Hotel de Dream imagines the last days of American writer Stephen Crane. He spends it passing in and out of delirium as he dictates what will turn out to be his last story.
The story is woven around a real-life encounter between Crane and a fifteen year old boy he encountered on the streets of fin de siècle Manhattan. I don’t remember much beyond these bald facts; this is another book that’s been sitting in a pile waiting to be reviewed.
There seems to be an urge to try to categorise certain authors as ‘gay’ authors – White, Hollinghurst, Waters and so on – but this pigeon-holing does them a disservice. Writing should stand or fall on its own merits, unaided and unburdened by the issue of the author’s sexuality.
I remember the writing in Hotel de Dream as having a beautiful polish to it, and in parts at least recalled Kafka’s weird novel, The One Who Disappeared (which was published and is now universally known under the title Amerika).
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