Without a doubt, the best thing I’ve read so far this year. Quarter of the way through and not much comes close.
As I’ve said many times, I don’t like dystopias that lean too hard into the dystopic-aspect. I like them with the axis of earth just tilted slightly; looking at reality through a cracked mirror. In other words, take scary parts of society and bend them a little to suit your story. Laila Lalami more than delivers that here.
What’s frightening about The Dream Hotel is its plausibility: the country’s incessant thirst for incarceration combined with the budding technofascist tendencies we are embracing. Making the tech (and its leadership) be incomplete, questionable, and frustratingly obdurate is the point: we have given so much of our lives to tech and have placed our humaneness at its mercy.
This is extended with Lalami’s take on dreams. She said in the afterward she was influenced by a small, weird, important volume called The Third Reich of Dreams and she takes all the best lessons from what she learns to add here: how male anger and authoritarianism slowly creep into our subconscious and mess with our abilities to just let our minds at east (a great piece on the book can be found here). It adds almost an Inception-like quality to the story. The transitions can be tough to navigate and I think that’s by design: by the end, you’re not sure if you’re supposed to be in a dream or not. But it still works.
And what makes it come together is the protagonist. Sara is an interesting character and you feel her frustration and fear as she tries to navigate this horrible space both physically, emotionally, and somnambulantly (hey it’s a word)! Again, while the dystopia is well-explored, none of it works without giving me a reason to care. Sara was a big reason.
Great stuff. We’ll see what else I’m lucky to read this year but this might take the cake.