Leaving Small's Hotel - Softcover

Kraft, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312206607 ISBN 13: 9780312206604

Publisher: Picador USA, 1999

Synopsis

With this, his seventh novel, Eric Kraft once again gives readers and critics everywhere a reason to celebrate: Kirkus declared it "one of the most delightful novels of the decade," while Publishers Weekly asked, "Is there a more beguiling writer today than Eric Kraft?" Small's Hotel is where Peter and Albertine Leroy have spent their lives, hosting visitors while Peter works on his memoirs. But as guests grow harder to come by the future of the hotel--and of every gift Peter ever dreamed of giving his wife--is in jeopardy. What he does to save his marriage is a story involving friendship, childhood, gadgets, and great, abiding love.

About this title

Review:

By the time you reach page 2 of Eric Kraft's novel Leaving Small's Hotel you know you're in for a different kind of narrative: "I was sitting on a bench at the town dock, trying to drift into one of my other selves, when, instead, another self came drifting into me. A long time passed before I realized that ... I had imagined yet another self, but this time a self who assumed that he had imagined me. Over the years I have developed this other, outer, self into an alter ego and persona who, within his world, has devoted himself to the exploration and elaboration of my world and my self, for motives much like mine, since for him my world and my self are another place, another self, a vacation." The speaker is Peter Leroy, the protagonist of several of author Eric Kraft's earlier works and that other of whom he speaks is, of course, Kraft himself. Though Kraft soon removes himself from the story at hand, the reader cannot forget what Peter refers to as the "partnership, Kraft & Leroy" as Peter, himself a writer, weaves the strands of his own memoir, Dead Air, through stories about his life and travails running a failing hotel with his wife, Albertine, in the fictional community of Babbington, Long Island. It is no coincidence that a ventriloquist and his dummy figure prominently in the novel.

Lest you worry that Leaving Small's Hotel is one of those horridly self-conscious experimental novels, rest assured: Kraft's tender story of Peter and Albertine--still in love after so many years--is funny, perceptive, highly readable, and peopled with a cast of characters as intriguing as they are unique. In the end, it doesn't really matter whether this is Peter Leroy's daydream or Eric Kraft's; either way this novel is a dream come true.

From the Publisher:

"One of the most delightful novels of the decade." -Kirkus Reviews

"Wonderful....The various tales move towards contrasting climaxes with just the sort of spectacular intricacy that makes a business fail and a novel fly." --The New Yorker

"Funny, deftly structured...warm, engaging...just right." -The New York Times Book Review

"Kraft's tones are elegiac and nostalgic, tones suitable for an America vanishing in innocence...a rare and beautiful writer." --Bomb

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0312206607
• ISBN 13: 9780312206604
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352