The Little Hotel by Christina Stead

When Mrs. Trollope found that the bed was not for her, she went crying to her friend Madam Blaise. They were on good terms at that moment; and the next thing I knew was that Madame Blaise had moved her chaise lounge into Mrs. Trollope's room. I flew into a temper at that, and scolded them both. I was really furious. It's simple. To keep order in a hotel, everything must stay in the same place; and then there's the logic of equality. If one guest has new linen curtains, the other must have the best of the older curtains; if one guest has a plush new armchair, the other must have a cane lounge; if one has an extra table to write on, the other must have a footstool. I sometimes let Charlie fetch things from the attic or even from my own room to be sure of this equality; but I cannot allow others to make changes; I have a plan of it all in my mind.

Christina Stead's The Little Hotel is narrated by Madame Bonnard, the proprietor of an inexpensive hotel in the Swiss Alps. Her charges are more residents than guests, long term visitors who live the life of exiles. They are eccentrics, like the beautiful but dying Miss Chillard, or the wildly bigoted American Mrs. Powell. One madman claims to be the mayor of a city in Belgium; he sends Madame Bonnard and the other residents cryptic messages that are numbered as official documents for recordkeeping--Document 126 says that the coffee was particularly good this morning, etc., etc. I was a little sad to see the Mayor whisked out of the pages early on, to be replaced with characters whose eccentricities are a little more mtued.

Though narrated by Madame Bonnard, the true protagonist of The Little Hotel is Madame Trollope, an aging woman who is traveling with her "cousin," Mister Wilkins. In reality, the pair are longtime lovers, living more or less as husband and wife; though free of their former marriages, Mister Wilkins refuses to marry Madame Trollope or live openly as partners. He prefers the wink-wink artifice of it all, even though everyone at the hotel knows the deal. He also prefers to sponge off of the wealthier Madame Trollope, who, at the hotel, begins to lurch toward a breaking point. Is it possible for her to shake off Mister Wilkins, who really is a smug little creep, when she knows that the alternative is likely lifelong loneliness? What is the cost, The Little Hotel asks, of love?

The Little Hotel really has its charms. At times it approaches the heights of absurd misbehavior that make Stead's best novels so good, as when Madame Blaise complains about how her doctor husband pesters her with photos of diseased children--by producing a stack of the very same photos at dinner. Such is the world of The Little Hotel, where the residents revenge their own petty hurts and slights upon each other. There's something here about the nature of Europe after World War II; though they are nominally all supposed to get along--especially here in always-neutral Switzerland--the enmities of the American, British, and French residents toward Germans and Italians--form a powerful undercurrent. But the enmity that once sharpened the wits and feelings of Europeans no longer does; in fact, it seems to be an image of Europe slipping into a kind of bored senility, where resentments no longer have any national shape, but turn inward, toward the bedroom and the spirit. Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. More than anything else it seemed like a pleasant look into one of those communities where people are a little too close, and everybody would benefit from a nap or a nice walk. 

S. S. Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy

All the rooms know. Likewise the portraits. Ancestors who do not favor a better lot for their successors. For the children. Perhaps Johannes's twin in his wheelchair went from garden to garden trampling over the fate of Johannes's daughter. Objects and predecessors, names no longer uttered, a genealogy of images was against me. I stand listening to the news, the decision of my departure. Orsola's voice comes from a chair behind the desk. "It is for your own good." "And Johannes?" "Your father will do as we decide." It is for my own good. A venomous expression. But it sounds good. I know that that expression has never boded any good. Since then it has worsened my condition as a minor. You ought to watch your back when listening to diktats of this kind. When you are a hostage to the good. A prisoner to the good. The good of the people. Expressions typical of dictatorships. I leave the house with a suitcase and my schoolbag. I have been consigned to others.

For my own good.

