Aug 4

Aug 4 What Happens at Night

Author: Peter Cameron
Publisher: Catapult
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

An atmospheric, suspenseful story of a couple's struggle to adopt a baby, while staying in a fading, grand European hotel. (Think: Barton Fink crossed with Patricia Highsmith)

In this atmospheric, suspenseful novel, an American couple travels to a strange, snowy European city to adopt a baby, who they hope will resurrect their failing marriage. Their difficult journey leaves the wife, who is struggling with cancer, desperately weak, and her husband worries that her apparent illness will prevent the orphanage from releasing their child.

The couple check into the cavernous and eerily deserted Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel where the bar is always open, the restaurant serves thirteen-course dinners from centuries past, and the doors of the guest rooms have been salvaged from demolished opera houses. Their attempt to claim their baby is both helped and hampered by the people they encounter: an ancient, flamboyant chanteuse, a debauched businessman, an enigmatic faith healer, and a stoic bartender who dispenses an addictive, lichen-flavored schnapps. Nothing is as it seems in this mysterious, frozen world, and the longer the couple endure the punishing cold the less they seem to know about their marriage, themselves, and life itself. What Happens at Night is a "masterpiece" (Edmund White) poised on the cusp of reality, told by "an elegantly acute and mysteriously beguiling writer" (Richard Eder, The Boston Globe).

TL;DR Review

What Happens at Night is a dream-like and weird but very atmospheric and moving novel. I really liked it, but it won’t be for everyone.

For you if: You like novels that border reality in weird ways that don’t always make sense.

Full Review

“[The bartender] remained at his post, gazing implacably at the beaded curtain, which occasionally shuddered ever so slightly, as if a subway train were passing in a tunnel beneath the bar, but the man knew the beads were responding only to the tension of the world, the fraught energy that leaked from him, from the Japanese couple, even from the seemingly implacable [bartender], for who knew what drama, what passion, what sorrow, what joy his stoic countenance concealed?”

First of all, big thanks to Catapult for sending me a finished copy of this novel! This was one of those rare instances in which I actually read a book within a few days of receiving it, it sounded that good and so perfect for my reading taste. And I was not disappointed! But it was also so different from what I expected.

The novel is about an unnamed man and woman who have traveled to a super-remote area of a super-northern Slavic-seeming country so they can adopt a child from the local orphanage. It starts as their train pulls into the station. They stay at a grand but mostly deserted hotel and meet several — let’s say unique — characters while there. Of course, in this strange place, everything changes for them.

The whole thing is very weird and dream-like and sort of fuzzy around the edges. I’d say it pushes into magical realism, sort of. In fact, dare I say this, it sort of gave me Samuel Beckett/Waiting for Godot vibes, lol. Existentialist and not quite logical. Very, very atmospheric. That’s not going to be for everyone, but it was for me!

The craft of this novel is just truly impressive. The ability to build a mood with so few words, the way he wields all the peripheral characters for purpose, the arc and parallelism of the story. All so good. And truly one that merits a re-read, I think — I’m sure that I didn’t get everything out of it that it has to offer.