Hotel novels

Step inside!

The arrival at hotels, large hotels, "grand hotels", is preferably designed as a welcome, and the welcome begins out on the pavement in front of the hotel, where the red carpet is rolled out.

Lots of writers have written along on the hotel adventure, and even more readers have moved into a hotel novel, for a day, a week or maybe longer. Like a hotel host handing out keys, the writer hands out destinies, and the reader lives in and out of the destinies. The adventure can begin.

In Hotelromaner the broad lines are drawn. Martin Zerlang cross-cuts between literary genres, historical events, philosophical and sociological as well as architectural theoretical and urbanity aesthetic perspectives, while providing detailed descriptions of hotel novels written by authors such as Henry James, Herman Bang, Henrik Pontoppidan, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Roth, Vicki Baum, Haruki Murakami, Ali Smith, Christina Hesselholdt, Kirsten Hammann and many more.

The book thus offers both explanations of a number of hotel novels, but also insight into the history of the real hotels that appear in the novels, although there are also fictional hotels. The hotel is seen as an existential and occasionally political and social theater with everything that life has to offer, good and bad. It is a terrific journey through both international and Danish hotel literature.

Pack your suitcase and go to the hotel with Martin Zerlang!