Atlantic Hotel
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Just who is the narrator of João Gilberto Noll’s dark and mysterious Atlantic Hotel? First he books a room where a murder has just occurred, claiming he's just arrived from the airport. But then he suddenly leaves the hotel, telling a cab driver he’s an alcoholic headed for detox. After that he hops on an all-night bus headed across Brazil, where he begins to seduce a beautiful American woman. Next he says he’s a soap opera actor, which is a bad idea—it makes the people he’s hitchhiking with want to kill him. Then he impersonates a priest. He travels to yet another town, and this time he knocks on a very wrong door. The man who opens it has him in the crosshairs of a gun—the narrator passes out, and when he awakes something terrible is happening to him . . .
Crossing the wanderings of a flâneur with the menacing mystery of a hard-boiled noir, and always leaving the narrator’s identity in flux, Brazilian master João Gilberto Noll ponders how any of us come to possess a sense of who—or what—we are. Published right before his widely acclaimed Quiet Creature on the Corner, Noll’s Atlantic Hotel is one of his best-known and most infamous works.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stalked by death and spurred by the desire to keep moving, the narrator of Atlantic Hotel sets off on aimless and perilous trip through his native Brazil in Noll's (Quiet Creature on the Corner) engagingly nightmarish novel. Unhampered by luggage, this unnamed man begins by checking into a hotel where someone's just been murdered. After a tryst with a woman he meets in the lobby, he purchases a bus ticket at random and sets off for Florian polis, seated next to a beautiful American with a tragic past, who gives him her ex-husband's coat. The next step on his noir-ish journey involves a brothel, two incompetent criminals, and a daring escape: "I'd have to run for it get quickly to the car, which was close to the guard dogs who would bark as though possessed " Recognized by fellow travelers as an actor, the hero still has several personas to assume, but no way to avoid the strange reckoning that's in store for him. Constructed as a picaresque, Noll's novel is ultimately the story of a man learning to die; blithe descriptions of sex and violence share the page with memorable images, including the narrator in a borrowed soutane and found staff walking through a small Brazilian village, conscious that he appears to be a "man in constant touch with sacred spheres, who didn't see the visible world." Readers will find his journey brief, captivating, and wonderfully opaque.
