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The Occidental Hotel
Guernica Editions, Fall 2020
268 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771835145
ISBN10: 1771835141
English
$20.00 Canada, $17.95 US, £11.95 UK
Read more from the Essential Prose Series
A brooding fugitive hides out in a crumbling hotel that was once filled with celebrities enjoying the successes of postwar America. He is a racist with a criminal past, an anti-hero who reflects on the ruins of the South and simultaneously on the life of a German performance artist called “Jupp”. The fictional Jupp is a thinly-veiled cipher for the late real-life German artist, Joseph Beuys, and the photos in the novel are photos of the performances by the controversial Beuys. At once echoing the moody worlds of W. G. Sebald and incorporating outrageous elements of pulp fiction, this novel of dark romanticism is not for optimists seeking redemption, but for those willing to take a look into a searing heart of darkness.
The strange mid-winter weather in Düsseldorf, in the municipal district of Heerdt, where this takes place on a day in early 1956, has nothing to do with what happens. It might do so, were Jupp to notice how unnaturally dry the air is today, how it lingers, windlessly, bright and unstirring, around the dormers and angles of the elderly house his studio is in, which he does not. The weather might play a part in this narrative, were it to tempt Jupp to go outdoors, which it does not.
The Occidental Hotel is a shockingly good book on this subject. And although it touches on many ideas and things, and is deeply pleasurable to read because of the masterful quality of Mays’s gifted language, it is finally and fundamentally a critique and satire of Western white supremacy and the attending wickedness and lunacy of that historical and current force.
Benjamin Klein, Border Crossings Magazine
The Occidental Hotel has a ghostly continuity. The story links melancholy remnants of the South and its Lost Cause nostalgia to the wrecked and repressed terrain of the Thousand Year Reich.
Richard Rhodes, former editor of Canadian Art
The final document of a razor-sharp mind that helped form Canadian culture over several decades.
Antanas Sileika
I loved his words. The ones he chose to deploy and the way he deployed them … I can’t tell you how glad I am that among the last things John did before he died was to finish a novel. Deploying those incredible words of his.
Anne Collins, vice president of Penguin Random House Canada
Mays’s passion for art electrifies fascinating sketches of Beuys.
Ryan Porter, Quill & Quire
Reviews
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The Occidental Hotel, John Bentley Mays
Ian Thomas Shaw, The Ottawa Review of Books - May 1, 2021
Books by John Bentley Mays
