The Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett
Monday, September 1st, 2008“… is advisable to behave exactly as at the club. The Grand Babylon was a hotel in whose smoking-room one behaved as though one was at …”
This book is absolutely dire. Bennett, in a desperate attempt to produce literature on par with the French authors he was so inspired by, wrote this lamentably bad novel. He is often compared to Dickens, who he frankly has no right to be compared to. Dickens is totally out of the league of this author. This book is uninteresting with awkwardly drawn characters. It was a challenge to be bothered to read until the end. It is for a very good reason that Woolf called him a “little grocer” and observed “I have formed my own opinion of what Mr. Bennett is about – he is trying to make us imagine for him; he is trying to hynotize us into the belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a person living there.” Exactly.
Zip file of the entire book (194MB)
