Simone and Her Books

My first book of 2024. I went into this one with completely different expectations. I thought it’d be dystopian. I thought it would be sci-fi, but instead it was the best kind of literary; the kind that interweaves lives to show you how one singular event or a hotel can shape the lives of a ton of people who are touched by it.

Here’s more about The Glass Hotel

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients’ accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.

In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.

My thoughts

“Caiette was the first place he ever loved. There was nowhere else he wanted to go. Give me quiet, he thought, give me forests and ocean and no roads. Give me walks to the village through the woods in summer, give me the sound of wind in cedar branches, give me mist rising over the water, give me the view of green branches from my bathtub in the mornings. Give me a place with no people in it, because I will never fully trust another person again.”

The story starts off with a young Vincent losing her mother to a drowning incident. The chapters are short, maybe only a sentence or two, but enough impact to see how it affects Vincent for the rest of her life. From the secluded woods of Vancouver to the bustling streets of Manhattan all shared through a Ponzi scheme that destroys countless lives, Emily St. John Mandel portrays a world so deeply interconnected with each other, to Vincent in some transient way; through degrees of separation.

And each character lends a hand to the bigger story. Each component like puzzle pieces to reveal a bigger story line: the fall of a man from his Ponzi scheme gone wrong. I didn’t think I would be able to connect with characters in this scenario. I’ve luckily never fallen victim to a Ponzi scheme, but Emily St. John Mandel’s talent lies in the ability to make you connect with people you wouldn’t necessarily do in real life. Her portraits of these characters are stark, in their natural habitat, flaws and all and somehow you can’t help but to emphasize with them.

In true Emily St. John Mandel style, it all comes together at the end. While there aren’t any sci-fi elements or magical going on, there’s this thread of ghostly behavior among the characters. People who have long gone arise in a haunting way like shadows in the past or truths that you can’t outrun that come back to haunt you in unpredictable ways. It’s slowly introduced throughout the story, but the final ending circles us back to the beginning in a poetic tribute to the character who started it all.

I do wish there was more around the hotel itself. While it being the name of the novel, I thought it would have a deeper role in the lives of the characters. Maybe in a way? It was the starting point’ the place where it all began but it wasn’t he place where it ended. Maybe it was the place where the future held endless possibilities because it shows up again in fond memories. Like the beauty within nature draws you back. Its simplicity and seculsion from everything else in the world gives these character a purity they can never obtain on their own.