Hospitality : meditations that make up Hotel
Object Lessons is a short series of beautifully designed books about hidden lives of common things.
Joanna Walsh, writer, editor, illustrator and critic, during the breakdown of her unhappy marriage, she got a job as hotel reviewer, and began to be attracted towards places designed as alternative to homes.
“If I planned carefully, I could live in hotels for weeks at a time”, as refracted in the fragments, insights and meditations that make up hotel, a period of metaphorical dislocation and estrangement.
Luxury, power, privacy, sex, anonymity… hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped be the hard realities of the market place. This book visits few rooms, suites, hallways and lobbies, the spaces and things that make up these modern sites of gathering.
Walsh uses the idea of the hotel as critical point for something unique, marshalling characters from Freud to Forster to Mae West to the Groucho Marx, Garbo for a series of skits and cameos.
According to Walsh “hotel is opposite of home as home is an art the art of most people is home because both has other arts, it was difficult to pursue the art of home. Usually the woman pursues the home while the other person, usually the man can look on approvingly, seeing the home is being made, although not by him. This is home work.” Yet in hotels none of this work is necessary and Walsh finds herself freed from the labour of home making. But in hotels she finds herself more obscure duties and difficulties those of being a guest.
On arriving at her first hotel “ I am not a guest so much as I am a ghost and like ghost I am in transition. I might have left somewhere, but I never really arrive anywhere else. I’m here to try on someone else’s version not of my life, but of an ideal life cut to my budget. Like the bathrobes and towels, if feels food, but it does not really fit, although I’ll still put it on.” She also wrestles with tipping with what is and isn’t free, and what is allowed, just when bleeds on the sheets in one hotel, she has to wash them and dries them with the hotel hairdryer. The question of course is how to be a good guest. She finds herself putting on lipstick to go down for breakfast something you won’t do at home. “We are on display; we’re what’s being sold. Hotels are for those who understand performance; Actors, women and ghosts”.
Hotel is where if anyone gives anything, something would be expected in exchange, though there was never any tariff fixed to the back of the hotel bedroom door, along with the fire escape instructions.
At the end she falls sick and returns home to recuperate.
Hotel is intellectually written, subtle, intriguing with sharp meditation and evocation, that mingles autobiography and reflections on home, secrets and parting, repays careful reading.
Hotel (Object Lesson) by Joanna Walsh (176 pages)
Bloomsbury
Academic
£8.99/ $16.95