The award-winning story that lured me to a Swiss lake
by Louise Doughty
It’s 40 years since Anita Brookner won the Booker Prize for her slender novel Hotel du Lac. The awards were televised back then, and I still remember the look on her face when they announced her name. She gave a sharp little dip of her head and her eyes widened, as if someone had dropped a tennis ball on her skull with a small donk.
Her surprise was shared by many in the literary community, which expected the award to go to J G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, a weighty, meaty story of survival during the Second World War. Another hot contender was Julian Barnes for a postmodern novel full of literary allusion, Flaubert’s Parrot. Apparently, the acclaimed author and professor Malcolm Bradbury put his arm round Barnes’s shoulder and said, ‘Well, I don’t think you should have won. But I don’t think you should have lost to that book.’
It’s not difficult to see why Brookner’s win caused such consternation among the men in tuxedos. Hotel du Lac is about a spinsterish romantic novelist, the euphemistically named Edith Hope, who stays in a hotel by a lake, observes the other guests, nearly snares a man and stares at the lake feeling wistful.
I read Hotel du Lac at the time of its Booker win, when I was a callow aspiring novelist aged 21 who very much wanted to write the kind of weighty books that seemed the exclusive province of those men. Hotel du Lac both bored and annoyed me in equal measure. Edith’s wistfulness, her woes… ‘Who cares?’ I thought, closing it with a sigh and giving my copy to my mother. (She loved it, but what did she know?) When the author declared her own books to be ‘quite nice but unimportant’, many, myself included, felt inclined to agree.
Fast-forward 40 years, now a veteran of ten novels myself, I was invited to the World of Words Festival in Gstaad, Switzerland. In need of a short break before my official duties I took the advice of the festival director, who recommended the village of Vevey, on the shores of Lake Geneva where, he said, the only place to stay was the Grand Hôtel du Lac – the very hotel in which Brookner set her prizewinning novel. When I realised it was the 40-year anniversary of her win, the suggestion became irresistible. What better place to reread Hotel du Lac than Hôtel du Lac?
When Edith first arrives at the hotel in the novel, she describes it as ‘a stolid and dignified building, a house of repute, used to welcoming the prudent… its linen spotless, its service impeccable’. For all its grandeur, the current version has an intimate feeling that is reassuring if you’re a middle-aged woman on her own who wants to stare at a lake and sit around reading books. The staff greet me with the kind of courtesy that implies they have known my family for years and my room, though small, is plush with cushions and fragrant with expensive toiletries. The linen is indeed spotless.
Breakfast is served on the terrace, with a view of the lake and small mesh food umbrellas to protect your plate from the tiny, cheeping birds that descend should you leave it unattended. On my first morning, I order an omelette. The waiter bows and asks if I would like it ‘English-style, or French?’ When I try to ask about the difference in my schoolgirl French he says, ‘Please, Madam, it will be much easier for us both if we speak in English.’ The difference, he explains, is that a French omelette is moist inside, whereas English is like a face flannel.
To my surprise, I appear to be the only person staying at Hôtel du Lac reading Hotel du Lac. There are no copies on display anywhere. But the village of Vevey and Lake Geneva, unnamed in the novel, are pleasingly how Brookner describes them. As a single woman of a certain age, I am comfortable wandering along the shores after dark, past strings of restaurants, taking the steamer with its haunting foghorn, or sitting in cafés alone thinking about life, much like Edith.
Revisiting the book 40 years on is a revelation: firstly, in how unromantic it is. The suave and wealthy Mr Neville, who proposes marriage in a cold, 19th-century way, is a man who wants ‘a wife whom I can trust’, hence his attraction to Edith. Mousy as she may be, she is merciless towards her fellow guests. A wealthy widow and her daughter enter the dining room in the evenings ‘apparently unaware that there was anyone else in the room but themselves or that the meal had been prepared for any other purpose than to assuage their own unassailable appetites’.
I realise that, as a young woman, I was too used to being the observed to understand the benefit of invisibility; to see rather than be seen – a benefit all too apparent now I’m in my 60s.
