'Dominic Smith’s The Electric Hotel winds through the nascent days of cinema in Paris and Fort Lee, New Jersey—America’s first movie town—and on the battlefields of Belgium during World War I. A sweeping work of historical fiction, it shimmers between past and present as it tells the story of the rise and fall of a prodigious film studio and one man’s doomed obsession with all that passes in front of the viewfinder.
'For nearly half a century, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films, who started out as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days foraging mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along Sunset Boulevard. But when a film-history student comes to interview Claude about The Electric Hotel—the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended the career of his muse, Sabine Montrose—the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated: celluloid fragments and reels in desperate need of restoration, and Claude’s memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him.' (Publication summary)
'The arrival of cinema is something that, like the Great War, has slipped out of living memory but only barely. We can just make out its faint glow over the temporal horizon. Yet the shift it instituted in our sense of reality is scarcely possible to imagine. There was an endless pictorial before, when we recorded the world as a series of static images, and then the rush of after, that ‘‘silver quickening’’ when the noun of our visual depictions became a verb.' (Introduction)
'The early years of cinema in Paris and US infuse this new novel from the Dominic Smith, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos.'
'The arrival of cinema is something that, like the Great War, has slipped out of living memory but only barely. We can just make out its faint glow over the temporal horizon. Yet the shift it instituted in our sense of reality is scarcely possible to imagine. There was an endless pictorial before, when we recorded the world as a series of static images, and then the rush of after, that ‘‘silver quickening’’ when the noun of our visual depictions became a verb.' (Introduction)
'The early years of cinema in Paris and US infuse this new novel from the Dominic Smith, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos.'
