Boring!
Just endured it till the end.

This is one of my favorite books of all time, and is-for what it's worth-my favorite John Irving book in a world where everyone else picks The World According to Garp. It's the perfect blend of sad and sweet and strange, a combination that is quite difficult to pull off. Irving himself doesn't always manage that trifecta successfully in his other works.

The story is about the travails (and boy, are there travails) of the Berry family of New Hampshire, in running the titular hotel and what follows (bears, Austria and wrestling are all involved, because John Irving.) Someone quoted, "Keep passing the open windows" to me the other day, and I almost cried because I love this book so freaking much and if you've read it, you get it.

It was also turned into a surprisingly faithful and underrated movie in the 1980's starring Beau Bridges, Jodie Foster and Rob Lowe.

Irving really was a modern writer: the unconventional relations between the family members, the risky cross-border themes, the rather marginal environment of prostitutes or revolutionaries, this all adds up to a real end-of-the-twentieth-century feel. And then there is the typical Irving-ingredient of absurd characters and situations that normally would seem completely incredible but with Irving are just a natural part of the story. In short, Irving presents a cocktail that makes this novel "big", giving the reader the feeling that he really learns something about the absurdity, complexity, harshness and tenderness of the world and of life.

For me, it's actually four and a half stars, losing half a star for the fact that the incest factor freaked me out! And it's not as good as Garp. But I'm not sure anything could be.

Irving is clearly a gifted writer. This is the type of family saga that it is easily to submerge oneself in. There are lots of characters in this book, the dad, the mom, Iowa Bob, Frank, Franny, the narrator, Lilly, Egg, Junior Jones, Freud, State-O'-Maine (Earl), the horrible football players, Rhonda Ray, Mrs. Urick and Max, etc....but I have not trouble at all keeping them all straight in my mind as I read, perhaps because Irving so carefully and memorably introduces each of them, that they make an impression.

But the the topics, go all awry and disturbing and have convinced me not to read another book by Irving. His writing skills do not make up for incest. Yuck. I finished the book and there were parts that were scary, sad, intriguing....but the incest and pedophilia (as described below) lost it for me. I wouldn't recommend this book.

I'm confused about how Franny is presented. She's seems overtly sexual, even toward her brothers-kind of- and then her gang rape on Halloween made me worried, mad and sad for her all at once....and yet before Thanksgiving anyway, she's back to commenting on sexual things as if nothing happened. Now I think what Irving has Junior Jones say to Franny, namely that no matter what happened on Halloween, no one touched the real her inside, and that she's a good girl. Important words perhaps. But I also think the rapists just getting expelled, and not jailed for life is not enough punishment...by far. And Franny is so "ok" afterwards (except for baths), well that seemed completely unrealistic.

It also bothers me that the main character is paying for intimacy from a woman old enough to be his mother (he's only 14)...that's illegal and predatory in lots of ways. It makes me sad for him and angry at the same time. I hope society has changed since this book was published in 1981 so that it wouldn't happen now, and wouldn't be casually included in a book....again without prosecution of the predator. I was happy when Sabrina Jones told him she was too old for him to practice kissing with...but then she suggested he try kissing her later. A 14 year old and a 29 year old...that is so wrong.

"But, you see, if I were a communist, who would I want for the government in power? The most liberal? No. I would desire the most repressive, the most capitalistic, the most anti-communist government possible--for then I would thrive. Where would the Left be without the help of the Right? The more stupid and right wing everything is, the better for the left." page 249 Interesting quote, made me pause for a moment and think.

Il libro è iniziato benissimo per poi calare con il susseguirsi della storia. Ho apprezzato l'utilizzo del tono scanzonato anche per affrontare temi più seri e decisamente più pesanti, ma poi anche questa allegria è andata scemando. Mi sono piaciuti molto i personaggi di Lilly e Frank e qualcuno tra i personaggi secondari. Non ho apprezzato alcune delle scelte dell'autore, soprattutto riguardanti il finale. Il libro è scritto comunque bene e la lettura scorre rapidamente, ma non saprei dargli un giudizio più preciso e non riesco a stabilire quanto mi sia piaciuto in termini di voto/stelline.

A COVID-ERA MEDITATION: BEGUN IN FEB 2020...

It’s been forty years since I read this book. It put me on a course that would take me thru almost the entire then-extant Irving opus, back in those depressing doldrums they called the eighties.

So Irving’s offbeat book helped this offbeat guy, through its deification of Murphy’s Law to a murky hilarity that totally reflected my thirtysomething life (and yes, in the evenings I watched the classic Thirtysomething TV series, so go figure how down I was)... at that sad time.

A Time of reflection and angst, after the passing of my dear Mom.

Dare I revisit the old hotel now?