Happy SHORT BOOK FEBRUARY, everyone. I've got all the books in my house that are under 200 pages stacked up, ready to be read in a 29-day frenzy. First up is S. S. Proleterka, a crisp 120-pager from Swisss author Fleur Jaeggy, a book as compact and sharp as "incorruptible crystal," a phrase the narrator uses to describe her heart. Having just received the ashes of her dead father, Johannes, she reminisces about a Mediterranean voyage they once took to Greece among the namesake ship. On this trip, the daughter fails to grow any closer to her aloof, unknowable father. She does get to know, however, at the age of fifteen, several of the ship's mates, who induct her into the world of sexual maturity--at her demand:

Johannes's daughter follows him to the cabin. He tells her to strip. He tells her to do what she does with Nikola. And no nonsense. The daughter thinks that this is part of experience. She strips and does what she does with Nikola. The mate's rough fingers fondle her. Scales. Like Nikola, he is violent. She feels as if drawn by lots. Drawn by lots by the crew. she feels pleasure in the disgust. I don't like it, I don't like it, she thinks. Yet she does it all the same. She no longer has much time. The Proleterka is the locus of experience. By the time the voyage is over, she must know everything. At the end of the voyage, Johannes's daughter will be able to say: never again, not ever. No experience ever again. "I want to go," she says now. The other throws her clothes at her. "Be my guest." He laughs, pointing at the door.

S. S. Proleterka is a book that makes you want to quote it rather than write about it, partially because of Jaeggy's staccato, almost violent, prose, and partially because it is so self-contained and self-possessed that it leaves you unsure of what to say about it. The key word in this passage seems to me to be "knowing": the narrator desires knowledge through experience, and sexual experience specifically, knowledge as in "carnal knowledge." Yet on the deck, she emphasizes over and over again how little she knows of her father, with whom she does not live, and who expresses no feelings whatsoever toward her, though it seems he has asked for her to accompany him on this jaunt. At the end of his life, she puts a nail in his pocket before cremation, hoping that something of hers will be mingled with him at last, but it comes back from the crematory whole alongside his ashes.

Jaeggy's narrator flips back and forth between the first person and third, between "I" and "Johannes's daughter"; her alienation from him is linked to an alienation from herself. (Anyone who's ever tried to play around with point of view in writing might recognize what a skillful thing this is.) She slips between the present tense and the past tense, too, mingling the present with memory in a way that collapses the distinction. She describes herself as haunted by a spectral twin, as Johannes had his own twin, a version of himself confined to a wheelchair. And then, at the end of the novel, a surprise, a swerve: the narrator is contacted by an aging man who insists that he is her biological father. The spectral twin, then, is that man's son, who died as a little boy. It's almost as if, for Jaeggy, learning the truth about oneself means nothing at all, has no impact. The strange man and his wife enter the narrator's life with belated chumminess, and we're not sure what to make of them. The truth, if it is the truth, has the air of falsehood. Who could be the real father of this narrator, so detached and severe, so haunted by the limitations of her own knowledge, than the man in the urn, Johannes?

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The story of Hans Castorp we intend to tell here--not for his sake (for the reader will come to know him as a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man), but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us to be very much worth telling (although in Hans Castorp's favor it should be noted that it is his story, and that not every story happens to everybody)--is a story that took  place long ago, and is, so to speak, covered with the patina of history and must necessarily be told with verbs whose tense is that of the deepest past.

Today is the first day of the year 2024, a year that marks the 100th anniversary of Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain. As soon as the bell dropped and the fireworks went off, I turned page one of this novel, at 850 pages itself a kind of mountain waiting to be climbed, and I began reading, so that I could finish by this afternoon, my first book of the year. Just kidding--I've been reading it for weeks, just enough pages each day so that I could finish it on the first. Though honestly, I had no idea until today that this was its 100th anniversary.

On top of the title mountain is the International Sanatorium Berghof, just outside the town of Davos in Switzerland. Hans Castorp arrives at the sanatorium one day, intent on visiting his cousin Joachim for three weeks. He stays for seven years. It doesn't take long for the doctors of the sanatorium to diagnose Hans Castorp with a mild illness--a moist spot on the lungs--but that's only half the story; in truth, the sanatorium is an appealing place, a world cut off from the "flatlands" below, a beguiling place like Brigadoon or Shangri-La. (In Hans Castorp's view, another beguiling aspect of the sanatorium is Frau Chauchat, with her Asiatic eyes, but perhaps she too is only a manifestation of the sanatorium's seduction, rather than a cause of it.) All too easily, Hans Castorp casts off his expectations of a shipbuilding career in the "flatlands" and embraces the life of the sick.

