Grand Hotel Europa

There are some long books which you reach the end and wish they would continue for ever, and there are some which it is just a struggle to get to the end. Unfortunately this book, at least for me, fell into the latter category. Especially in the first half, there is little in the way of plot to help the readers along, just a lot of conversations, which are actually mostly rather unnatural monologues by various characters, sometimes going on and on for many pages. A bit more 'show not tell' wouldn't have gone amiss. Not a lot happens other than talking for most of the book, aside from gratuitous sex scenes which seem to be oddly irrelevant to the rest of the book.

The book's redeeming feature is that the text is beautifully written. However, that also gets a bit much after all those pages. What I found very odd was that the same flowery language and long and intricate sentence construction is used by nearly all the characters, be it the intellectual protagonist or the immigrant hotel porter who has recently learnt the language. Which brings me to the protagonist. He has the same name and biography as the author, but it is (presumably deliberately) unclear just how much of the book is autobiographical. He is presented in quite a negative light in several passages, with an overbearing arrogance and selfish attitude, which is either remarkable honesty or not actually intended to reflect the man's real character.

The theme of the book is about the rise of mass tourism and the associated decline of Europe as a world power. Unusually for a novel, the tourism is discussed not only with narrative, but with substantial quantities of statistics. That was a little odd, as time and again we had to believe that various characters just happened to have all those facts and figures at their fingertips, and indeed the author acknowledges that this is not entirely credible by inventing thin excuses for this at various points. Reading this at the moment when global tourism has completely collapsed adds a certain poignancy. He is also a little selective with his evidence, for example at some points only counting tourist taxation as an economic benefit and ignoring the benefit to (for example) BnB owners. That is a shame, because it isn't really necessary to do that in order to make his points.

The decline of Europe is the most important and central theme of the book. Again, he uses statistics to make the case that manufacturing industry has largely moved to Asia (although he exaggerates the effects, countries like Germany are still major and innovative manufacturers). He also makes the rather bizarre case that Europe is culturally superior to the rest of the world. Does he really believe that, in which case that seems to rest mostly on profound ignorance of the cultural riches of other regions, or is it more tongue in cheek? And his evocation of Europe's glorious past astonishingly completely ignores the historic exploitative and barbaric relation of Europe to the rest of the world. But regardless of that, is it really the case that Europe is only looking back on a glorious past and has nothing to look forward to in the future? Personally, I'm not quite ready to attend its funeral yet.