In many ways, Hotel du Lac is a dated novel. But it was dated in 1984 – it could have been set in 1884 with little adjustment. The time frame is not the point. It’s the classic tale of the small, quiet woman – a tortoise rather than a hare. Brookner was the tortoise who got the Booker Prize and even if it took me 40 years to appreciate the fact, Hotel du Lac stands the test of time – there is no greater prize than that.
A Bird in Winter by Louise Doughty is published by Faber & Faber, £9.99
In Japan, truth is stranger than fiction
by Tasmina Perry
Japanese fiction is having a moment. Butter by Asako Yuzuki is Waterstones Book of the Year and nine out of the top 20 recent bestselling translated fiction titles were Japanese. I could also tell something was happening from the pile of candy-coloured books on my teenage son’s bookshelf. ‘Try this, it’s fantastic,’ he told me, thrusting a copy of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman at me. And it was. So much so that, in September last year, my husband John, our son Fin and I went on holiday to Japan.
There is a whimsical quality to the literature. It’s comforting yet cutting edge, quirky and introspective – a world of magical bookshops, coffee culture, libraries and cats, and it’s what we go looking for the moment we arrive in Tokyo.
Sweet shops sell candy floss the size of Spacehoppers, department-store food halls are a gourmet paradise. In the backstreets of Harajuku we dive into cafés like Reissue, for their amazing latte art – my foam is shaped into the head of Pikachu; Tsutaya, in hip Daikanyama district, becomes my new favourite bookshop, with reading nooks, aisles of English-language titles and a thriving magazine department.
The convenience stores (konbini), as depicted in Murata’s novel, don’t disappoint either. You’ll find one on every street corner and we went in them multiple times – every day. We loved the robot smoothie machines, melon-flavoured Coke, steamed buns, restaurant-quality sushi and sandos (sandwiches) of fluffy milk bread that are like biting into a cloud. No wonder Murata was inspired by them – unlike this author, who has no plans to set a book in Tesco Express.
A bullet-train ride away is Kyoto, the setting for Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, a book that first sparked my interest in Japan in the 1990s.
Our apartment is in Higashiyama, Kyoto’s old town – an enchanting area of traditional wooden houses and pagodas. By day it’s rammed with tourists but at night, when the temples close, the crowds disappear and the lanterns flicker on, I feel transported into the pages of Golden’s novel.
Kyoto has clamped down on geisha tourism in recent years, closing off many of the alleyways that house the okiya where geishas live and train. But we still spot the Ichiriki-tei teahouse made famous by the novel in the historic Gion district, and although we fail to see any real geishas, kimono hire is big business and hundreds of tourists play dress-up when they visit famous shrines like Fushimi Inari.
Everything is magical or offbeat in Japan, from canned bread to cat cafés. They all remind me why, for so long, the lifestyle and aesthetic was seen as so cool. Somewhere along the way Scandi trends like hygge took centre stage, yet the popularity of Japanese literature has not just shone a light back on this charming country, it reminds us to create beauty in the everyday.
A medieval French mystery
by Kate Mosse
In the winter of 1989 we bought a tiny house in the shadow of the medieval city walls of Carcassonne in France. It was the beginning of my love affair with Languedoc and I spent every free moment reading about the region that I would learn to call home.
One of the books that came up time and again was The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Centred around a tiny village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, Rennes-le-Château, it was published in 1982. It’s a beguiling mixture of speculation, conjecture, conspiracy theory and esoteric Christianity predicated on the idea of a secret more than 1,000 years old, discovered by a 19th-century priest, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene. I recall thinking that, although the book was promoted as nonfiction, it read like a thriller.
The story begins in 1886, when a Catholic priest named Abbé Saunière arrived in Rennes-le-Château. From then until his death in 1917, he renovated the church and presbytery, building Villa Bethania and the gothic revival tower Tour Magdala, while laying out formal gardens – all at great expense, well beyond the salary of a humble village priest. Where did his wealth come from? What was the treasure he found? The book became a cult classic and brought visitors in their hundreds of thousands to the village.
