Two aspects struck me on my first reading of Marie Redonnet’s Hôtel Splendid. Pared back sentences flow unexpectedly, not quite a bricolage, but also not quite where one expects them to be. Take the opening paragraph:

The Splendid is not what it used to be since grandmother died. The lavatories always need unblocking. The wallpaper is peeling off the walls because of the damp. The Hôtel Splendid is built over an underground lake. It’s grandmothers fault. No one had ever built a hotel on the edge of the swamp. Having her own hotel had always been her dream. She wanted to do things properly.

The more one interrogates the paragraph, the more the causal connections between the sentences seem erratic. The narration continues in that style, until one realises that Redonnet is also compressing time and space in unusual ways. Situations and emotions change polarity within a few paragraphs. On one page she writes, “The Hôtel Splendid has come back to life.” Two pages on she reports, “There are not many guests.” The reversals in the hotel’s fortunes and those of its guests and hosts are relentless.

On a second reading, it was easier to appreciate the narrative voice, old-fashioned in a sense, but one that maintains, even reinforces, a distance from the narrator and her two similarly named sisters. Redonnet subverts the first person perspective by adopting a voyeur-eye view. The effect is alienating but without dampening any curiosity to see how far, and where, Redonnet plans to take the story.

Hôtel Splendid is part of a triptych of novels, translated by Jordan Stump. I intend to read all three out of curiosity for Redonnet’s stylistic development and to see what binds the three novels together.