Grand Hotel Europa by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (.ePUB)
File Size:
Grand Hotel Europa by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, Michele Hutchison (Translator)
Requirements: .ePUB readers, Retail
Overview: Grand Hotel Europa has dominated the Dutch general bestselling list for more than an entire year. More than 300,000 copies have been sold so far.
‘The love of my life lives in my past. That is, despite the alliteration, a terrible sentence to write. I do not want to come to the conclusion that, as it is the case for the hotel where I am staying and the continent after which it is named, the best time is behind me and that I have little more to expect from the future than to live on my past.’
A writer takes residence in the illustrious but decaying Grand Hotel Europe, to think about where things went wrong with Clio, with whom he fell in love in Genoa and moved to Venice. He reconstructs a compelling story of love in times of mass tourism, about their trips to Malta, Palmaria, Portovenere and the Cinque Terre and their thrilling search for the last painting of Caravaggio. Meanwhile, he becomes fascinated by the mysteries of Grand Hotel Europe and gets more and more involved with the memorable characters who inhabit it, and who seem to come from a more elegant time. All the while, globalization seems to be grabbing hold even on this place frozen in time.
Grand Hotel Europe is Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s masterly novel on the old continent, where so much history resides that there is no place left for a future and where the most realistic future perspectives are offered in the form of exploiting the past in the shape of tourism. It is a theatrical and lyrical book about European identity, nostalgia to the end of an era. It is, how troubling it may be, his best book yet.
Genre: Fiction > General/Classics
Free Download links: