Read Like the Wind: Two books about hotel life
Dear Readers, Perhaps you are familiar with this rabbit hole: I went online recently to make what should have been a simple booking for a short trip and promptly lost several hours of my life (without, somehow, finding an actual hotel). But what a window into humanity! Is there a better form of flash fiction than the one-star reviews on popular travel sites? These screeds have everything: hauntings, bedbugs, moral injury. Even the dullest airport Marriott, though — the nubbly carpet, the sad little cups — seems to exist somewhere outside of everyday life. That's what I like about books set amid temporary lodgings, too; like maritime law or that free zone in Denmark, they allow for other codes. Consider this week's newsletter picks, touched with mayhem and strange currencies. For the price of a good stoop sale or a library card, you can check out any time you like and you can, in fact, leave. I hope you'll read on anyway. —Leah "Hotel Splendide," by Ludwig BemelmansNonfiction, 1941
Though Ludwig Bemelmans is best known for writing and illustrating the beloved "Madeline" children's book series, he also penned this zingy and decidedly adult account of his early years as a young German immigrant in between-the-wars Manhattan, working at a "vast and luxurious structure with many mirrors" that he calls Hotel Splendide. (In real life, it was the Ritz Carlton.) The nom de guerre was probably necessary: Few who pass through the Splendide's doors are spared, from the morbidly obese society couple who waddle in nightly with their Pekingese to the bottle-blonde girlfriend of a Cuban marquis who takes a careless spin in an open-top Hispano-Suiza. (The trophy car is repaired and repurposed, once the blood stains have been removed from its leopard-skin seats; the trophy girl is not so lucky.) The guests, though, are mostly amuse-bouches; the real meal is the employees. There is a Monsieur Victor, the punitive manager who terrorizes underlings for minor infractions, then goes home every night to nurse his bald spot under a heat lamp; a womanizing in-house magician called Professor Gorylescu who dazzles at private parties when not chasing lithe young things from the Russian Ballet; and an eccentric, bird-murdering waiter known as Mespoulets. A Senegalese dishwasher with a flair for show business gets his own chapter, as does a homesick Bavarian busboy. The humor here is wry and episodic and blithely unconcerned with certain sensitivities, in the way of most old-timey things. A smattering of illustrations and piquant turns of phrase — why say a man's socks are merely green, when they can be "the color of a wet frog" — share some of Madeline's insouciant DNA, if not her intended audience. No orphaned Parisian schoolgirl, though, ever lived as well as young Bemelmans did during his later days at the Splendide, holed up in the empty penthouse suite of a traveling V.I.P., reading first-edition Mann and Voltaire and eating caviar with a spoon: a real American dream. Read if you like: Plush carpets, petit fours, finding out what really happens in the service elevator. "Motherland Hotel," by Yusuf Atılgan; translated by Fred StarkFiction, 1973
There are few amenities in "Motherland Hotel," and exactly zero whimsy. This bare, harrowing novel by the Turkish modernist Yusuf Atılgan concerns the lonely life of Zeberjet, the bachelor clerk and keeper of a former manor house turned family hotel. His rooms offer good enough way stations for the farmers, prostitutes, midlevel businessmen and other customers who pass through for a night or two, and there is a competent, largely silent maid to keep the sheets fresh and the communal washrooms clean. Though it's not in her job description, or seemingly to her preference at all, the maid is also subject to Zeberjet's sexual attentions, which he executes most nights with a grunt. The arrival of a beautiful female guest appears to unmoor something in him, though; when the woman checks out, promising to be back in a week, he becomes increasingly agitated and preoccupied by her return, rearranging and treasuring the small objects (a towel, a teapot) she's left behind. And his rare trips outside, to a cockfight or the local cinema, only cement that he is missing some crucial sense of how humans connect. Like Bemelmans, Atılgan was also apparently the author of a popular kids' book, though I would not presume to know for what kind of child. His writing style is brutally matter of fact, with an undercurrent of menace that expands and fragments as the book goes on, mimicking the mind of his protagonist. Just as it starts to feel like Zeberjet's head is a place you may have overstayed, Atılgan ends it with a perfect thunderclap of a paragraph. I read it several times over, and thought about it for days. Read if you like: profound alienation, train timetables, raki by the glass. Why don't you …
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