One morning in spring, when the first of the hawthorn was just coming into blossom, I set out to drive the 45 kilometres south from Carcassonne to Rennes-le-Château. The scenery was breathtaking: deep evergreen pine forests, mountain flowers of pink and blue, until I arrived at the hilltop village perched on limestone cliffs.
Now the village is an organised tourist attraction and everything is very sanitised. But on that April day in 1992, there was still an atmosphere of mystery. From the hideous font in the church, held up by the devil Asmodeus, to the creaking floorboards of the Villa Bethania with the scent of beeswax polish and must, the idea of an arcane mystery did not seem so far-fetched. It is a beautiful place, but unnerving. I could see without hesitation how the conspiracy had taken hold.
Laughter and tears in Turkey
by Victoria Hislop
I had already holidayed several times on the Greek island of Cephalonia, inspired purely by Louis de Bernières’s 1994 book Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, so when I read that he actually believed his best novel was Birds Without Wings, I was intrigued. I read it in 2010 and then soon found myself on a plane again, this time to Turkey, compelled to visit the place on which it is based.
In the story, the village is called Eskibahce, but it was inspired by a real place, Kayakoy, in western Turkey (near Fethiye, where I stayed). The novel is set in the period when Greek-speaking Christians were threatened with persecution by the Turks – by the third decade of the 20th century, the entire town had been abandoned, leaving hundreds of homes, along with churches and shops, to fall slowly and inexorably into dereliction and gradually be taken over by nature. The atmosphere is extraordinary and reminded me of the abandoned leprosy island of Spinalonga in Greece, which had previously inspired me to write my novel The Island.
In Kayakoy, the streets still seemed to echo with people’s conversations and laughter. It had a tremendous beauty and, of course, it was impossible not to populate it in the imagination with de Bernières’s own characters. But sadness always prevails in such places, too, and it is the magic of de Bernières’s writing that allowed me to feel the bittersweetness of this place.
On this same trip, I decided to fulfil a long-held ambition to paraglide. As I stepped off the highest mountain in the region, known as Babadag (Father Mountain), I had the greatest surge of adrenaline I have ever experienced. Floating more than 2,000 metres up in the air, I looked down and saw Kayakoy below. Even from the sky, there was something epically magical about that abandoned town.
In search of a Spanish hero
by Elif Shafak
When I was a young student and an aspiring writer, I discovered the most influential Spanish poet and playwright of the 20th century: Federico García Lorca.
I was born in Strasbourg, France, but raised by a traditional grandmother in the Turkish capital, Ankara, after my parents got divorced, and somehow Lorca’s Andalusian folk tales felt familiar. I liked that he was not only a teller of stories, but also a searcher of silences. There was something else in his writing that appealed to me: a deep attachment to a landscape and a culture. In Spain, people will rightly tell you: ‘Granada is Lorca and Lorca is Granada’.
One summer in my early 20s, after reading his last play, The House of Bernarda Alba, I decided to travel with friends to the place that had made this quintessential artist from Granada who he was. Of the train trip from Madrid I do not remember much, but once I arrived in Fuente Vaqueros, a farming village in the Andalusian lowlands, my senses were awakened: by fruit orchards, poplar trees, scents of sage and rosemary, and beautiful views.
The simple house with whitewashed walls and flowers on the balconies where he was born in 1898 is today a museum, and a fountain commemorates him in the main square. You can idle in the cafés where he met with his fellow writers. But a true literary pilgrimage honouring this remarkable poet cannot only focus on landmarks. It is the culture and the people that were essential for Lorca. The ballads of Andalusia. The duende fuelling the passion of flamenco dancers.
Guided by this belief, and hoping to avoid the glitzier spots, I looked for local peñas and tablaos (music venues for flamenco dances). They had barely any publicity and minimal decoration – only a few old chairs on stage – but I saw the most exquisite art. I chatted with young street performers and elderly grandmothers sitting in the shade. But mostly I just wanted to listen. Writers, I believe, need to be curious readers and listeners.
In 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was arrested by paramilitaries, executed and buried in a mass grave. He was 38, and his body was never found.
But the spirit of Lorca is everywhere in Granada. If you close your eyes you can hear it in the wind.
This post was originally published on here
