The Dream Hotel
Powerful, richly conceived ... Lalami skates along at the height of her powers as a writer of intelligent, complex characters ... Although it relies on a speculative technology for its plot, The Dream Hotel is astounding, elegantly constructed, character-driven fiction.
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Unsettling, meticulously observed ... Lalami has a knack for taking a flashy premise and underdelivering — that’s a compliment, by the way ... The claustrophobic authorial perspective, coupled with narration in the present tense, creates a creeping sense of disorientation ... Lalami has peered into the future and found that it looks like nothing so much as the present — which is to say dingy, corrupt, dumb, and dishonorable. And terrifying.
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Lalami’s social critique has a righteous vigor, but as fiction The Dream Hotel often feels inert: Once the novel has set out its nightmarish stall, not much happens beyond an insistent delineation of the boredom and sadness and absurdity of Sara’s situation. It might seem odd to critique a book set almost entirely in a carceral facility on the grounds of its feeling airless and entrapping, but this has less to do with its narrative than its failure to break its provocative premise free of the walls around it ... Still, the novel’s central vision — a world in which the most private aspects of people’s inner lives are extracted and sold — retains an insidious power, and an uncomfortable relevance.
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