“The Glass Hotel” by Emily St. John Mandel:
“Sweep me up“! This words are scrawled with acid marker on a window pane by Vincent, one of the main protagonists of this extraordinary tale, by then a thirteen-year-old school girl who likes to shoot 5-minute-videos. Sweep me up, out of my life, take over control, give my life a direction, take me out of my present situation: a plea for change and the admittance of weakness in will.
How would your life have been if this and that had happened differently, if you’d chosen this path instead of the other one? Alternate realities, permutations of events, what-ifs. These are, among others, themes in The Glass Hotel.
And we are being swept up by this tale. Swept up and into a long arc of narrative that begins in the titular Glass Hotel, a sparkling place on a remote Vancouver Island for the rich and wealthy who wish to flee civilization for a while and still stay among themselves. It is owned by Jonathan Alkaitis, a New York self-made entrepreneur in finance who, in his hubris lives in the firm assumption that no serious harm will come to him, that he’ll get by with his criminal Ponzi scheme, roughly based on the scheme of Bernard L. Madoff who in 2008 caused one of the biggest financial crisis of the century. The book is as much an exploration of the machinery of late neoliberalism leading into financial crisis as a journey into the mind and consciousness of ordinary people who became corrupted and took part in a crime, who simultaneously ”knew and not knew“ what was going on and what they were involved in.
Jonathan Alkaitis strikes up a relationship with the bartender Vincent, the teenager of years ago, now a young woman who, apart from shooting videos has not achieved much in life, has no sense of purpose but a strong sense for opportunities and is a sort of social chameleon. He leads her away from her job into the ”Kingdom of Money” and she spends the next three years with him until the day his scheme implodes, brings downfall and disaster to everyone and he gets arrested.
Where in the post-apocalyptic Station Eleven it was a pestilence, a virus, which got out of control, here it is a post-modern man-made criminal construct, a Ponzi scheme, which leads to devastation for many. Mandel introduces us to several characters involved criminally active in the crime itself or at its periphery like innocents, victims, by-standers, friends or relatives of the accused. In doing so she lends a realism to an abstract crime and shows how easily ordinary people can fall victim to corruption.
As in Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility different time zones appear, disappear, mingle, intercept. We are taken back in flashes to the past and projected forward to the future. We learn that Jonathan, decades later, dies in prison, that Vincent, too, dies thirteen years later in a storm on a ship. We learn of her artist brother Paul who made the beginning of his career with her stolen videos, we learn of the older brother of Jonathan who used to be a painter and died of heroin addiction. We meet Olivia, another painter who later became victim of Jonathan’s scheme. And of course we get close insights into the minds of Vincent and Jonathan.
Ends and beginnings begin to overlap, possible and improbable outcomes of lives, alternate lifelines and life narratives are presented. Alkaitis, after years and years in his prison cell, conjures an alternity, a ”counterlife“, a luxurious dreamscape in which he meets ghosts of his deceased victims.
It is a breathtaking narrative arc that goes forward and backward in time and geographically from the foggy wilderness of a Canadian island to the glass and steel high-rises of Manhattan to a South Carolina prison. From lives lived in abundance and wealth to lives on the brink of extinction this tale circles back to its beginning in a beautifully if hauntingly resolved end. It is a dramatic and ingenious tale of how weak, fragile, fleeting, precarious and easily changeable everything is.
#robertfaeth, #painterinBerlin, #painting, #art, #bookblog, #bookreviews, #literaturelover, #poem, #poetry
No comments:
Post a Comment