Jonathan Arnold reviewed I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita
Review of 'I Hotel' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
I don't even know where to begin with this massive (over 600 pages), varied (comics, plays, transcripts, dance notation, stories), multicultural (10 different interweaving stories) monument of a book. Basically, it tells the story of the International Hotel, a nexus of activism in the late 60s early 70s San Francisco, especially Asian American activism. It is a battle to keep this cultural touchstone from being demolished, and along with it the stories and oral history of the few elderly tenants who still live there.
It is told thru 10 stories from differing points of view, which interweave in amazingly complex and ephemeral ways. You'll be reading along and then say, wait, wasn't two stories ago from this person just mentioned in passing? I would imagine a whole new way of understanding this book would open up if I just sat down and read it again, as I bet there are …
I don't even know where to begin with this massive (over 600 pages), varied (comics, plays, transcripts, dance notation, stories), multicultural (10 different interweaving stories) monument of a book. Basically, it tells the story of the International Hotel, a nexus of activism in the late 60s early 70s San Francisco, especially Asian American activism. It is a battle to keep this cultural touchstone from being demolished, and along with it the stories and oral history of the few elderly tenants who still live there.
It is told thru 10 stories from differing points of view, which interweave in amazingly complex and ephemeral ways. You'll be reading along and then say, wait, wasn't two stories ago from this person just mentioned in passing? I would imagine a whole new way of understanding this book would open up if I just sat down and read it again, as I bet there are plenty of folks that show up in the earlier stories as bit players, only to become stars in their own stories later on.
I'm no quite up to that challenge, unfortunately!
The ways it used multiple methods of storytelling reminded me of Stephenson's epic [b:The Baroque Cycle Collection|22535547|The Baroque Cycle Collection|Neal Stephenson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407110757l/22535547.SX50.jpg|50643684], only Ms. Yamashita explored even more mediums, including comic strips, songs and even a long intricate dance(!) soliloquy.
And I learned so much and was so discouraged at the same time. There was a lot about African American contemporaries, getting treated the same way 50 years later - incarcerated and often murdered for raising a ruckus. Or the chapter that interwove writings from Mao Tse-Tung, Marx and words from the Bandung Conference, the first large-scale Asian–African. So fascinating. As were, in an incredibly depressing way, the stories of Japanese incarceration during World War 2. Makes you want to scream in frustration and depression.
So if you are looking for a deep, intricate, dense thicket of words, pictures and images, with an explosive clarity about activism during that time, you would be hard pressed to find a better novel. I am a different person for reading this. What else can you ask from a book?