The Electric Hotel

By Dominic Smith

From the award-winning author of the acclaimed bestseller The Last Painting of Sara de Vos comes a radiant new novel tracing the intertwined fates of a silent film director and his muse.

The Electric Hotel winds through the nascent days of cinema in Paris and Fort Lee, New Jersey - America's first movie town - and the battlefields of Belgium during World War I. A sweeping work of historical fiction, it shimmers between past and present as it tells the story of the rise and fall of a prodigious film studio and one man's doomed obsession with all that passes in front of the viewfinder.

For nearly half a century, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films, who started out as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days taking photographs of Sunset Boulevard. But when a film-history student comes to interview Claude about The Electric Hotel - the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended the career of his muse, Sabine Montrose - the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated: celluloid fragments and reels in desperate need of restoration, and Claude's memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him.

The Electric Hotel is a portrait of a man entranced by the magic of movie-making, a luminous romance and a whirlwind trip through the heady, endlessly inventive days of early cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Release date: Aug 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781760870638

Dominic Smith

Dominic Smith is the author of six novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, which was a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and was named a best book of the year by Slate, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Kirkus Reviews. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Australian, among other publications. He grew up in Sydney, Australia, and now lives in Seattle, Washington.

Reviews for The Electric Hotel

[miss.mesmerized · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Claude Ballard is a legend in film making. Having started at the times of the brothers Lumière and the silent film, his „The Electric Hotel“ was a highly innovative masterpiece which is meant to have been lost for decades. Yet, when a student comes to interview Ballard about his life and work, he not only learns about the beginning of the moving pictures, but also makes an interesting discovery.Dominic Smith’s novel is a must read for film lovers, at the example of Claude Ballard who wanders the streets of Paris and New York of 1910 to capture real life through the lens, the history and development of the silent film is narrated. His only film – “The Electric Hotel” – could have been a great success, but times weren’t easy and so were the women, first and foremost Sabine Montrose the actress who had the main role in his film and his life. The cinematic background is clearly well researched and also the times that the characters remember come to life vividly. Yet, I am not enough into cinema to really enjoy this intensive read and the characters were quite hard for me to relate to. I am sure that readers with more interest I the topic will find a lot more delight in the novel than I did.

[ozzer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dominic Smith tells a very human story about the birth of the film industry in THE ELECTRIC HOTEL. His novel is replete with interesting historical facts about the struggle to move cinema from a curiosity to an artform, abundant technical details about early film and the machinery that ran it, and especially evocative descriptions of the excitement engendered by people’s first encounters with moving images. He melds these with an engaging plot, nuanced characters, and writing that is both cinematic and atmospheric.Claude Ballard is an 85-year-old former movie mogul living in a rundown Hollywood hotel in 1962. He is gently coaxed into reminiscing about his past by a film graduate student who interviews him about his important lost work (The Electric Hotel). Ballard’s life is indeed epic, spanning the period from 1895 to 1962. His story includes surprising portrayals of Thomas Edison as a menacing greedy man, and the Lumiere brothers as astute marketeers. It also includes harrowing descriptions of life in the trenches of WWI. But the heart of his story revolves around Ballard’s efforts to make art at his studio on the Palisades of Fort Lee, NJ. Who knew Fort Lee is known for more than “bridgegate?” Indeed, it is the predecessor to Hollywood and the birth of the term “cliffhanger.”Several well-crafted fictional characters inhabit Claude’s tale. The beguiling Sabine Montrose is his star and muse. She is indeed an early version of the complex movie diva. Hal Bender rises from obscurity as a Brooklyn peep show entrepreneur into the archetypical movie producer. These two characters, along with Claude, all have troublesome backstories involving dysfunctional family histories. Lesser characters include Chip Spalding, a runaway Australian stuntman with a penchant for setting himself on fire, and Pavel, a somewhat mysterious acting coach resembling Stanislavsky.It turns out that Claude had preserved a copy of his masterwork and the graduate student had the capability to restore it. This leads to a particularly poignant ending for this excellent novel.

[beth.clarke · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I won an ARC of The Electric Hotel from a Goodreads giveaway. A historical fiction novel that transports the reader back to the early days of films. The first 100 pages gives a lot of information about the film industry and sets the stage for the main characters. I enjoyed the last 2/3 of the book much more.

