Ideologically opposed to her own despair

I choose what I want to see. I know I am imagining this. I, in the here and now, am willfully abstracting my own history. Because? There are a number of answers to this but today's will be: I can never find my past where I think I've left it and, in his designated role as catalyst, he is the worst offender of all. He will never just lie down where he lay. I keep discovering him wandering around inside me again.

Strange Hotel, by Eimear McBride, is another in a series of slim, meditative novels I appear to be drawn to these days.

The prose is beautiful and easy, but this is not an easy book to read. One has to work to assemble the story.

Strange Hotel is a little like a pared down version of Helen Weinzweig's Basic Black with Pearls (but ultimately very different). One review says it's reminiscent of Joanna Walsh's work, including Break.up. Deeply interior.

We know next to nothing about the narrator — not her name or profession or why she's travelling so frequently to international destinations. We don't know what her days are like. We have only glimpses of hotel-based evenings, mornings, and middles of the night.

There's a neat thing McBride does in switching form third person to first person, I barely noticed it at first, but it is very deliberately meaningful. It's a lovely interplay of the past and present, how we become who we are. (And it tells me that if I'm aware of that, I've got a better shot at authoring my own future.)

She scans her body for some distracting wound to press but it's pretty well; even her mouth is not, currently, in need of a dentist. Her skin, despite her revels, bears not the slightest nick. Her shoes may be nondescript but fit so she has no grazes or blisters to attack. In short, she possesses no immediate means by which to hurt herself back into the clear. How she longs for that sky to be blue. But, ideologically opposed to her own despair, she contemplates a heavy blow to the wall instead. And the ameliorating effects of such an activity are: the gratifying click and bruise of knuckles. The pain shooting its ferns up into her arm. The slightly amazed exhalation, then the clarity behind. All very tempting, yet she does not permit herself this. There remains the matter beyond the door, and only with careful deliberation will she ensure it becomes appropriately resolved.

I'd been meaning to read McBride for years, and this new novel felt like the right place to start. I'd heard or read an interview that basically covered what's documented in this exchange in The Quietus:

I was writing about a middle-aged woman – which makes sense because I am a middle-aged woman – and how angry and bored I am by the tropes about, you know, what it's like to be a middle-aged woman and what our preoccupations are, the things we worry about and how we're supposed to behave.

So, yes, I really wanted to take back the notion that a middle-aged woman going to a hotel room to have some anonymous sex with someone is an act of self-hatred and self-harm.

So, being a middle-aged woman who is somewhat preoccupied with the notion of a middle-aged woman engaged in and enjoying casual sex, how could I not read this?

I was a little disappointed, then, to find this book was not so subversive as to let its narrator simply take pleasure. She satisfies a physical need while applying an emotional analgesic. (But I forgive McBride. After all, this is not my story.)

We learn that she's known heartbreak and grief, but we're never told the full extent of it.

While it's not exactly self-destructive behaviour she engages in, it carries an element of undermining her own pleasure, if not her happiness. It's not unconnected to her emotional past, and it's a conscious effort to maintain her current level of emotional well-being. She's afraid of falling in love again (I'm not), because it would be a betrayal of her "true" love, because it would be an act of forgetting, because it would open the door to the potential for fresh loss.

She has lingering concerns about whether anything exists beneath what she is standing on. And, let's face it, there's nothing like the threat of the abyss to make one reluctant about purposefully striding across an unfamiliar floor.

Reviews
Frieze
Pi
Interview: The Quietus