Stay tuned in the warmer time of year, after I’ve reread this book - it showed me back then I’d only escaped from the seismic shock of the seventies to be met by a muddlesome mid age crisis!
***
I have now, some several months of unanticipated though virus-mandated isolation later, acquired an 80’s edition of this book in mint condition.

That copy I will probably give to a young friend who has long wrestled with this selfsame contrariness of happenstance throughout his life, as I did. Because I believe I now see the key to dismantling that contrariness in my life - or in yours - which key I’ll now bequeath to your common good.

Though my friend will relish its topsy-turvy world, it would now be deleterious to my own well-being.

Why do I say that?

Simply because the world as it is is much simpler and more workable than Irving’s, and all it takes is the clarity that is gained by a lifetime of fortitude in the adverse yoke under which us seekers labour, in a world ruled by Murphy’s Law.

Quantum physics might say the Murphy’s Law life is a parallel and antecedent world to a world that simply - and quite peacefully, amid the noise of eternal conflict - IS.

In such a way Parmenides saw the world: it just IS, immutably. And its trajectory is eternally circular.

You see, the phony world is TRYING to habituate us to endless defeat in a Murphy’s World, as Irving is in the following suggestion to himself: Give it up! As the gatekeeper tells Franz Kafka.

Get this - the phony world, no matter what age or aeon you live in, wants to sell you ITS version of itself. Got it? Not the straight and narrow world of pure unprejudiced ISNESS. Only its mere fabrication.

So it wants us to admit defeat and accept its version of life.

I don’t buy that. I KNOW life is simple, pure, uncluttered Being, because I have LIVED that experience. And intend to continue doing so.

And that’s why I can no longer read this book.

Life is at the same time much simpler and much more difficult than that. Cause you gotta fight it every inch of the way if you want to reach the summit (and “the Road goes on Forever”).

So I continue to fight - just trying to:

redeem the Dream...
The unseen token of the Higher Dream.

Our Dream takes dedication, but it’s real. So’s the battle!

This is my Quest, to follow that Star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how FAR...

And the end of all our searching
Will be to arrive at the place where we started
And KNOW the place for the First Time.

But, you know, it’s a book my young friend Matthew - and YOU - might LOVE, if you’re in those Sturm und Drang younger years when happenstance is NEVER on your side!
***
All is now well, as the chill winds of imminent fall weather blow...

And I, in the late September of my years, have made penultimate Peace with a world that always went against my expectations, simply by not refusing to bear my Lifelong Cross peaceably, as I ALWAYS should have done!

And another happy ending... Irving’s long and hilarious conundrum is now in the permanent possession of my fruitlessly questioning young friend!

May Irving’s ideas fall deep into his fertile spiritual soil.

I read 'The Hotel New Hamsphire' a over a decade ago. I just remember being shocked about the incestuous line in the story. Thinking, "This is ruining this! Why does John Irving always do this? Completely charming characters, interesting storyline, and then the sickness. It's always in there. The dysfunction. The immoral. I know it's a part of the real world, and I don't consider myself a prude, I just don't always want to fill my head with it.
The "great story" is far enough away now (I read it in college) that presently I cannot remember if it was good enough to read despite the more messed up portions of his writing. Right now, I am feeling like this in general about his stories.
Although I must admit I remember feeling distinctly like I just wasn't going to be able to handle it if Owen Meany died (and really crying, maybe even sobbing), or in general when any of the books ended, I felt a little sick that these rich, lovable characters weren't going to continually be in my life. I obviously loved his work on some level, because I read 3-4 of his novels in quick succession. I just wish he left the weird incestuous and inappropriate older women/ younger men sexual relations out of his books. I truly feel it wouldn't weaken the storyline. It wouldn't make him less a writer. But I suppose that is a part of him, part you have to accept. Maybe he is working thorough personal stuff. I doubt it, because he never seems to present it with any moral implications, it's just 'what it is' with him. He is an amazing, captivating story-teller. So reader beware. Or just make your own choice.

The bear knows this, too: it is hard work and great art to make life not so serious. Prostitutes know this too.

John Irving is trying to write the perfect novel. Every time he finishes one book, he looks back and frowns: still not good enough! So he goes back to the planning board and starts anew. We, as readers, should be grateful for his determination and for his integrity towards his art. Even as he reuses favourite themes, imagery and type of characters, Irving remains true to his vision of hope against all odds, in a world too serious for its own good. Sometimes you need a bear riding in the sidecar of a derelict motorcycle to help you through the dark times.

Every kid should grow up in a weird hotel, don’t you agree?

