A Dreamlike Book! In the truest sense of the word. I don't mean this in a fanatical way, but rather literally. While reading the story of the Berry family, I often felt as if I were waking up in the morning after a wild dream. There are dreams that take place in realistic environments with familiar people, but suddenly other people or beings appear who don't really belong here and the dream becomes strange and surreal.

How else would it seem to someone when talking bears, amputated prostitutes, terrorists, dwarf-like figures, sex-addicted people, and one's own family suddenly live in a house. And this is told with a complete self-evidence. In this retrospect over several decades, the Berry family operates a total of four hotels in New Hampshire. So each hotel can be seen as a stage of life of the first-person narrator John, who is the middle of the five children. The book is full of symbolism, allusions, but also copies from other books. It is wonderfully told, especially extremely lovingly and humorously, but also very crude and vulgar in many places. One must surely like this, because otherwise the book will put one off. At the Hotel New Hampshire, one can clearly see why it is said: You either have Irving or you love him.

In some places, the Vienna Hotel New Hampshire was also too grotesque for me and I longed for the idyllic family life in the first Hotel NH in the former girls' school in New England. But this was probably because I took in the narrative too stuffily in this phase and was therefore bothered by the lack of realism. Only when I became aware of the connection with dreaming, precisely because Sigmund Freud is also often quoted from dream interpretation, did I change my perspective, saw the book more as a fairy tale rather than a biography and in this way found the fascination with the book again. Biographically, at most there is a reference to Irving's life, the wrestler (John is a fanatical weightlifter), the Viennese (where Irving lived for a long time), or the literary scholar (there are countless parallels to other books and authors he admires, e.g. The Great Gatsby or also The Tin Drum (especially the many dwarfs in the book)). But the leitmotif remains the love of life and the betterness to a personal matter. Probably every family member has this. The father wants the best hotel, Frank wants to create the best stuffed animal, Franny the best sex, John is obsessed with Franny (a very intense incest scene), and the small-statured Lilly is obsessed with growing. But everything should be done with caution. This is also a leitmotif of the family, especially constantly shouted by Grandpa Iowa Bob: Just keep passing the open windows. A title of a Queen song that was written for the film (I only found out about this through that).

In any case, it has given me great pleasure to accompany the Berry family and I will miss them. Just this feeling of loss after reading the last page tells me that anything other than 5 stars would not be justified for me.

Well, I finally give up on this.

I tried to read it again, having found it boring earlier. But the result was the same.

According to the blurb, it has been compared to the "great" American post-war fictions, such as Portnoy's Complaint, Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five, and Irving's own The World According to Garp.

Well, I hated all those books. And this one is even worse than The World According to Garp. What's more, it even includes an incestuous relationship. Yuck!

I don't usually like throwing books away, even if they are bad. But in this case, I may have to think about it again.

Abandoned, I won't be reading John Irving again. I just can't seem to get into his works. Maybe his style is not for me. I've given it a fair chance, but it just doesn't click. I'll have to look for other authors who can capture my interest and imagination.

3,75

Re-read. This was my first encounter with Irving back then. There are so many biographical associations within it that I can't clearly assess. "Stay away from open windows" remains a memorable phrase among my siblings and me to this day.

It has aged better than "Setting free the bears", which I couldn't finish. In the end, I still love all the characters very much even 30 years later, and as I said, it was my entry point to one of my all-time favorite authors.

This initial reading of Irving's work left a lasting impression. The biographical elements added a layer of complexity that made it both fascinating and challenging to understand. The simple yet powerful phrase "Stay away from open windows" has become a kind of inside joke among us siblings.

Unlike "Setting free the bears", which I struggled with, this particular work has stood the test of time. The characters have remained vivid in my mind, and my love for them has only grown stronger over the years. It truly was a significant milestone in my literary journey, introducing me to the wonderful world of one of the greatest authors of our time.

One of my most enlightening professional discoveries is astonishingly simple. It comes from Bob Probst: Reading is a self-centered pursuit.

This is indeed the case. I'm disappointed in myself for not grasping this earlier. It's a principle, perhaps one of the top two or three, that guides my work with pre-service English teachers. It would have transformed my approach to teaching English in high school. I was reminded of the self-absorbed nature of reading while making my way through John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire. I'll say more about this in a moment.

Here's why considering the solipsistic aspect of reading is crucial, especially for the teachers in my audience. We read, let's say 99% of the time, for our own motives and purposes. This is evident when we read for pleasure, but even professional reading is driven by specific personal reasons. I pick up a novel to immerse myself in the characters, savor the author's use of language, and be carried away by the plot and conflict. When I conduct research for an article I'm writing, my personal reasons are different, but the act of scouring journals and other texts for relevant information is also highly personal and depends on what I'm writing. In both cases, I'm reading for my own reasons, and this holds true for almost everyone, regardless of what they read.

