Atlantic Hotel, by João Gilberto Noll, translated by Adam Morris
Early in Atlantic Hotel, an unnamed narrator recounts a dream: “Nothing was in black and white,” he recalls, “Almost everything was a shade of gold, but with pink splotches.” Though he means to capture only his dream here, the narrator might well be describing Atlantic Hotel as a whole. Written by João Gilberto Noll in 1989 and newly translated by Adam Morris, Hotel is a slender, surreal journey through a hazy, serpentine Brazil, in which life is lived moment to moment and fluidity—not just of identity but of reality itself—is the name of the game. At the heart of a journey peppered with sex, death, and near-constant instability lies the narrator’s compulsive need to switch personas (he is, in turn, an alcoholic in need of treatment, a fading soap opera star, a priest); this need is an addicting, elusive force that ensnares the reader even as it heightens the mystery of the narrator’s true self. In the end, it seems, this mystery is precisely Noll’s point–“We have so much time to guess so many things,” his narrator tells us, and he’s right: why confine ourselves to a single identity, or story, when in truth we are filled with so many?
