I really enjoyed The Remember by Aimee Bender. So I googled her and found her
website, which is well-designed and interesting. The pictures are cute and the
page layout is neat and clean. There are several links to her short stories,
including The Remember, and after
reading three of those stories, I decided that Hotel Rot is no doubt my favorite.
The
story is short yet significant. There are three rooms in the hotel where birds
are dying in the first, flowers are withering in the second, and bones are
silently on show in the third. People buy tickets to visit these rooms.
Aimee
Bender did a wonderful job making me and people in the story feel extremely
sick. I love her way of writing such a dark story in a calm way as if she is an
outsider. And I love her way of telling the story by providing large amount of
facts rather than comments. There are many nouns and few adjectives in her
story, but she successfully conveys the sense of disgust and depression to me. I
think that is wonderful! The tone of the ending is quite different from the
previous text, “Pease write a letter to the world” the author says. I’m not
quite sure about what it is that she is trying to get across to us, but I think
it has something to do with the human-nature relationship.
Equally
fascinating is how they present this story: you read it with pictures relating
to the story, and sounds of birds. And you click each time you finish a page. It
is a way of reading that I have never tried before, but would like to try more
in the future.
I
would like to recommend this short story to those who are interested in the
relation between human and nature, those who love birds and flowers, and those
who want a ten-minute reading experience with vivid images and sounds of birds.
And I would be more than glad if you read through this short piece of story and
tell me how you feel about it.
Link
to Hotel Rot: http://locusnovus.com/lnprojects/hotelrot/
Wow! What an interesting way to tell a story. I agree Min, the author does an excellent job of giving the reader a sense of disgust without even using many adjectives. I definitely think the music and pictures have a huge role in capturing this spookiness. Its like a combination of 'film' and 'literature' brought together to tell a story. I personally have never read something like this but found it very rewarding. I'm still not too sure about what the author is trying to portray with the final slide. Maybe she is saying that humans think of nature as a separate thing from ourselves. They put flowers in one room and birds in the other. With the knowledge of basic biology I think everyone knows that organisms cant survive separated like that. Maybe she is saying that humans need to reconnect themselves with nature and 'be one with nature.' What do you, or other people, think the story means?
ReplyDeleteI’m glad that you love it :) I haven’t read any story like this before, neither. But I found it amazing when I was reading the first page.
DeleteI think the author was trying to tell us that we were maltreating living things around us, and we as human beings might have a terrible ending if we continue to do so. Instead of taking good care of lives on the earth, we are using them to make money; we don’t even care about how they feel. And isn’t it interesting that the show of all those bones is the cheapest one among the three? I think she might be indicating that we are not fully aware of what would happen if we keep doing things like this. We think it funny to see those skulls and bones, without realizing that one day, if we continue doing bad things to animals and flowers, our bones would be among those in the third room. Anyway, I love stories that are a little bit ambiguous, because they leave me space for my own interpretation. I think it is because the author didn’t explain all that forces the readers to read it in their own ways, and it is because of the discussion among the readers that provide the story with more possibilities.
This story was presented in such a fascinating way! I loved the requirement of reader engagement to get through the story. You had to continue to click the arrow to the next section. There was such an eeriness to this story, which was amplified by the animated presentation accompanied by beach sounds and soft music.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this story is touching on the relationship between humans and nature. The bones would seem to be the creepiest of all the rooms - yet it was the most comforting for the people to experience. The bone room was 'humbling', while the bird room was chaotic and the flower room was overwhelming. I also thought the story may be exploring the peacefulness of afterlife. The bone room brought peace and serenity, each of the bones belonged to an individual soul who brought something unique into this world. Now their bones are all that remains, and there was no asthma or claustrophobia brought by these bones. They simply allowed the visiters to sit and reflect.
Loved this story!
Your interpretation of this story is interesting! I think you are right, if we take the sharp contrast between the first two rooms and the bone room into consideration. Thank you for bringing up such a nice interpretation of the story! I don’t know what Aimee Bender had in mind when she wrote this, but I’d rather not know about it. Because I think different reflections make the story more interesting
Delete