GRAND HOTEL EUROPE, by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer | Translated by Michele Hutchison
A middle-aged Dutch writer checks into a hotel in an unnamed Italian city, to recover from a failed love affair and “take back control of my mind.” Thus begins ‘Grand Hotel Europa’, the extended new autofiction by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, a Dutch novelist, poet and scholar who lived in Italy for a long time.
The narrator, also called Ilja Pfeijffer, has arrived at the “luxurious … and once magnificent hotel” to try to work his affair with Clio – an art historian from an aristocratic family – into a novel. The hotel’s cast of eccentric characters includes a North African errand boy with a painful refugee past; an erudite and philosophizing scholar; a “militant feminist” poet; the new Chinese owner, determined to modernize the place for Asian tourists; and the mysterious, Miss Havisham-esque former owner, nestled in a room Ilya can’t find, “alone with her art and her memories.”
The hotel evokes the mundaneness and beauty of pre-modern European life, the gilded moldings and Chesterfield armchairs transport the narrator to a bland retrospective. But his enchantment is undermined by his great preoccupation and terror – ‘the phenomenon of mass tourism’, in all its multiple hideousness. “Grand Hotel Europa” shows a Europe overrun by hordes of visitors who consume a travesty of the past and turn the continent into their “fantastic historical park”. The narrator himself is an inveterate traveler, but his wanderings are presented as a push toward enlightenment; by contrast, the tourist’s incessant quest for unique experiences – and impressive social media posts – leads to obscenity and farce, such as when a tour operator touts night-time orientation in Cambodia and asks Ilja if he’s looking for “Vietnam, napalm, Tour of Duty, that sort of thing.”
You can’t help but be impressed by how many narrative balls Pfeijffer keeps in the air. The novel combines a comedy of manners with travel journalism, political and cultural commentary and reflections on European identity. Oh, plus a mystery of art theft (centered on the last days and paintings by Caravaggio). And that love story. Bravely translated by Michele Hutchison, Pfeijffer’s prose is as multifaceted as the novel itself—elegant and baroque, then bland reporter, then sassy (some readers may cringe at his lustful descriptions of sexual encounters). How about a style reminiscent of Nabokov, Tom Wolfe, Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, Wes Anderson and a UNESCO position paper? The novel deliberately mixes the erotic and the esoteric, the hilarious and the hectic, the ancient and the academic.
Pfeijffer’s characters often give lectures: about immigration policy, about the inequality caused by Airbnb and the sharing economy, about George Steiner’s conception of Europeanness. The occasional longueur is relieved by a lively, even virtuoso invective, provoked by tourists who “babe on in all their idleness… as if cholesterol were inhibiting the circulation of the city and causing strokes.” A merry misanthropy animates the novel’s academic reflections, while Ilya harbors flowery fantasies about alleviating tourist abundance through terror attacks or medieval torture methods – and at one point she hurls a German tourist from the Rialto into the Grand Canal in Venice.
Pfeijffer’s auto-fictional gambits begin with a scene where the narrator promises his publisher a novel about tourism, then incorporates the author’s own itineraries, such as his trip to Skopje, Macedonia, for a literary festival. A conference organized by Clio, on the future of museums, with the real art historians Eike Schmidt and Jean Clair. Pfeijffer fuses this everyday reality with the fictional and the fantastic. Clio is, of course, the muse of history; as for the identity of the mysterious ex-owner of the hotel, it becomes clear in a spectacular denouement with what you might call a funeral for Europe.
The novel has a skewed character that suggests a writer takes all the clutter on his desk and sews them together with meta-fictional and auto-fictional threads. Not everything works, but in the end “Grand Hotel Europa” is like its garrulous narrator, whose mistakes and excesses you easily forgive because you enjoy his company. Even the book’s biting and sometimes gloomy view of contemporary European reality cannot dampen its incorrigible cheerfulness.
Rand Richards Cooper is the author of two works of fiction and a contributing editor for Commonweal.
GRAND HOTEL EUROPE | By Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer | Translated by Michele Hutchison | 560 pages | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | $30