Emily St. John Mandel was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied contemporary dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York.
Emily St. John Mandel is the author of five novels, including The Glass Hotel (spring 2020) and Station Eleven (2014.) Station Eleven was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the Morning News Tournament of Books, and has been translated into 34 languages. She lives in NYC with her husband and daughter.
For anyone who has lived through the 1990s in Russia, or at least heard the stories of their elders, the new novel by Canadian writer Emily St. the famous financial pyramids of that era, the "people's" "MMM" or a little more "elite" bank "Chara". The story that Emily St. John Mandel tells at The Glass Hotel is also built around a global financial pyramid - it turns out to be a kind of magical artifact that destroys or simply transforms human destinies associated with it. And the waves of this transformation spread strikingly widely - both in time and in space.
For some formal reason, Emily St. John Mandel's previous novel, Station Eleven, was fictional (the action took place in the post-apocalyptic future, after most of humanity became extinct from the so-called “Georgian flu”), the current one up to the last pages are held in the field of conditional realism. However, the key technique in both cases remains unchanged: dozens of human lives are woven by Mandel into delicate lace, the pattern of which appears in all its harmony and beauty not even towards the end, but some time after reading.
One night, a strange inscription appears on the glass wall of a luxury hotel on the secluded coast of Vancouver Island: "Why don't you eat broken glass?" Ten years earlier, a thirteen-year-old girl named Vincent, who had just lost her mother (she went canoeing and never returned), wrote another strange phrase on the window of the school auditorium with an indelible marker on the window of the school auditorium - “Sweep me away” (according to legend, these are the dying words of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard).
On the night when the first mysterious sign appears, Vincent - now a night bartender in the bar of the same hotel - meets his charming owner, recently widowed businessman and financier Jonathan Alkaitis, in the lobby, and becomes his girlfriend, and then his wife. A woman sitting in a nearby lobby dreams of exposing and destroying the financial pyramid built by Jonathan, while another sleepless night visitor of a hotel bar, an elderly top manager of a shipping company, on the contrary, falls into his net, flattered by absurdly large profits.
A few years later, Jonathan's financial empire, so stable and well-looking, collapses, his company's office on Wall Street is besieged by ruined investors with dry and terrible eyes, and Jonathan's accomplices destroy papers, dream of countries without an extradition treaty and try not to look into the windows. Vincent leaves his comfortable and charming husband into the fog - and disappears to reappear in our field of vision already as an assistant cook on a huge cargo ship sailing across the Atlantic. Jonathan Alkaitis, who was sentenced to 170 years in prison, slowly goes crazy in prison and communicates with the ghosts of people who died as a result of his machinations. And a couple of years later, that same unlucky shipping manager, who turned from a prosperous rentier into a homeless beggar at once, receives an offer from his former employers: he has a business trip to Germany - a woman cook disappeared from the ship right in the middle of the ocean, and he must find out the circumstances of her death ...
Any attempt to retell the "Glass Hotel" rests against the obvious absence in it of an end-to-end linear plot that brings numerous lines together. Nodules that seem significant at first (such as the already mentioned ominous phrase on the hotel wall or the disappearance of Vincent at the end of the possibility of detective intrigue), with a slight change in perspective, lose their emphasis. The heroes, from whom we expect energetic interaction, disperse in different directions, barely touching their elbows or simply missing them.
Significant references to the previous novel, "Station Eleven" (Mandel several times makes it clear that we have an alternative version of events within the same universe - there was an outbreak of the Georgian flu here too, but it was quickly localized), turn out to be a non-binding dummy ... The global tragedy, which sees the fall of the financial pyramid of Jonathan Alkaitis to his direct eyewitnesses, in fact turns out to be either a clap or a sob. The irreparable damage is somehow gradually straightened out, the participants and victims of the events, having coped with the shock, for the most part begin to live from scratch, and for some, these new lives turn out to be, in general, no worse than the old ones. A merciful oblivion descends on the graves of those who did not manage to survive what happened, and the world rolls on with almost no loss.
In a word, the guns hung on the walls defiantly refuse to shoot, and sometimes turn around and not with guns at all, but with decorative elements, plot hooks do not cling to anything, and trodden and lovingly illuminated paths lead into darkness and uncertainty.
However, this obvious, blatant violation of canonical genre expectations, this demonstrative refusal to practice the narrative schemes and clichés we are used to, surprisingly does not make The Glass Hotel neither amorphous nor loose, as often happens with novels of this type. Rather, it makes sense to talk about him in terms of a new novel and new literature in general. Rejecting, as is customary now, from the principles of traditional narrative, thoroughly artificial and conventional, Mandel proposes in their place not chaos, but, on the contrary, absolute lifelikeness. As in the real world, in the world of the "Glass Hotel" all events and objects are interconnected in a complex and not always obvious way, and this thoughtful connectivity "works" - that is, it touches, excites, captivates - no worse than typical plot structures.
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