School is the only place where people are regularly required to read for external reasons beyond their control. They want to do well on the quiz, write the paper, and contribute to the discussion, and the criteria for success in these activities are usually set by the teacher. In my experience, students are rarely encouraged to read for their own purposes, which directly contradicts the way people read outside of school. We read what interests us or, if we're unsure, we bring our own experience and knowledge to bear on the text to make sense of it.

This was also the case for me with The Hotel New Hampshire.

(As a side note, this is where the Common Core State Standards get reading completely wrong. In their blind adherence to "the four corners of the page" and the desire of standards author David Coleman that students not access their prior knowledge and history, essentially asking students to approach the text as a blank slate, which no one ever does, the self-centered aspect of reading is completely overlooked. By focusing solely on providing textual evidence for whatever superficial task the teacher has assigned, student choice is eliminated. We're asking students to read in direct opposition to what we know about how people read, which means most of the reading tasks they're asked to complete in school are artificial and have little transfer to the way we read outside of school. It's absurd.)

Back to The Hotel New Hampshire, and from here on I'll be more cautious.

I enjoyed the book, but it has several issues. It touches on anti-Semitism, adolescent sexuality, incest, prostitution, terrorism, and rape, yet it's also hilariously funny. It details the adventures of the Berry family, mainly father Win and his children Frank, Franny, John (who narrates the book), and Lily, and the three hotels they own in New Hampshire, Vienna, and Maine over about twenty years. The last item on that long list of the book's sensitive topics looms large after Franny is raped in high school by several boys, and it's tempting to view it as the catalyst for much of what develops later between her and John.

The interesting thing, and what made me think carefully about the inherent self-centeredness of reading, is how I zeroed in on Franny's rape as the book's defining event, even though it's not really about rape, misogyny, or even, broadly, gender politics. It's certainly part of the book's fabric, but if I said this was a book about rape, I'd be lying.

And yet.

The treatment of women in our culture has been on my mind lately due to the recent video of a woman being sexually harassed on the streets of New York, the misogynist cowards behind Gamergate, the threats against critic Anita Sarkeesian, and the need for #YesAllWomen. It's also the Hobby Lobby decision, the GOP's rejection of equal pay for women, and even yesterday's extremely lame conference on "men's issues" at the campus where I teach. If the autumn of 2014 taught us anything, it's that men, as the saying goes, are pigs.

So I was already sensitive to this subject, and I wasn't optimistic about the direction Irving was taking. It seems incredibly foolhardy to think a man has anything worthwhile to say about rape, but making it one of the key events in a novel had all the potential for a Hindenburg-like disaster. Because of my prior attunement to the issue, I was perhaps more prepared to trace its development than any of the other problems Irving presents.

I think there's one big reason why Irving's handling of this most sensitive issue ultimately works: it's nuanced. This may seem counterintuitive when dealing with an issue like rape, so I should probably clarify that it's the aftermath of the rape that's nuanced. The crime itself is always seen as the brutal act it is, but Irving's characters resist easy answers. Franny, as the victim, manages to be the strongest character in the book. She refuses to see herself as a victim, claiming that while she was physically assaulted, the rapists never touched her emotionally, never got to, as she puts it, "the me in me." She continues to write letters to one of her assailants for years after the attack because she was in love with him at the time.

In Vienna, the family meets Susie, another rape survivor (who also dresses as a bear, a backstory too convoluted to discuss here), who says Franny's response is ridiculous. According to Susie, Franny's blithe refusal to see herself as a victim indicates a refusal to deal with the crime itself, and by not attacking her assailants at the time, "she sacrificed her own integrity." The problem with this view, as John the narrator realizes, is that it reflects Susie's own refusal to accept that everyone is different, everyone processes trauma differently, and by demanding Franny handle her rape in the same way Susie did, she's robbing Franny of her individuality:

"Even before she started talking to Franny, I could see how desperately important this woman's private unhappiness was to her, and how – in her mind – the only credible reaction to the event of rape was hers. That someone else might have responded differently to a similar abuse only meant to her that the abuse couldn't possibly have been the same.

‘People are like that,’ Iowa Bob would have said. ‘They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.’

And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety – it stands alongside our sameness."

And this seems to me to be what the book is all about: simultaneously celebrating human difference while also recognizing the problems it causes. Is that the definitive answer to what Irving is aiming for with The Hotel New Hampshire? Probably not. As I said earlier, there are many other issues at play in the book, not to mention how it explores the concept of family: what it is, how it begins, what holds it together, how it copes with loss, and so on. There are many ways a reader can make sense of The Hotel New Hampshire, but I, rightly or wrongly, made sense of it through the lens of Irving's sensitive handling of the aftermath of rape. And that's because I, recently dismayed by the prevalence of misogyny in our culture, selfishly (and in defiance of the Common Core) took ownership of my own reading.

The Hotel New Hampshire is so rich that it invites these kinds of readings, and to reduce it, as I've somewhat done, to a book only about rape is to do it a disservice. The best thing about it is that I could read it multiple times and see a completely different story each time.

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