In this matter of hotels as refuges from reality from the deepest estrangement of the comfortable that never makes a home, I always remember the invented hotel guide of Oscar Sipan. Hotel rooms where characters pass through who hardly have time to occupy that space and whose ghosts remain there, in charge of the next one who arrives.
A writer should always take refuge in a hotel in search of inspiration. Because it is there where illustrious and nobodies rest their dreams in transition until the check out that impels them to resume their "real" life. Diverse people who leave there vague spectral impressions of what they would like to have been between business visits, passing love affairs, symposiums or rock concerts.
It is the turn of an author of electric prose like Leonard Pfeijffer in this book. Practically lyrical paragraphs, of vitalism turned into visceral or spiritual sonnets. Because everything fits in a hotel room from the most tremendous hangover to crime or the rambling made quick notes of the traveler turned occasional poet...
While doing research for a book on mass tourism, a writer named Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer suffers a painful breakup and decides to drop everything to put his memories in order. The place he chooses for his retirement is the Grand Hotel Europa, an establishment with an illustrious past and an uncertain future inhabited by a cast of bizarre characters.
The author sets himself the task of reconstructing in writing his explosive relationship with Clio, an Italian art historian with an audacious theory about Caravaggio's last painting, and as he progresses in his task, his fascination with the mysteries of the hotel increases. His conversations with the other guests, meanwhile, lead him to reflect on the decline of the Old Continent.
"Grand Hotel Europa" is a monumental novel that dialogues "sotto voce" with great European thinkers and writers, from Virgil, Horace or Seneca, through Dante, to Thomas Mann and George Steiner.
You can now buy the novel Grand Hotel Europa by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, here:
