The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Hotel in the Jungle by Albert J. Guerard
Irving Malin

Albert J. Guerard. The Hotel in the Jungle. Baskerville, 1996. 391 pp. $23.00.

Although Guerard is one of our distinguished critics (of Conrad, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky) and teachers of writing (of Hawkes), he deserves serious attention as a novelist.

Guerard is interested in the obsessive, dark nature of our personalities; he views history as hallucination (or vice versa). It is appropriate that his novel is, in part, a meditation on the eccentric Mina Loy. She appears as “Monica Swift,” a beautiful visionary who longs to find her lover “Brian Desmond” (Arthur Cravan). Desmond was a boxer and poet—a legendary figure in the history of surrealism—who disappeared in Mexico.

The novel should not be read as a mere evocation of Loy. (For a superb biography of Loy see Carolyn Burke’s recent book.) It is a thrilling attempt to capture the duplicitous quality of memory, love, and knowledge. It reminds me in part of Proust, who is mentioned in the text, Conrad, and Faulkner.

The novel begins in 1982. Eloise Deslonde, a young historian, is writing a dissertation on Rosellen Maurepas’s two obsessions: “the Isthmus of Tehwantepec and William Walker.” She seems fated to trace Rosellen’s adventures in Mexico; she views her as an uncanny double. The novel moves backward to 1870. We see Rosellen trying to find Walker, to possess him—if only for her journal. The repeated references to texts—the dissertation, the journal of Rosellen and her lover, Charles Stanfied, the guest book in the mysterious hotel in the jungle—are repeated in the novel’s fascination with Monica Swift’s poetry in 1922. From 1982 to 1870 to 1920 and then to 1982, time is examined in a crooked occult manner.

And the fact that the characters seem to reflect one another—think of the three women—intensifies the “jungle” of epistemology. The search for meaning, for fact, is married to the distortions of desire. There is, if you will, a circularity, a labyrinthine quality. Consider this passage: “He wrote a poem about a man who lost something in the course of a picnic. It had slipped into a small pond or perhaps a spring like this one. I think it was a silver drinking cup, and he could not find it. Then fifty years later he happened by that place, and there was the drinking cup in the water, shining in the reflected sunlight. Nothing had changed.”

The timelessness of dream; the precarious, unstable nature of knowledge—in texts and lives—is at the heart of the novel. And Eloise recognizes that in “the dreaming mind” we are all “immortal.” The separation of dream and waking experience, of art and life, cannot be stable. Thus the novel resembles the hotel—both are structures which fuse creation and decay—and like the hotel, the novel is for the brave explorer who seeks terrifying beauty (or beautiful terror). It is, finally, a fascinating presence filled with domineering ghosts. It is an entrance into our secretive worlds, “an emanation of the darkness itself, one that might or might not take on human shape.” [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Hotel in the Jungle by Albert J. Guerard Irving Malin Albert J. Guerard. The Hotel in the Jungle. Baskerville, 1996. 391 pp. $23.00. Although Guerard is one of our distinguished critics (of Conrad, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky) and teachers of writing (of Hawkes), he deserves serious attention as a novelist. Guerard is interested in the obsessive, dark nature of our personalities; he views history as hallucination (or vice versa). It is appropriate that his novel is, in part, a meditation on the eccentric Mina Loy. She appears as “Monica Swift,” a beautiful visionary who longs to find her lover “Brian Desmond” (Arthur Cravan). Desmond was a boxer and poet—a legendary figure in the history of surrealism—who disappeared in Mexico. The novel should not be read as a mere evocation of Loy. (For a superb biography of Loy see Carolyn Burke’s recent book.) It is a thrilling attempt to capture the duplicitous quality of memory, love, and knowledge. It reminds me in part of Proust, who is mentioned in the text, Conrad, and Faulkner. The novel begins in 1982. Eloise Deslonde, a young historian, is writing a dissertation on Rosellen Maurepas’s two obsessions: “the Isthmus of Tehwantepec and William Walker.” She seems fated to trace Rosellen’s adventures in Mexico; she views her as an uncanny double. The novel moves backward to 1870. We see Rosellen trying to find Walker, to possess him—if only for her journal. The repeated references to texts—the dissertation, the journal of Rosellen and her lover, Charles Stanfied, the guest book in the mysterious hotel in the jungle—are repeated in the novel’s fascination with Monica Swift’s poetry in 1922. From 1982 to 1870 to 1920 and then to 1982, time is examined in a crooked occult manner. And the fact that the characters seem to reflect one another—think of the three women—intensifies the “jungle” of epistemology. The search for meaning, for fact, is married to the distortions of desire. There is, if you will, a circularity, a labyrinthine quality. Consider this passage: “He wrote a poem about a man who lost something in the course of a picnic. It had slipped into a small pond or perhaps a spring like this one. I think it was a silver drinking cup, and he could not find it. Then fifty years later he happened by that place, and there was the drinking cup in the water, shining in the reflected sunlight. Nothing had changed.” The timelessness of dream; the precarious, unstable nature of knowledge—in texts and lives—is at the heart of the novel. And Eloise recognizes that in “the dreaming mind” we are all “immortal.” The separation of dream and waking experience, of art and life, cannot be stable. Thus the novel resembles the hotel—both are structures which fuse creation and decay—and like the hotel, the novel is for the brave explorer who seeks terrifying beauty (or beautiful terror). It is, finally, a fascinating presence filled with domineering ghosts. It is an entrance into our secretive worlds, “an emanation of the darkness itself, one that might or might not take on human shape.” [Irving Malin]

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