Review
Alphaville Hotel
2010
translated by Marcel Barang
ThaiFiction
Review by Peter Young in The Thai Literary Supplement #7 (December 2016).
The title gives some clue as to the kind of story within because, while this story is very much in the orbit of the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, his movie Alphaville doesn’t really inform the plot although there is certainly some resemblance to the kind of Godardian characters that populate the story. Here, the seedy Alphaville Hotel in Lop Buri is owned by a Thai-Frenchman by the name of Jean-Luc Godard (no relation), and it’s a place where time stands still and ghosts of past residents haunt the rooms. A mysterious woman named Anna, or sometimes Mari, has multiple roles to play in the story particularly in connection to its narrator, a struggling writer who unexpectedly has been asked by Anna to come to the Alphaville Hotel to work on a screenplay with M. Godard. From here on in, heavy doses of meta come thick and fast.
This novella was a real pleasure. The multiple and innovative directions it takes means it never gets dull and there are surprises on just about every page. It would also be interesting to see it filmed, to see how much, or how little, it would need to resemble a Godard film itself in order to be a success in its own right.