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I could not stop reading Dominic Smith's new novel The Electric Hotel. I was transported back in time to the heady early days of film, disturbed by a trek into the horrors of WWI, and enthralled by the vivid characters and their stories, especially the tragic story of unrequited love.Claude Ballard's cutting-edge, notorious 1910 film The Electric Hotel had impelled audience to high emotion. It was his highest achievement, but it came crashing down when Thomas Edison sued his company for copyright infringement--as he did all his competition, seeking a monopoly on the film industry. Claude has not seen a movie since 1920 when in 1962 a grad student in filmography seeks him out. He realizes he has been "pickling" himself for thirty years, holed up in a hotel filled with other aging film industry has-beens, his hoard of film decaying from vinegar syndrome."He'd witnessed and photographed the passing of a golden, burnished epoch." from The Electric Hotel by Dominic SmithAs Claude answers Martin's questions and shares his hoard of decaying canisters of film, he revisits his early life and ascent from a French farmer's son who in 1895 was mesmerized by the early Lumiere films, how he became a noted movie maker, then while bravely filming WWI he was taken by the German army, always haunted by the film actress who broke his heart."When I dream of that old life I see it like a strip of burning celluloid. It smokes and curls in the air, but it's impossible to hold between my fingers." from The Electric Hotel by Dominic SmithSabine Montrose had beauty but no heart. She arrived in Paris as a teenager and fled when men pursued her. She learned to act and to use men but never would give her heart. Claude became one of her victims when the older woman took him into her bed for one night only. Claude was caught in her web, filmed her and made her an international star, forever hoping that Sabine would allow him into her life once again."Loving a woman was like that...was chasing smoke." from The Electric Hotel by Dominic SmithThe son of a failed nickelodeon owner, Hal was the theater owner who ran Claude's films; the small, spunky boy Chip was the burning man in a circus act when he joined the company as a stuntman. Sabine's mysterious mentor Pavel was always at her side.The mystery of what happened pulled me along like a magnet, but I cherished every sentence of the gorgeous writing and would not skip a line. Smith was impressed by the quality and art of the early movies he viewed during his research. What treasures have been lost? The Electric Hotel is an actual 1908 film recently rediscovered. I viewed it online here. A couple take a room in a hotel in which stop-action animated luggage takes itself up the elevator and unpacks itself. Brushes clean the traveler's boots. I can imagine the impact on audiences over 100 years ago!I received an egalley from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

[bookczuk · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is a case where an author and editor's choice in punctuation did the story in for me. I am childish enough to be really distracted and disgruntled by the decision to delineate conversations with a -- instead of quotations. I found it more difficult to decipher the thread of convo than if they'd decided to use no punctuation. I'm old.

[siri51 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great storytelling - great characters - early silent film history

[mrmapcase · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

We step back in time back to when Hollywood was nowhere near California. This is an enthralling tale back when Thomas Edison controlled the studios, mixed in with brutality of WWI.Free review copy.

[techeditor_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

THE ELECTRIC HOTEL is historical fiction that goes all the way back to the beginning of silent movies (which was in the 19th century in France) to the 1960s showing of “The Electric Hotel.” But the book begins with an old man in 1962 and the PhD candidate who is interviewing him for his dissertation on “innovation in American silent film before 1914.” Nearly everything else is flashback as the old man, Claude, tells his story.The first and longest flashback deals, mostly, with Claude, a movie maker, and Sabine, the actress he loves. This part, more than half of the book, is both interesting, as the reader learns how and where this movie business began and what obstacles they had to deal with, and boring, as Dominic Smith is often too wordy. But after Claude’s production of “The Electric Hotel,” the story is both interesting and engaging, even for someone who doesn’t particularly care about the movie making business. I know I’ll never feel the same way about Thomas Edison again.I expected to love THE ELECTRIC HOTEL because I loved Smith’s last book, THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS. I didn’t. But I did like THE ELECTRIC HOTEL a lot. I must have because now I want to watch some silent movies. And I wonder if anyone asked Smith whether he modeled Claude and Sabine on real people.I won this book through goodreads.com.

[desiree_reads · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Totally drawn in right away. Great imagery, historical setting and references. Put had to put it down at page 7. For some inexplicable reason, the publisher chose to ditch quotation marks for conversation and replaced with just a dash at the beginning of each line. Super distracting and pulled me out of immersion continuously. Such a bummer

[coffeefairy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I daresay Dominic Smith is one of those writers of whom I want to read everything by. His use of language and turns of phrase are so beautiful. For example:

“Sabine often thought that she had been preparing for exile her whole life. For years she imagined the endless white days in a stone cottage along the Brittany coast, saw herself as an old woman eating solitary meals, moving from room to room
In her robe, a dog-eared novel by the bathtub.

Her eventual banishment, whenever she’d conjured it, was listless, sun-bleached, and aloof. But after five years of living under an assumed name, she also understood that exile was a kind of devotion.”

Five stars. So well done. I really wanted to know what happened to the characters and almost wanted to read faster so I could find out faster! :)

But I didn’t want to miss any of Smith’s use of language. I do wish more of Claude’s childhood and foraging with his father were included. I found that part interesting and wanted more of it.

I received this book as an Arc from a Goodreads Giveaway, with gratitude. This is my honest opinion.