Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum

On my recent visit to London, I was fortunate enough to visit a whole slew of bookstores. I saw this brand-new edition of an NYRB Classic: Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum. It ticked off a lot of boxes for me:

• Nice cover
• Set in a hotel -- so lots of characters thrown together 
• Woman writer
• Translated into English -- I'm always trying to widen my literary perspective
• Set in Germany
• Between the wars -- one of my favorite time periods

So, basically, this was a no-brainer -- I had to buy it. It took a couple of chapters to get into it, but once I got started it was great. Set in 1929, it's the story of a different guests at the posh Grand Hotel in Berlin: the aging ballerina Grusinskaya, who is worried that she's losing her appeal; the sexy playboy Baron von Gaigern; the tragic Dr. Otterschlag, whose face was destroyed by a bomb during the Great War; Herrr Preysing, the director of a family firm who's desperate to secure a manufacturing bid; and the meek clerk Kringelein, who's worked for thanklessly for years for Preysing's firm. He recently had a terminal medical diagnosis and has decided to spend his last few weeks enjoying life. Some of the characters have a slight connection, like Preysing and Kringelein, but after a few days in the same hotel, their lives interconnect and are changed forever.  

I really enjoyed this book. I love how Baum intersected all the characters' lives, and I thought the plot was great and the ending well done; however, I think the strength of this book was the character development. I do love any book that has a variety of characters -- I'm particularly fond of books set on trains and sea voyage (I think it started with my love for Murder on the Orient Express.) In this book I was concerned at how many characters Baum, was going to introduce, but it was easy to keep them all straight. I do wish there had been a better ratio of female to male characters (there's also a beautiful young stenographer who shows up about halfway through the book) but Baum made a point with both of the women about the limited choices they had during the time period. 

I also found the writing to be very insightful. The whole book is full of great quotes that I kept marking with little scraps of paper as I read. Here's one of my favorites:

Then the doors closed throughout the hotel. Everyone locked himself in behind double doors and each was left alone with himself and his secrets.

And here's Dr. Otterschlag using hotel as a metaphor for life:

The whole hotel is only a rotten pub. It is exactly the same with the whole of life. . . . You arrive, stay for awhile, and go on again. Passing through. Isn't that it? . . . and what do you do in life? A hundred doors along one corridor and nobody knows a thing about his next-door neighbors. 

Originally published in German as Menschen im Hotel, this was an international best-seller and was adapted as a stage play and an Oscar winning movie in 1932, starring Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, and Joan Crawford -- it's the source of the famous Garbo line "I want to be alone." I've never seen it but it's available on Netflix so it's at the top of my DVD queue.

Greta Garbo and John Barrymore. She just wants to be left alone .

Vicki Baum wrote about 50 books altogether, some in German, some in English after she left Europe during WWII. As an Austrian Jew, her books were banned by the Nazis, so I'm counting this as my Banned or Censored Classic Book for the Back to the Classics Challenge. 

TTYL by Lauren Myracle

Banned books week!

I was inspired by a display at my library to include TTYL by Lauren Myracle. All I knew about this book was that it was a book written in IMs (so I guess it's epistolary fiction) and that it must have offended someone at some point. Also, the author has written a series of juvenile books that my daughters enjoy (Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen); at some point, they're going to want to read another book by this author, so I thought I'd better check it out first.

A small note of explanation regarding banned books: many of the books found on banned books lists haven't actually been banned, just challenged, which is slightly different. Challenged means that someone has gotten his or her knickers in a twist about a book and complained about it to a library or school; banned means that the book has been successfully removed by said challengers. Many, many books are challenged unsuccessfully. And hooray to all the librarians, teachers, and school administrators for standing up for literary freedom. Frequently, the book-challengers have never even read the books in question. Should I be shocked? I know I shouldn't, but it never ceases to amaze me that people jump on the banned-books bandwagon without completing the entire literary work.

OK, rant over. Back to the review.

TTYL is the story of Zoe, Maddie, and Angela, three 10th graders in suburban Atlanta. The entire story is told in the form of Instant Messages. The book was published in 2002, but I'm sure if it had been written today it would have been all text messages or tweets, so it might have been even more difficult to read for an adult. I admit it, I am a texting snob. I do text, but I can't help it, I write in complete sentences, and I do punctuate and capitalize. Unless I'm being ironic. I did find it really irritating that these girls can have these long conversations but can't take the time to write out the word "you," "you're," and "night." Ironically, I read this book on National Punctuation Day.

However, if you can get past the grammar and IM-speak, this is actually a decent story. I did sometimes get the characters confused (the characters are differentiated by font and typeface color, which helped), but I was sucked into the story pretty quickly. Basically, the girls are dealing with the usual 10th grade stuff: cliques, crushes, strict parents, getting a driver's license. The girls are worried that their friendship will suffer from the usual growing-up high school angst. However, these girls have some serious problems that emerge: shy Zoe gets a lot of attention from an English teacher that attends her church, and things get a little nebulous. Maddie's new hip friend posts something really embarassing about her on the Internet -- these are real problems that could happen to a lot of kids, and teen readers should be aware of them.

I knew this book was banned/challenged because of the language and adult content, but some of it really did surprise me. In fairness, [mild spoiler alert!] the girls are just talking, no action. It really isn't any raunchier than most of the episodes of Sex and the City, but those characters are thirtysomething women, not teenagers. On the one hand, I'm well aware that teenagers talk like this all the time, so it's probably fairly realistic talk. I know teenagers are curious about sex, but some of it did make me pretty uncomfortable. It's a little icky.

Also, I do think that the sexual content of the book detracts from some good material about the more serious issues. Yes, the girls are somewhat stereotyped -- Angela is the pretty girl, Zoe is the good, religious girl, Maddie is the wild party animal -- but there are some topics included that parents should discuss with their kids.

Of course, this is probably just ironic because the parents who should discuss this stuff with their kids are the ones who aren't paying attention to what their children read anyway. Like the typical parents in most YA lit, the parents in this book seem to be clueless and uncaring; for example, there's a subplot about the girls planning a weekend camping trip virtually unsupervised. Who are these idiots? In this day and age when most parents won't let their kids walk to soccer practice unsupervised, how is it possible that they'd allow this? It is implied that Maddie's father has a drinking problem -- these are the parents that give their newly licensed daughter a car and let her drive around at all hours of the day and night. No wonder naked videos of this girl are posted on the Internet.

Basically, I'd really recommend this book for parents of teenagers to read -- they really need to be aware of what's going on with high schoolers, and talk with them about it. Maybe that's the underlying message that most librarians (and teachers, probably) want to pass on: pay attention to what your kids are reading, and why they're reading it. Don't stick your head in the sand and pretend that if you ban books like this, kids won't read them. Nothing will make a kid want to read something more than telling them that it's bad and that they shouldn't. I'd like to pretend that my twelve year old daughter won't want to read books like this, but she probably will. Hopefully when that time comes we can even talk about it.