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Summary
Summary
A sweeping work of historical fiction from the New York Times -bestselling author Dominic Smith, The Electric Hotel is a spellbinding story of art and love.
For more than thirty years, 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 foraging for mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along 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 in desperate need of restoration, as well as 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 moviemaking, a luminous romance, and a whirlwind trip through early cinema. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.
Author Notes
Dominic Smith grew up in Sydney, Australia and now lives in Austin, Texas.
Smith earned an MFA in writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. His writing has been nominate for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly.
Dominic's writing has received several awards including the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, and the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize. His debut novel The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre was selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. It also received the Steven Turner Prize for First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. Dominic's second novel, The Beautiful Miscellaneous, was optioned for a film by Southpaw Entertainment. His third novel-Bright and Distant Shores was published in 2011 and was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year and the Vance Palmer Prize, two of Australia's foremost literary awards. His most recent book is The Last Painting of Sara De Vos (2016). It won the 2017 2017 Indie Book Award for Fiction.
Dominic serves as a faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and has taught recently at the University of Texas at Austin and Southern Methodist University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Smith (The Last Painting of Sara De Vos) takes readers back to the dawn of the motion picture era in his splendid latest. Claude Ballard is an old man in 1962, living at Hollywood's Knickerbocker Hotel, when he's contacted by Martin Embry, a PhD candidate in film history. When the elderly director reveals that he owns a print of his first feature film, long considered lost, the young scholar's enthusiasm about its discovery prompts Claude to reminisce about the film's genesis and aftermath. From his early days photographically documenting ailments at a Paris hospital, to his rapid rise to prominence by demonstrating the capabilities of the Lumière brothers' moving picture innovations, to his ill-fated (both professionally and personally) production of The Electric Hotel, to his surprising heroic turn in WWI, Claude's own story-and those of the leading lady, stuntman, and impresario who collaborated with him-unfolds as cinematically as the scenes he creates on film. Fascinating information about the making of silent films (including a villainous cameo by Thomas Edison) is balanced by poignant, emotional portrayals of individuals attempting to define their lives offscreen even as they made history on it. Smith winningly delves into Hollywood's past. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
The year is 1963, and silent-film director Claude Ballard is tracked down at the Los Angeles hotel where he's long lived by a PhD student writing about Claude's lost masterpiece, The Electric Hotel. Smith, who delved into art history in his previous novel, The Last Painting of Sara De Vos, does much the same for the history of early cinema this time around. Beyond that, we end up learning much more about Ballard's life, including his derring-do covering the carnage of World War I and his relationship with the love of his life, the complex and sultry actress Sabine Montrose. There's even a cameo by a most unpleasant Thomas Edison, who does his best to put a stop to Ballard's wildly successful film. Ballard's obsession with the moving image drives him throughout his journeys, and at times you want reach through the pages and give him a little shake. But he's an admirable person even if he doesn't realize it. VERDICT Smith tries to cover too much territory, but Ballard is finely rendered, and there are quite a few edge-of-your-seat moments. Recommended to fans of Graham Moore's The Last Days of Night and Amor Towles's The Gentleman from Moscow. [See Prepub Alert, 12/3/18.]-Stephen Schmidt, Greenwich Lib., CT © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.