It's down at the end of Lonely Street 1 Edition

• Published in: Herald (Glasgow, Scotland)
• Main Author: Murray, Isobel
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Glasgow (UK) Gannett Media Corp 24.03.2001
• Subjects: Smith, Ali

Hotel World Ali Smith Hamish Hamilton, #10.99 In her second novel, Hotel World, Ali Smith responds energetically to the best in the Scottish literary tradition, for the most part turning it on its head. In Memento Mori, Muriel Spark has old people disturbed and troubled by a telephone voice that says Remember you must die. In Hotel World, Smith has a dead girl with a contrary message, Remember you must live. Alasdair Gray signs off his novels with a large GOODBYE, and Sara, the dead girl in Hotel World, starts and finishes that novel with the sudden excitement of her death. Woooo-hoooo. The [Sara] who introduces us to the novel in Smith's very individual rendition of an afterlife is a spirit, dwindling away on her last night of existence, losing apprehension of colours, sensations, words. Perhaps because of the violence of her smash, she has become dislocated, a split personality who remembers only part of her own story. Sara tells a macabre and funny tale of how she tormented the rest out of her other self, her dead body. She invaded her coffin and demanded information, torturing her with songs from musicals, sticking fingers up her nose, until she was told of the circumstances in which the whole Sara, who has just fallen in love, grotesquely fell down the dumb-waiter shaft before she reached 20.