Book Review: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.
One of the story’s main plots is the mechanism of the fraud Ponzi run by businessman Jonathan Alkaitis. The fraud was convicted and sentenced to 170 years in prison but killed many. The novel explores the spirit of the individual who committed the crime of committing suicide, with many falling into poverty. In prison, he falls into self-pity rather than remorse for his actions. In that respect, he is relieved by the fact that his actions will not be worse than he was in the worst order. A financier’s Ponzi scheme has had a devastating effect, revealing unexpected relationships between the cast of different characters.
How did Vincent Smith fall from a container ship near the coast of Mauritania? A place away from her former life pretending to be Jonathan Arukaitis Trophy’s wife? In the long-awaited sequel to Station Eleven (2014), Mandel uses Vincent’s disappearance to ripple through hundreds of lives to uncover the remnants of Alkaitis’s erroneous investment plan. Paul Vincent’s half-brother, songwriter, and recovering addict. Teenage painter, Olivia, who invested her retirement savings into the Alkaitis fund. Leon, former advisor to a shipping company. And a choir of office workers who tolerate alkali salts and are afraid to face the consequences. Slowly, Mandel reveals how her character struggles to align her position in life with her vision of her own possibilities. When Vincent was offered a job with Arukaitis in “The Kingdom of Money”, he made a promise of transformation. Here, unlike the rules of reality, time magnifies and allows you to pursue video art that others think is meaningless. For Alkaitis, reality itself will be tolerable. He faces the ghosts of his victims in prison and runs away to “Counter Life”, which is a delightful alternative reality to avoid punishment. In this dreamlike cross-section, Mandel’s thoughts about guilt and responsibility, wealth and comfort, reality, and imagination begin to organize. Essentially, this is a ghost story with all boundaries blurring from the moral to the practical. Alkaitis is do you go How far to reject responsibility for his actions? How fast will his wealth corrupt the ambitions of those nearby? Mandel is prone to netting with unexpected results at the shining almonds and shows how disasters can occur when such soft ties break under pressure.
The story explores the world of wealth, greed, and contentment, and each character’s view of it. Vincent is a life-upgrading character in terms of cost, having a relationship with Jonathan, even if he doesn’t fall in love. Because she understands life without money and is always worried about it, the existence of money puts her there. In contrast, Jonathan is emphasizing that money affects everyone differently because he is an individual who succumbs to greed obsessed with wealth.
It’s completely a strange, subtle, and haunting novel.
Book: The Glass Hotel
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2020
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