The Feminist Book Club 2/6

20.03.2025

Eimear McBride - Čudan hotel (Strange hotel, 2020)

The sixth meeting of the club was dedicated to the novel Strange Hotel by the contemporary Irish writer Eimear McBride, whose style has been compared by critics to that of James Joyce. The structuring of the narrative around travel through European cities and the shaping of the narrative flow through the stream of consciousness prompted us to discuss, in the context of previous discussions on the political novel and more generally on the politics of the novel, the effects of the narrative strategies and procedures used in the novel in terms of thematic elements and genre categories that often guide interpretation and critical evaluation. We also asked whether the concept of the political can be extended to the point where genre categories become superfluous, or whether we need a more precise use of concepts in literary studies.