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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/05/strange-hotel-eimear-mcbride-review In a series of anonymous hotel rooms, a woman reflects on romantic loss and the instability of identity, in the latest novel from the Girl Is a Half-formed Thing author “Door. Scratched dull lock. Put in. Turn the key. Fail. Joggle. Lean into. Be firm. Try again now. Try again, again. And, on another try, there. She’s in.” The nameless protagonist of Eimear McBride’s Strange Hotel – whose story is revealed, apart from a brief passage near the end of the book, in the close third person – is here caught going into a hotel room in Avignon, southern France, the first of five such transient stopping places. And, with the “fail” and “try” chiming through that string of brief sentences, McBride reveals this narrative’s link with Beckett, whose short piece “Worstward Ho” contains the famous words, usually decontextualised to sound like an exhortation to persistence: “Fail again. Fail better.” “Worstward Ho”, like most of Beckett’s work, locates existential drama firmly within the confines of the physical body, the flesh cage that the mind must drag with it wherever it goes, but which can also offer moments of forgetting and release. In her previous two novels, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians, McBride has probed this porous boundary, and its connection to how we break language down in order to represent the chaotic interplay between our thoughts and our bodily sensations, appetites and stresses. In Strange Hotel, too, there is a constant traffic between the impulses and exigencies of the body and the looping digressions and brutal hairpin bends of the mind. “That is the plan. That is plan,” she intones to herself in France, determined not to allow herself to wake with an unknown man in her hotel room, but “the plan” seems to refer to something much more fundamental and not immediately apparent than mere carnal reluctance. Continue reading...
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