Before reading The Magic Mountain, I knew of it as a "comic novel" and a "novel of ideas," and it proved to be both. Its comic nature relies on the menagerie of personages who live alongside Hans Castorp at the sanatorium: the loquacious humanist Settembrini, the sinister arch-conservative Naphta, the outlandish Mynheer Peeperkorn, the idiotic Frau Stohr, and of course, Frau Chauchat. Among the medical staff, too, there are a number of strange figures, from the spiritualist lecturer Doctor Krokowski to the hideous Nurse Mylendonk to the enigmatic director of the sanatorium, Doctor Behrens. The characters are the primary pleasure, I think, of The Magic Mountain; the sanatorium, being slightly removed from the real world, seems the perfect home for them.

I knew, too, that part of the novel's reputation as a "novel of ideas" relies on the lengthy discourses between frenemies Settembrini and Naphta on subjects like humanism, religion, realism, science, and revolution. Settembrini is the novel's defender of the Enlightenment and rational progress; Naphta is a bitter and cynical Jew-turned-Jesuit committed to tradition and hierarchy. The two characters share much in common; both are poisonously long-winded, and seem to be fighting a kind of battle for Hans Castorp's soul. That in their discourses they often end up encroaching upon or even adopting each other's positions shows a blurring of the lines between their two worldviews. I don't know that I can describe their arguments with any more specificity than that, though; the truth is, when the two of them faced off, my eyes almost always glazed over. It was never clear to me how much we are supposed to truly consider the ideas they present and how much we are supposed to take it as sophistry. I imagine it's both: not only are the lines blurred between Settembrinism and Naphtaism, in The Magic Mountain the lines are blurred between wisdom and bullshit--which is itself a kind of wisdom. Still, I can't say that these parts, though famous, were my favorite sections of the novel, though I enjoyed the two characters very much. And I thought that the final showdown between the two was one of the novel's most surprising and memorable moments.

What interested me most about The Magic Mountain, I think, is what it had to say about illness, the body, and death. It's not clear at all that Hans Castorp belongs at the sanatorium; it's only a "moist spot" on the lungs, after all, and a very slight but persistent fever. We sense very quickly that anyone with an interest in extending their stay at the Berghof could find an excuse to do so, though others are clearly very sick. One thing that The Magic Mountain reveals is that illness--and health--are only labels, social constructs, as much ways of thinking about oneself and one's body than descriptions of any objective or measurable state. Settembrini advises Hans Castorp from the beginning to go back down to the "flatlands," knowing that illness has a kind of allure. Illness isolates and transforms; it turns the Berghof into its own world, different in kind from the "flatlands" below.

It also frees Hans Castorp up to live a life of the mind, trading in shipbuilding for philosophical disputation and what he calls "research." Like I said, it's not always clear what's wisdom and what's bullshit, but I was really taken with Hans Castorp's thinking about the life and the body, as when he repeatedly asks himself the question, "What is life?," and can only conclude that the spark that separates life from inanimate things remains unknowable and unidentifiable. The personages of the sanatorium, we are not allowed to forget, are also bodies, and unusual ones at that--like Hermine Kleefeld, who can whistle through the stomatic "pneumothorax" in her chest. There's something unsettling and fascinating about the way that Hans Castorp, after finally spending an evening deep in conversation with his beloved Frau Chauchat, persuades her to trade their x-rays. The portrait of Frau Chauchat that Director Behrens has painted is false, a bad lie, but to possess the x-ray is in way to possess Frau Chauchat herself. And these elements are emphasized by frequent forays into scientific and medical language that, despite being 100 years old, feels as familiar as the pamphlets in a modern doctor's office.

Illness, the body, death--these are big elements in The Magic Mountain, but it's one of those enormous novels that takes in just about everything, and it's impossible to say exactly what it's about. It's about politics, too, and war, and I suppose one way to read the sanatorium is as a microcosm of pre-World War I European society. It's a big novel, but also a great one, not necessarily in the sense of quality--though it is really rewarding and a lot of fun--but in the sense of vastness, of capaciousness. It's the kind of novel you might spend three weeks in--or sevne years.