Hotels of North America

De: Rick Moody

Narrado por: Jefferson Mays

From the acclaimed Rick Moody, a darkly comic portrait of a man who comes to life in the most unexpected of ways: through his online reviews.

Reginald Edward Morse is one of the top reviewers on RateYourLodging.com, where his many reviews reveal more than just details of hotels around the globe -- they tell his life story. The puzzle of Reginald's life comes together through reviews that comment upon his motivational speaking career, the dissolution of his marriage, the separation from his beloved daughter, and his devotion to an amour known only as "K."

But when Reginald disappears, we are left with the fragments of a life -- or at least the life he has carefully constructed -- which writer Rick Moody must make sense of. An inventive blurring of the lines between the real and the fabricated, Hotels of North America demonstrates Moody's masterly ability to push the bounds of the novel.

Reseñas de la Crítica

Praise for Hotels of North America

"This is Moody's best novel in many years. It's a little book, a bagatelle, but it's a little book of irony and wit and heartbreak. It is insightful...In Hotels of North America [Moody] eases back on the throttle, and his engine begins to purr...This novel's elastic format--short hotel reviews--gives Moody a lot of room to improvise and play, and play he does. He is terrific."

—Dwight Garner, New York Times

"Formally daring, often very funny, and surprisingly moving. It should earn Moody new fans from a millennial cohort that was still in diapers back when he was basking in his early critical acclaim...Part of what makes Hotels of North Americaas breezy as it is rewarding is its structure, which in our era of digital discourse manages to feel both unorthodox and perfectly familiar. The story unfolds as a series of online reviews for the Web site RateYourLodging.com, all of which have been submitted by one Reginald Edward Morse, a reviewer of such entertaining prolixity and discursive majesty that the adjective 'Nabokovian' immediately comes to mind. (It will come to mind more than once throughout the novel.)"—Jeff Turrentine, Washington Post

"Throughout the novel, Morse's shattered life takes on ever sharper edges, as he plows into the desultory American landscape with all the eagerness of a middle-aged man of waning prospects...Moody's sweet spot in Hotels of North America is quotidian detail tinged with some deeper existential unease: Fear and Trembling at the Holiday Inn, if you will. Over and over, with an impressive attention to the nuances of the hospitality industry, Moody manages to suffuse your average roadside lodging with a kind of life-sapping dread...This is a very literary novel, cleverly constructed and written in an arch, clever, very literary voice, at once mannered and unrestrained, like an aging patrician after his third drink...But if Moody can sometimes untether himself from plot and character, it is because he seems more interested in existential truths than novelistic conventions. This novel is short and plangent and...frequently beautiful. If it were a hotel room, you'd give it four stars."—Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek

Absorbing read

I listened to an interview with Rick Moody on CBC's Writers and Company and bought the book on audible right after the episode. What a delightful read on a grey November day. A book about hotels with some references to beds and I only slept 4 hours in mine because I didn't want to stop listening.
One of those rare books when I was sad that it would end when i was only halfway through the book. I enjoyed the tone and pace of the narrator but would have enjoyed hearing the author narrate the last chapter. For reasons you may appreciate once you read the book. I will check out other writings by Rick Moody.

Definitely NOT for everyone!

Overall, the book worked for me, but I'd be very hesitant in recommending it to my friends. Starts out in the vein of a cranky hotel reviewer, but that aspect fades until the latter part of the book is pretty much all about his personal life, which is basically a dysfunctional mess (by implication). I suppose that if I had to describe the story in a single word that'd be "quirky"; however, there's also an aspect of Murakami-like surrealism at times - a collection of dark vignettes, if you will.

I uprated my stars slightly as the narration really helped carry the story. Not sure what I thought of the final chapter, where the author comments on the protagonist, but I suppose it does succeed in providing a sort of closure.

Definitely interested in more from the author, and even more so from the narrator!

A Clever Idea but ultimately a bit of a bore

What disappointed you about Hotels of North America?

The idea of telling the life of the hotel reviewer through his reviews was an intriguing idea but, for me, many of the 'reviews' were dreary and pretentious. Not a very interesting character to build a novel around it seemed.