is a meditation on romantic loss and a sketch of the accommodations one makes in its absence. In a way it is; but it also delves far more deeply into the instability of identity.”
—Alex Clark, The Guardian
“A novel rich with mystery, complexity and seductive charm.”
—Malcolm Forbes, The Star Tribune
“McBride writes with soul-stirringly inventive language and an immediate, stream-of-consciousness style that's all her own . . . This begs to be savored, and reread.”
—Annie Bostrom, Booklist
“There are numerous sparks of singularly brilliant prose.”
—Kirkus
"McBride’s challenging new novel extends the stream-of-consciousness technique she honed in her celebrated debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing." —The New York Times (New and Noteworthy)
“No writer currently working excites me more than Eimear McBride—in her writing of the body, in her radical reimagining of the sentence, in her invention of new intimacies. Nothing else feels so fresh, so radically new. Strange Hotel challenges and expands my sense of what art can do. Each of McBride’s novels feels like an event—not just in English-language literature but in the English language itself. ”
—Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You
“In Strange Hotel, a nameless woman’s voyage through a string of hotel rooms gradually reveals an inner world of striking tumult and depth, as her meditations draw her, and us, deeper into the unsettled tides of her own past. Eimear McBride has created a powerfully hypnotic novel of consciousness, one that traces the intricacies of thought and memory in prose so thrilling, so dagger-sharp, it makes the heart race.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
“A load-bearing beam of a book carrying a whole mansion (or possibly hotel) of meaning. It gives you the almost eerie sense of reading a future classic, but is also a novel reaching back into many byways and private roads of world literature.”
—Sebastian Barry, The Guardian
Praise for A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
“Blazingly daring ... [McBride’s] prose is a visceral throb ... [Her] language plunges us into the center of experiences that are often raw, unpleasant, frightening, but also vital.”
—James Wood, The New Yorker
“[A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing] is, in all respects, a heresy—which is to say, Lord above, it’s a future classic.”
—Joshua Cohen, The New York Times Book Review
Praise for The Lesser Bohemians
“The Lesser Bohemians is a full-on sensory experience—and another superlative achievement.”
—The Wall Street Journal
Library Journal
05/01/2020
An anonymous middle-aged woman from someplace undisclosed travels the world to stay in hotels. Though cultured and possessing a rigorous intellect, this traveler does not seem interested in sightseeing. Instead, she spends much of her time in her rented room, meticulously observing and describing to herself the emotional, mental, and physical sensations she experiences. She also absorbs the details of each room, noting the locations of thermostats and light switches. Occasionally, she drinks in the hotel bar and meets a man, experiences that also undergo keen analysis. Despite the intellectual control she exerts during her hotel stays, memory inevitably intrudes upon her thoughts, calling into question the very nature of her travels. Is she running from something or someone? Is she on a quest? Answers remain elusive, though a moment of humiliating indiscretion may disrupt the traveler's intentionality in ways that might liberate her. VERDICT Thematically and stylistically, McBride's third novel boldly departs from previous work, especially her stunning debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. McBride narrates this story of a mature woman in a considered, crafted voice that suggests language can be both subterfuge and cover. [See Prepub Alert, 11/4/19.]—John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman
MAY 2020 - AudioFile
Award-winning author Eimear McBride introspectively delivers her emotionally charged novella about a middle-aged woman who frequents hotels. In a stream of consciousness style, McBride introduces listeners to an unnamed female character who checks in and out of hotels in different places around the world—such as Avignon, Austin, Auckland, Moscow, and Oslo—to run away from a past she only vaguely mentions. To cope, the unnamed character indulges in casual sex with men and smoking. The narrative is complex, but McBride’s indulgent tone, modulated voice, and on-point pacing carry it forward and make it appeal to listeners’ emotions. This poignant story of love, loss, and self-exploration will linger in listeners’ minds. A.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2020-02-10
The third novel from the unique Irish author.
After her dazzling debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2014)—winner of the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, among others—McBride took a slight step back in The Lesser Bohemians (though that book did win the 2016 James Tait Black Memorial Prize). In her latest, a slim book that could be considered a novella, the author yet again dives relentlessly into the interior of her unnamed protagonist, narrating her travels to anonymous hotels in Avignon, France, Prague, Oslo, Auckland, and Austin. In each locale, she drinks wine, smokes cigarettes, and engages in one-night stands and lengthy bouts of what she admits is “existential overindulgence,” desperately seeking to avoid any further thoughts of an unnamed trauma that she suffered in the past (likely the loss of the father of her child, referenced only obliquely at moments throughout the book). The narrative is focused almost entirely inward, structured like a lengthy interior monologue or self-negotiation that often grows claustrophobic. Consistently, the protagonist reverts to her “preferred manner in which to proceed. Thinking her way carefully around every instant. Grammatically and logically constructing it….Lining words up against words, then clause against clause until an agreeable distance has been reached from the initial, unmanageable impulse which first set them all in train.” It’s clear that the woman has endured significant emotional and spiritual pain. However, in relating her thoughts, she may be “relentlessly reshuffling the deck of pseudo-intellectual garble which...serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence.” As in McBride's previous books, there are numerous sparks of singularly brilliant prose—e.g., “Outside the sky’s a horror of fight and bruise. Velour black, pumped with racket, gored by orange.” Ultimately, though, as the protagonist herself acknowledges, “the time for this digression is up. She should really be getting off this subject.” Readers will agree at many points in her story.
A bridge work that will hopefully lead to McBride’s next major novel.
