In this outstanding book, which has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize for nonfiction, Jane Rogoyska reports that by the mid-1930s the Lutetia had become headquarters to German political dissidents fleeing Hitler ... In the third and final part, Rogoyska’s book soars to great heights.
Jane Rogoyska’s eloquent history brings this period vividly to life, in part through the simple trick of narrating the story in the present tense ... Rogoyska includes some excellent pen portraits of characters on both sides of the war ... The real impact of this book arrives, inevitably, in its final section.
In this exceptional work of non-fiction — you couldn’t call it just a history book, it’s more than that — the British writer Jane Rogoyska tells the wider story of the hotel, and Paris, and France at war ... She captures the historical moment with a rare combination of urgency and empathy ... This is a scintillatingly good book. I think it will win prizes — not least because it is subtly experimental. It is a group biography. That can make a book labyrinthine, but here it feels right to be a little lost in the maze.
Around the Lutetia, Rogoyska has woven a tapestry of stories — some familiar, some not; some connected to the hotel, and some not ... Many of her subjects are themselves writers, and it is from their accounts and memoirs that her book gains much of its force ... Rogoyska follows the mode of history as storytelling, preferring anecdote to analysis ... If she does not always eschew what appears to be imagined speech to make a scene vivid, the result is an almost cinematic account that will, for many readers, connect figures and episodes in a new way. Her focus on wartime Paris allows one to ponder the linkages and the larger history of the émigré experience in France itself.
In her highly readable Hotel Exile, Jane Rogoyska tells the story of World War II-era France through the Hotel Lutetia ... Rogoyska writes in present tense, no doubt to increase the subject’s immediacy, although some readers may find this a slightly distracting affectation. Telling the story of a place through profiles of the people who inhabited it is an effective narrative strategy, allowing the author to cover a wide cast of characters and events, but it takes some time to see this technique bear fruit and allow the hotel to come into focus. Nonetheless, these snapshots are fascinating.
