Chris reviewed Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser
None
4 stars
A fable which reminded me of Borges, whose Library of Babel encompassed the whole world the way that Dressler wants his ultimate hotel to do precisely that, and render the world outside irrelevant. In attempting to best reality with a hotel containing national parks in its undercrofts and which would never require its inhabitants to actually leave, Dressler finds himself ejected from the world he creates, whether by marrying the wrong daughter, quiet Caroline rather than clever Emmeline, or simply by having too much ambition. Millhauser's worldbuilding echoes Dressler's, providing an assemblage of the rather contradictory world of 1900 America where powerful modern binoculars are encased in Morocco leather and steelframed buildings have super-ornate facades harking back to an imaginary past, the way the Victorians in Britain dressed up their ambitions for modernity in a faux mediaevalism which haunts us to this day (and in that other ultramodern decade, the …
A fable which reminded me of Borges, whose Library of Babel encompassed the whole world the way that Dressler wants his ultimate hotel to do precisely that, and render the world outside irrelevant. In attempting to best reality with a hotel containing national parks in its undercrofts and which would never require its inhabitants to actually leave, Dressler finds himself ejected from the world he creates, whether by marrying the wrong daughter, quiet Caroline rather than clever Emmeline, or simply by having too much ambition. Millhauser's worldbuilding echoes Dressler's, providing an assemblage of the rather contradictory world of 1900 America where powerful modern binoculars are encased in Morocco leather and steelframed buildings have super-ornate facades harking back to an imaginary past, the way the Victorians in Britain dressed up their ambitions for modernity in a faux mediaevalism which haunts us to this day (and in that other ultramodern decade, the 1960s, promptly went back to Victorian imagery and fairies at the bottom of the garden). Martin Dressler felt like a very short novel, although it is probably of average length..
