'Hotel Impossible is the puzzle-world of global capital Pilgrim enters looking for comfort, discovering instead various trials and tribulations on his way through an unresolvable Hell of Whiteworld. As it spreads and occupies the planet, a super-charged colonialism of the now, there's a paddock in the Western Australian Wheatbelt where Sister is waiting, keeping life going as they knew it, but it was always a different kind of life, out of keeping with the conservative rural community around it, a community with its corruptions and invasiveness. Discovering purpose in resisting corruption, Pilgrim decodes his way through the hotel via CERN and Lake Geneva, arriving back ‘home’ to confront the offices of colonial mining corruption. Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is a de-map in a world of constant remapping and overlays, and Escher and Penrose are clues to possible solutions, but in the end only the land itself and truths outside colonialism can offer any way through without ongoing acts of appropriation, cultural-theft, and the deceptions of ‘fictionalising’ reality.' (Publication abstract)
AustLit
Alternative title:
Featuring Hotel Impossible, by John Kinsella
Issue Details:
First known date:
2020...
vol.
6
no.
2
August
2020
of
CounterText
est. 2015
CounterText
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Latest Issues
Contents
* Contents derived from the 2020 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
- The CounterText Interview: John Kinsella, Ivan Callus (interviewer), James Corby (interviewer), single work interview (p. 221–231)
-
Stolen from the Snows : John Kinsella as Poet and as Fiction Writer,
single work
criticism
(p. 232-238)'This piece explores the fiction of John Kinsella, describing how it both complements and differs from his poetry, and how it speaks to the various aspect of his literary and artistic identity, After delineating several characteristic traits of Kinsella's fictional oeuvre, and providing a close reading of one of Kinsella's Graphology poems to give a sense of his current lyrical praxis, the balance of the essay is devoted to a close analysis of Hotel Impossible, the Kinsella novella included in this issue of CounterText. In Hotel Impossible Kinsella examines the assets and liabilities of cosmopolitanism through the metaphor of the all-inclusive hotel that envelops humanity in its breadth but also constrains through its repressive, generalising conformity. Through the peregrinations of the anti-protagonist Pilgrim, as he works out his relationships with Sister and the Watchmaker, we see how relationships interact with contemporary institutions of power. In a style at once challenging and accessible, Kinsella presents a fractured mirror of our own reality.' (Publication abstract)
-
Hotel Impossible,
single work
novella
(p. 239–381)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 13 Jan 2021 13:36:13
