The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel Paperback – June 3, 2014

I'd rate this 3.5 stars.There comes a moment when your life changes. For Pete Winters that moment came when Edward Freling stepped on his glasses in a crowded cafe in Lisbon, Portugal. It's 1940 and the world is a chaotic place, with Hitler making his way across Europe. Lisbon is the only neutral port left, and refugees from all over Europe have crowded into Portugal, hoping for sanctuary or at least a place to wait until finding passage somewhere else.Pete and his wife, Julia, are expatriate Americans forced to leave their longtime home in Paris when the city was occupied. They've been staying in Lisbon, although expected to sail back to the U.S., much to Julia's chagrin. The thought of having to return to America has completely unsettled her, as she had vowed to her estranged family she'd never leave Europe, but the fact that she's Jewish (a reality she understandably doesn't make public) complicates their ability to go anywhere else.Edward and his wife, Iris, are independently wealthy writers, who have lived nearly all over the world. They, too, are headed back to the U.S. on the same ship as Pete and Julia. They are free spirits, loose where the Winters' are uptight, although they are not without their share of challenges.The two couples find themselves continually thrown together, spending their days in cafes and sightseeing, their nights drinking. Julia would rather play solitaire and brood by herself, lamenting that she will have to leave Portugal. Pete and Edward, much to their surprise, begin a torrid affair. Pete finds himself quickly falling in love with Edward, imagining a life spent together. But while Edward, too, feels very strongly for Pete, his life and his marriage are far more complicated. Iris will do anything to keep her marriage intact."Because there are occasions when none of the choices are good. You simply have to calculate which is the least bad."It's been said that certain things happen in wartime that wouldn't happen at other times. The same is true for the period leading up to war. People find themselves acting differently, thinking differently, making decisions they wouldn't otherwise make. But are those decisions, those feelings true, or just borne by circumstance? The Two Hotel Francforts is an introspective novel about relationships, about things said and unsaid, how you never can truly know what a person is thinking or feeling, or what secrets they've kept hidden, and how those secrets are affecting them.I've always been a fan of David Leavitt's writing since I first read The Lost Language of Cranes years ago. He creates such vivid characters you can practically see with your own eyes, or imagine coming into contact with them in your daily life. His storytelling ability is on fine display in this book, which is at times passionate and moving, at times contemplative.I enjoyed The Two Hotel Francforts but it left me with more questions than answers, particularly around Pete and Edward's relationship. I couldn't figure out if this was a whim for Pete or something he truly felt. I also found the way the plot was tied up rather confusing, as an incident pretty crucial to the whole story was told more in passing than anything else, and I was confused and frustrated by that.In the end, this is a book that has several love stories tied together, as it explores secrets, dreams, fears, and frustrations. While it's not a perfect book, it's well written and compelling, and I'm glad to see David Leavitt back in the world of fiction again.

Lisbon holds thousands of people fleeing Hitler's armies. The lucky ones are American expats awaiting a cruise ship sent to take only them to the US. In this extraordinary invoking of that upheaval, we are seamlessly deposited into that zeitgeist. Pete, our narrator, sways in his status of "other", barely understanding his role. "We were too worried about what we were losing to care about losing more." He and his wife Julia were losing their new life and fine apartment in Paris. They speak openly of the need to escape danger of the war by returning home. Only in subtext do they refer to Julia's Jewishness. They meet another couple returning home, but Edward is openly Jewish.In the furor around them, their enmeshments set within hours. The couples are rooted in dualism. Each one dwells as a double agent. When Pete and Edward begin an affair, it is viewed in the context of an ultra-modern experiment with only Julia unaware. Here is where the characters are bound closely by the world around them. Their views of themselves are colored by the bigotry of the age that tinged every part of those days with a distancing of self. The weaving of each person into the duality is written with brilliant prose that ensnares the reader as well.The world these two couples had lived within just before the war was a place of breaking barriers and daring exploration of alternate roles. Art was evolving into a stunning new expression. Writing explored new fringes laid bare by the last Great War. Lea it succeeds in bringing us to that aching point when the boundaries began to slam back into place. Partly in a paroxysm of dread, the Nazi state fought for a nostalgic return to a world that had truly never existed. Tolerance for "those people - the Jews and the homosexuals" was revealed as a thin shell that many people had never adopted even superficially. All of this is acted out within these two couples. The cracks form quickly.This is a literary work which I have to stand back and admire.

