Eimear McBride’s tale of a woman drifting from one hotel to another leaves our reviewer scratching her head
If you’ve read so much as a sentence of Eimear McBride’s writing, it is likely to have burned into your brain. Her first two novels, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians, were both written with a ferocious immediacy, in hurtling, viscerally direct prose that captures pre-verbal thought processes “far back in the mind”, as McBride put it.
Strange Hotel feels like a book determined to show just how different it is from its predecessors. An unnamed 35-year-old woman checks into a hotel in Avignon; over the years, we’ll meet her in several more – in Prague, Oslo, Auckland and Austin. She monitors her desire to drink, to have casual sex, and to not quite look at her own past. She is haunted by a lost love, and these encounters with others – or mostly, really, with herself – in these anonymous rooms bring painful flashes of that former relationship.
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