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“Prefigures Downtown Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs by examining multiple characters from different classes.” —Shelf Awareness
The luxury Grand Hotel is a revolving door for the stray souls of 1920s Berlin. Among the guests is Doctor Otternschlag, a World War I veteran whose face has been sliced in half by a shell. Day after day he emerges to read the paper in the lobby, discreetly inquiring at the desk if the letter he’s been awaiting for years has arrived. Then there is Grusinskaya, a great ballerina now fighting a losing battle not so much against age as against her fear of it, who may or may not be made for Gaigern, a sleek professional thief. Herr Preysing also checks in, the director of a family firm that isn’t as flourishing as it appears, who would never imagine that Kringelein, his underling, a timorous petty clerk he’s bullied for years, has also come to Berlin, determined to live at last now that he’s received a medical death sentence.
All these characters and more, with all their secrets and aspirations, come together and come alive in the pages of Baum’s delicious and disturbing masterpiece—a Weimar-era bestseller that retains all its verve and luster today.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 7, 2016 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781590179680
- File size: 2082 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781590179680
- File size: 2082 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from May 1, 2016
The well-born and the downtrodden live out their fates against the backdrop of a Berlin luxury hotel in Baum's 1929 bestseller. The legacy of Baum's novel is not just the 1932 MGM film starring John Barrymore and Greta Garbo (and the 1980s Broadway musical), but all those star-stuffed movies and fat popular novels--The High and the Mighty and Airport among them--in which some institution or event serves as the setting for the intersecting individual dramas. What distinguishes the book from its plump progeny is not only its relatively modest length but the delicacy of Baum's writing. Her characters and situations range from the swoony (the aging ballerina worn out by the demands of her art) to the romantic (the nobleman-turned-rakish jewel thief) to the melodramatic (the dying middle-aged clerk blowing his savings for a taste of the life always denied him). Throughout, Baum writes with the melancholy glissade of a mink stole sliding down a shoulder as a fabulous evening comes to a close. The hotel becomes a stage, and Baum is the novelist as choreographer, guiding her characters smoothly through their steps, regarding them with sophisticated though not unsympathetic irony. The book is kin to both the stories of Stefan Zweig and the films of Max Ophuls, both artists who chronicled devastating loss but drew our eyes to the exquisite fluidity with which the most precious things slid through their characters' elegant, manicured fingers.COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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