Atlantic Hotel

March 6, 2017
Stalked by death and spurred by the desire to keep moving, the narrator of Atlantic Hotel sets off on aimless and perilous trip through his native Brazil in Noll’s (Quiet Creature on the Corner) engagingly nightmarish novel. Unhampered by luggage, this unnamed man begins by checking into a hotel where someone’s just been murdered. After a tryst with a woman he meets in the lobby, he purchases a bus ticket at random and sets off for Florianópolis, seated next to a beautiful American with a tragic past, who gives him her ex-husband’s coat. The next step on his noir-ish journey involves a brothel, two incompetent criminals, and a daring escape: “I’d have to run for it get quickly to the car, which was close to the guard dogs who would bark as though possessed…” Recognized by fellow travelers as an actor, the hero still has several personas to assume, but no way to avoid the strange reckoning that’s in store for him. Constructed as a picaresque, Noll’s novel is ultimately the story of a man learning to die; blithe descriptions of sex and violence share the page with memorable images, including the narrator in a borrowed soutane and found staff walking through a small Brazilian village, conscious that he appears to be a “man in constant touch with sacred spheres, who didn’t see the visible world.” Readers will find his journey brief, captivating, and wonderfully opaque.

March 15, 2017
An unnamed man has surreal experiences as he journeys across Brazil.Although author Noll (Quiet Creature on the Corner, 2016, etc.) has long been a phenomenon in his native Brazil, he has still remained largely unknown in the United States. This slim novel, narrated by a nameless man as he travels through Brazil, shows why that might not be such a bad thing. The narrator is a cipher throughout, telling strange, contradictory stories about himself to everybody he meets. He tells people alternately that he's an alcoholic on his way to a treatment center, a priest, a B actor specializing in soap operas, and other such lies, all for no apparent reason. As he goes on his journey, death and sex seem to follow his every move. He encounters corpses throughout and frequently trysts with strange women he's only just met. These lurid encounters are rendered dispassionately, presented as nothing more than quotidian events in the protagonist's life. These passages, both in their too-cool-for-school alienation and needless edginess, reek of affectation and cheapen the novel by making its cryptic nature feel like just a contrived stab at the avant-garde. Indeed, while Noll and his translator Morris' prose frequently has a seductive, noirish quality, the novel is so fatally hamstrung by its inherent lack of substance or point that any stylistic grace only reinforces how fundamentally empty an exercise it is. None of the surreal events in the unnamed narrator's life ever have a significance beyond titillation and transgression, and in its gratuitously sexual and violent episodes, the book often feels more like a 14-year-old's diary than the work of an eminent novelist. A short novel that still manages to feel like a waste of time.

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