My soul is fastened to a dying animal

 A few years back I yoinked a large pile of Irish lit from my aunt Katrine, in one of those bouts of clearing out her belongings that happened a few times before she died when preparing for increasing levels of care. A good number of the books I walked away with are history or mythology, but for some reason I never seem to get around to reading them, and the few I have done have seemed to be contemporary realist novels of the sort I generally don't like reading at all. I read Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You on our Ireland trip in 2016, and that was three years ago, and I haven't touched any of the rest since.

 

So why I decided to pick up Finbar's Hotel this Memorial Day weekend remains a mystery even to myself. Perhaps it's just because it was short, and I wanted something as different as possible from the different bits and pieces of socialist theory I'm trying to work my way through. It also seemed like an interesting project, a collaborative novel in which each chapter is written by a different famous Irish novelist. 

 

It's probably going to take me quite a while to work my way through all the contemporary(ish) Irish lit, because "once every three years" is about as often as I can handle books featuring a lot of middle-aged people having mopey thoughts about sex, which seems to be a major feature of contemporary realist literature. It's bad enough when that sort of thing is woven into stories where it's interspersed with lots of people being eaten by dragons, but when characters being introspectively horny is mostly alternated with characters being introspective about having cancer... well, perhaps I am a philistine, but it's just not my jam.

 

That said, Finbar's Hotel is pretty good for a quick read. Each chapter in the book revolves around the occupant of one of the hotel rooms on the 100 floor of Finbar's hotel, a run-down midcentury monstrosity in Dublin that's set to close soon, having been sold to new owners who are planning on tearing it down. Some of these characters are downright insane, and it's amusing to see how they think of each other when they spot each other around the hotel, compared to their own viewpoints of themselves. Being bored with the stifling conditions of Irish life features heavily, as do various family scandals, and some extremely '90s pop culture references (the book was published in 1997). It's not divulged which critically acclaimed Irish author wrote which chapter, but they're all quite good at writing awkward people who are making total asses of themselves, but in ways that keep you engaged and somewhat sympathetic to them -- except possibly the guy who's there because he's planning to kill his ex's cat, which I simply will not be sympathetic to, but it's a pretty weird chapter so it's engaging all the same. 

 

Possibly the thing that spoke to me the most in this book was the story of the hotel itself, its grand-turned-sad history and the particular feeling of adriftness that can happen when you're staying in a hotel, especially by yourself, even if you do have reason to be there. I love hotels, even run-down ones, and I love traveling alone, and I found myself feeling very sad for this poor mismanaged hotel, the embodiment of one family's dysfunction over the whole history of the Republic. 

 

Overall I'm glad I read it, but I have higher hopes for some of the other Irish lit on my shelves, and hope that next time I reach for it I'll have the sense to reach for one of the mythology books like I keep intending to do.