The Berry family, with parents Win and Marry, children Frank, Franny, John, Lilly and Egg, grandfather Iowa Bob, a pet dog named Sorrow and a trained bear named ‘State of Maine’ are taking over an abandoned school building in the small town of Dairy and transforming it into something else. The first Hotel New Hampshire is the product of the dreams of Win Berry, first fostered in the summer of 1939 when he met Mary and the bear on the coast of Maine, while serving as temporary staff for a fashionable resort.

Life is never boring in the Hotel New Hampshire

The novel starts as a romantic interlude on the eve of war, the fading splendor of a lost generation, spiced up with Irving’s signature black humour and weird characters. A wandering Jew named Freud with his elderly bear nicknamed ‘State of Maine’ are entertaining guests and temporary workers like Win and Mary – inspiring a form of rebellion against a life without surprises and without passion. A mythical figure of an elegant man dressed in a white tuxedo, rising out of the moonlit waters of the bay will be later revealed to be a reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald and his Gatsby character: the dreamer who rejects the world as it is and tries to recast it in his own vision. Fitzgerald is also used later as a reference for the writer who wrote the perfect ending to a novel.

“Everything is screwed down in the Hotel New Hampshire; in the Hotel New Hampshire, we’re screwed down for life!”

Children being raised by such a non-conformist family and in such an unusual setting as an improvised hotel, are liable to develop strong, unconventional personalities. Familiarity with other novels written by the same author will help identify recurring themes and overlaps with those other novels. Like I mentioned earlier, Irving is the sort of writer who starts from autobiographical elements and transforms them into universal truths by the power of his imagination, so there was little surprise for me when I came across references to things like the circus, midgets, weight lifting/wrestling, campus life, literature teaching, rape crisis centers, tattoos/taxidermy, Vienna/ psychotherapy, oddball sexuality and trauma.

Of all these elements, trauma is the most potent in shaping the life of the Berry family. For all the comedy and the free spirit mentality of the household, their life is defined by pain and loss.

Sorrow floats. We knew that. We shouldn’t have been surprised.

Time after time, life sends the Grim Reaper to block the path forward for Franny and Frank, John and Lilly and Egg. The focus of the novel, as the Berry’s first foray into the hotel industry stumbles and flounders, moves to post-war Vienna, where their old acquaintance Freud, an old blind man now with a new pet bear named Susie, is inviting them to take over his own derelict hotel in the town centre. The second Hotel New Hampshire is about to take off!

It was as if the power of his dreaming was so vivid that he felt compelled to simply act out whatever future he imagined – and we were being asked to tolerate his absence from reality, and maybe his absence from our lives, for a while. That is what “pure love” is: the future.

Win Berry, the irrepressible dreamer in the family, is the driving force behind the move to Vienna. The personal price the family has to pay is high, and for seven long years the children must learn how to deal with their terrible sadness. The elements of black humour and the theme of sexual abuse/ sexual liberation are continued under the tutelage of the twin teachers lodging in the second Hotel New Hampshire : the semi-legal prostitutes on the third floor, and the group of anarchist revolutionaries on the top floor. Between the lobby and the different inhabitants moves Susie the bear, another victim of sexual abuse.

She is a symbol for all the sexually wounded, which is what the ‘Hotel New Hampshire’ is about.

Violence, psychoanalysis, literature (with a reading of Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’) , Arthur Schnitzler’s bedroom excesses, sexual identity and family connections can all be condensed in one phrase that defines both the Vienna interlude and the novel as a whole:

“Keep passing the open windows”

Hang in there, Frank and Franny and John and everyone else – no matter how bleak and desperate life gets, it’s still better than the alternative. The words from an urban legend about a depressive clown who couldn’t take it any more and jumped from a high window, become the Berry family catchphrase. Father Win Berry, about to become a hero in a formidable apocalyptic scene at the end of the Vienna sejour, is the one who explains the significance of the meme to the reader:

“Human beings are remarkable – at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn’t get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can’t have, then we couldn’t ever get strong ‘enough’, could we? What else makes us strong?”

The stronger Berry family, such as it is left after the Vienna debacle, moves back to New York, and the children try to find their place in the world as adults. Before they can do so, there are still unsolved issues from the past – like dealing with repressed memories and with denial of inflicted deep wounds.  Franny’s rape and John’s incestuous desires, Lilly’s literary aspirations coupled with her stunted physical development, Frank’s insecurity and their father’s incurable optimism

The New York episode is memorable for me for the inclusion of poetry as an integral part of the narrative. At first I thought that Donald Justice was an alter ego of the author, a way to include metaphor as a way to define the characters and their significance. Further research reveals that he is a real poet, and a teacher of John Irving, one of the mentors who shaped him and helped him find his unique voice:

If what’s best and clearest in him isn’t in his poems, he wouldn’t be a very good writer.