This is a beautifully written book. It evokes the atmosphere of wartime Lisbon and the fear and dislocation of people fleeing from terror to uncertainty with vivid artistry. But its central characters are all unsympathetic and there is an air of unreality about them and what befalls them. There is no clear background to the affair between Edward and Pete, which even the cover blurb describes as an "unlikely affair". The female characters are elusive and their emotions and behaviour come across as stylised rather than real.Part of Leavitt's purpose seems to be to show how, in the face of war, everything is out of joint, including time itself. But, while I found the book readable, I was disappointed. It is, as the blurb again says "an extraordinary work"; but not a compelling one compared with some of Leavitt's other, brilliant, books. It is almost as if he is treating us to a literary experiment but one that does not quite come off.

As a fan of Mr Leavitt I found this book a little dull, did not have the sense of prescience his previous ones had. Interesting story of two American couples fleeing Europe and waiting in Lisbon for a ship home prior to the U.S. Joining world war2. Each couple staying at a Hotel named Francfort. The friendship that grew between them and the hidden pressers that a return to the U.S. Were having on them. In the end I found it slightly stilted and the ending manufactured.

Not his best but it did make me want to visit Lisbon.For classic Leavitt try his novel 'Martin Bauman'

Peter and Julia Winters are Americans fleeing from Paris ahead of the advancing Nazis. Their flight is given extra impetus by Julia's Jewish background. They end up in Lisbon, a city full of refugees awaiting ships to America, and presided over by the dictator Salazar. In a café they meet another couple, Edward and Iris, he another American, she English, joint writers of detective novels. Their meeting in a highly, but none too subtly, symbolic moment is brought about by Edward standing on Peter's glasses.The central part of the novel is taken up by an affair between two of the characters, while one spouse is apparently complicit, the other remains and must remain in ignorance. As the affair runs its course all seems relatively conventional in terms of the narrative structure, but then the final section completely undermines the reader's perceptions. Firstly the story is retold from different perspectives, and is revealed as being something very different from that which Peter, as first person narrator, believed it to be. He really was blind to the true nature of the events which unfolded from Edward standing on his glasses. Secondly, the novel becomes self-referential, commenting upon itself.I could read The Two Hotel Francforts in a number of different ways. It is a portrait of decadence in the face of an impending apocalypse. It is a treatise on the corrosive nature of repressed and latent sexuality. It is a discourse on the process of novel writing. It is the examination of the fragility of objective versus subjective truth.It also reminded me of a number of different novels. The shallowness of the expatriate Americans and their relationships strays into the territory of F Scott Fitzgerald. The self-referential nature of the text brings to mind John Fowles and the French Lieutenant's Woman. The strangely dispassionate sexuality is reminiscent of Jane Bowles' cult classic, Two Serious Ladies. The fact that the text is chock full of metaphor and symbols which rub against each other suggests parallels with Paul Auster.So this is a novel of many layers which plays with the reader's perceptions in some interesting ways. It is also a well plotted novel which I found genuinely intriguing and engaging. It is not a difficult read.And yet, and yet, it all seemed to be less than the sum of its parts. It just didn't work for me. Fundamentally I didn't believe it. I felt no empathy for the characters, as they seemed to display no empathy for each other. Two characters engage in an affair, which is totally alien to the previous experience of one of them, and a major step forward for the other, with absolutely no apparent doubt, guilt or uncertainty. These two characters are apparently physically besotted with each other and yet one walks out on the other at the first moment of private intimacy without a credible explanation. On a much more mundane level Peter is a car salesman whose flat is featured in the Paris edition of Vogue.Part of my alienation from the novel is to do with the nature of the narration. In another piece of symbolism linking different parts of the story, Iris and Edward are revealed to have an autistic daughter. It cannot be unintentional that Peter is completely emotionally disengaged from events around him. The affair is described in a manner about as erotic as a car maintenance manual. A major life changing event at the end of the book seems to be dealt with along the lines of "Oh dear, that's a shame, better just order one pint of milk rather than two then".To complete my dissatisfaction, the technique of seemingly ending every chapter with a cliffhanger behind which the East Enders drums would not feel out of place came to irritate me well before the end of the book.There is undoubtedly some very clever writing in the Two Hotel Francforts, the question is whether it is too clever by half. For me, I'm afraid, the answer is an unequivocal "yes". My overall impression is that the author, David Leavitt set out to write A LITERARY NOVEL and ended up writing something overly ostentatious with far more style than substance.

I have always greatly enjoyed Leavitt's work right back to the Lost Language of Cranes but this is a bit of a disappointment. Bloodless characters and an wholly unbelievable gay romance. There are some great descriptions of war time Lisbon but the sense period is destroyed at an early stage when a character claims to be ' gobsmacked'. This inelegant expression appeared in the 1980's and sits like a quartz watch in a photograph of Nancy Astor.