I'm just back from England. I told myself I wouldn't take a book with me. I was hoping to travel light, and I knew I would never read on the red eye over. I did have 2 significant train rides while there, on one of which I might have the energy to read. I thought I'd just pick something up to read in my explorations. Then at the last minute I threw in Dostoyevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, which I'd been intending to reread and was appropriately slim. Of course that didn't stop me from picking up more books while I was there. At an Oxfam shop I found Hotel du Lac, and I bought it as well as a Penelope Fitzgerald book. I almost bought Lauren Groff's Matrix as well, but it was raining and the only means I had for keeping books dry while I was out was to put them in the front pocket of my hoodie and zip up my rain jacket over them and I didn't think all three books would fit.
I was drawn to the Brookner because I seemed to remember the writer Rumaan Alam posting about her recently. Hers was a name I knew, but that's about it. I didn't even notice until today the "Winner of the Booker Prize" tag on the cover of the book. I started it in my hotel room in Manchester on Saturday didn't get very far. I did read a bit more on the train ride from Manchester to London yesterday. And then I finished on my flight home, reading the last pages just as we were landing. It's a quiet little book and the culture in captures I think must have been a throwback even when it was published in 1984: well-heeled women at a discreet Swiss resort to escape the boredom or the scandal of their lives at home. But it's not set in the past; it's more the tail end of a period. The novel's protagonist is experiencing that end herself. At the start of the book she is thoroughly modern in some ways, but at the same time rather old fashioned. Over the course of the book, she grows up – she says so herself, though she's already 39. Her two weeks at the Swiss resort prove consequential for her coming into herself.
