Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

Back from a weekend in Geneva I decided to re-read this short novel and Booker prize winner, published in 1984.
A solitary writer takes time out staying at a hotel on Lake Geneva one late September, reflecting on past events and observing others staying at the hotel. This is Anita Brookner’s writing at its best: restrained, elegant, enigmatic.
Dressed for dinner in her Liberty silk smock, her long narrow feet tamed into plain kid pumps, Edith sought for ways of delaying the moment at which she would be forced to descend into the dining room and take her first meal in public. She even wrote a few paragraphs of 'Beneath the Visiting Moon', then on re-reading them, realised that she had used the same device in 'The Stone and the Star', and crossed them out.
She recalls a conversation with her agent discussing the changing romantic market, saying that women still prefer ‘the old myths’. ‘They want to believe that they are going to be discovered, looking their best, behind closed doors, just when they thought that all was lost, by a man who has battled across continents, abandoning whatever he may have had in his in-tray, to reclaim them. Ah! If only it were true…’
‘Now you will notice, Harold, that in my books it is the mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero… this is a lie, of course. In real life it is the hare who wins. Every time.’
‘In life, I mean. Never in fiction. At least not in my kind of fiction.’
Edith’s solitary existence is upset by the presence of Mr. Neville and she is forced to consider her future.
One rainy day, when I have time to spare, I will gather up all my second-hand copies of Anita Brookner’s novels and work my way through them, slowly, methodically teasing out her detailed descriptions of characters and places. I am in no rush; it is a project I am content to savour.