These two novels have a common theme – they are set in a time of turmoil in 1919 at the end of the Great War. Both tell their story through the guests at an hotel: conveying the mood of the whole country under this microscope.
Troubles is set in the Majestic Hotel in Co Wexford; a building of crumbling grandeur recalling the days of the Ascendancy that has passed. As the hotel decays social order unravels. You have probably read it. It is by J G Farrell and is the first in his Empire trilogy, published in 1970. The hotel is entirely fictional.
Hotel Savoy is set in Łódź in Poland, let’s call it Lodz, so much easier to type. Where is it?
In 1919 the Austro-Hungarian Empire had fallen asunder. The war had been lost and the Bolsheviks were a threat with many workers and pacifists supporting them. Add to that a stream of soldiers coming west to homes and families in the old Empire they hadn’t seen in years and it’s a cocktail of chaos, poverty and misery.
Here is the very real Hotel Savoy, completed in 1912. It was, I expect still is, the last word in luxury.
“The designer of the Hotel Savoy was the local architect Stefan Lemmene. The building was meant to be simultaneously modern and luxurious, and it merged modernist and art nouveau elements, both popular at the time. The seven-storey building’s most distinctive feature is its original window design. The hotel windows vary, from impressive shop windows at the ground floor to circular side bay windows, large square windows at the first floor and one round window, ornamented with peacocks, above the entrance.
Back in the day, the Savoy was furnished according to the latest technological trends, with its electric lamps, plumbing, elevators, phones and sewer system.” (Culture.pl)
Joseph Roth’s novel, one of his earliest, published in 1924 describes the hotel rather accurately and is an ideal setting. The rich live on the lower floors and get more eccentric and much poorer on the higher floors with the seventh floor housing the almost destitute. The scenario reminds me of The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al Aswany, set in Cairo in 1990. Nor is it remotely happy or optimistic.
“Things are going badly with these people, and their sorrow towers before them, a great wall. They sit enmeshed in the dusty grey web of their cares and flutter like trapped flies.” (Hotel Savoy, Joseph Roth)
By the way it was only translated into English in the 1980s, so it’s unlikely J G Farrell borrowed Roth’s idea. It’s rather glum but has a plot which I will not give away. It is well worth reading, or a read, as people seem to say nowadays. I also recommend it because it’s only about 120 pages. If you enjoy it fall in for The Radetzky March.
To make it a trilogy A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles fits the bill admirably as we never really leave the Hotel Metropol for 40 or so years. I believe you may have recommended it in a dim and distant blog. It is a very quirky and highly enjoyable read. A mutual friend acquired the book to learn more about Moscow and was disappointed!