Metaphorically speaking them, Donald Justice and John Irving will explain to us why we spent all this quality time in the company of the Berry family, in and out of one hotel after another. Like a good novel, a good hotel is there to provide service we sometime don’t even know we need:

We’ve been in this business for years, and that’s just what a good hotel does: it simply provides you with the space, and with the atmosphere, for what it is you ‘need’. A good hotel turns space and atmosphere into something generous, into something sympathetic – a good hotel makes those gestures that are like touching you, or saying a kind word to you, just when (and only ‘when’) you need it. A good hotel is always there but it doesn’t give you the feeling that it’s breathing down your neck.

I recommend a visit to this Hotel New Hampshire!

Kaikki isäni hotellit on hirtehinen kuvaus Berryn seitsenhenkisestä perheestä ja sen lemmikeistä. Tarina kattaa perheen elämää toisen maailmansodan kynnykseltä 80-luvun alkuun asti.

Tapahtumien kehyksenä toimivat muutamat hotellit, joita perhe isän haaveen mukaan omisti ja joissa perhe eli. Hotelleissa asui hyvin kirjaavaa joukkoa. Lapset varttuivat huorien, karhujen(?), koirien ja satunnaisten matkailijoiden keskellä. Kertojaäänenä toimii perheen keskimmäinen lapsi, John.

Perheessä sattuu kaikenlaista. Koomisista kohelluksista kauheisiin tragedioihin. Temaattisesti kirjassa sivutaan murrosikää ja seksuaalisuuden heräämistä, rakkautta, erilaisia seksuaalisia suuntautumisia, kuolemaa, raiskauksesta selviämistä, lyhytkasvuisuutta, uuteen kulttuuriin asettumista ja Sigmund Freudia.

Lisäksi Irving viljelee taajaan viittauksia muihin teoksiin, eniten F. Scott Fitzgeraldin 20-luvulla kirjoitettuun klassikkoon, Kultahattuun.

Tarinan rytmi on melko verkkainen. Tapahtumia kyllä riittää ja monia niistä käsitellään perusteellisesti. Paljon kirjassa pyörii seksin ympärillä. Enimmäkseen melkoisen huolettomaan sävyyn, mutta välillä hyvinkin totisesti, jopa... sairaalloisesti.

Jotenkin tuntuu, että Irving on ladannut Kaikki isäni hotellit -teokseen liikaa teemoja ja rönsyjä. Tyylillisestikin teos on levällään, mikä on toki tyypillistä Irvingiä. Välillä on kuin lukisi komediaa, sitten syvää draamaa, kohta taas nuorille suunnattua kasvutarinaa ja hups... yhtäkkiä lipsahdetaan melkein fantasian puolelle ja siitä sitten tragediaan. Päätä jo!!!

Toisaalta tämä on myös kirjan hienous. Lukijana ei todellakaan voi tietää, mitä seuraavaksi tapahtuu. Tai miten tämä tarina päättyy. Symbolitasolla Irving on ujuttanut tarinaan niin paljon aineksia, että analysoitavaa ja tutkittavaa halukkaalle riittää pitkäksi aikaa. Sigmund Freudejakin kirjassa on kaksi. Revi siitä!

Que bé m'ho passo amb Irving.

“Of course it’s all downhill. And anyone knows downhill is faster than uphill. It’s up until fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, then it’s down. Down like water, down like sand.”


Generally speaking, the books I read are pretty dark. Brooding, introspective, often tragic. I enjoy these books and what I can learn from them but they do take their toll at times (I’m looking at you Thomas Hardy) and send me toward something a little more life affirming. While John Irving’s “The Hotel New Hampshire” doesn’t lack for tragedy that is random, at times shocking, and painful, it is also something deeply beautiful about a family that is deeply flawed and at times threatens to break apart with each new setback it’s dealt and yet never does. Rather it only seems to strengthen them and bring them closer together as they never wallow in their misfortunes even when it would be justified.
The members of the Berry family are quirky to say the least and are definitely the stars of this story but it is the large cast of supporting characters that really bring this novel to life and separate it from being just another family drama. From Viennese prostitutes, women who dress as bears, real bears(!), anarchists, jocks, pseudo intellectuals and so many more, John Irving has created a world which is messy and complicated much like the one we see around us. With wonderful humor and a wonderful sense of rolling with the absurd, even when tragic, “The Hotel New Hampshire” is one of the best examples of what family is all about. I’m only sorry to have to close the book on the Berry family after watching them grow up and survive so much. But as young John Berry says:

“Trotsky was killed with a pickax” the bearded fellow said, morosely, trying to remain unimpressed. “But he’s not dead is he?” I asked insanely, smiling. “Nothing’s really dead”, I said. “Nothing he said is dead”. I said.
“The paintings that we can still see, they’re not dead”. I said. “The characters in books, they don’t die when we stop reading about them”.