The electric hotel /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

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.

Publishers 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.

Booklist Review

In 1962, cinematographer Claude Ballard is rusticating with the other eccentric, washed-up denizens of Hollywood's Knickerbocker Hotel. When a doctoral candidate arrives to interview him, Claude's past begins to unspool, and Smith (The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, 2016) shifts the focus to the nascent film industry at the turn of the century. On the Hudson Palisades, a ragtag bunch of innovators Claude, aging French stage actress Sabine Montrose (clearly modeled on Sarah Bernhardt), an Australian stunt man, and a Brooklyn entrepreneur creates a silent film masterpiece, The Electric Hotel. Success is within their grasp when archvillain Thomas Edison lets loose his copyright lawyers. The atmosphere is convincing as Smith transports readers to fin de siècle New Jersey, the sick room of a tubercular widow, and Belgium in the throes of WWI. The depth and breadth of the characterization is truly impressive, the story line immersive, and the prose richly evocative as the novel ranges from tragic to nail-biting to hilarious. Smith's tale is as luminous as celluloid projected on a silver screen hung from a dirigible floating over the Hudson (yes, this happens). Highly recommended.--Bethany Latham Copyright 2019 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A long-retired moviemaker recalls the early days of silent films in Smith's atmospheric follow-up to The Last Painting of Sara De Vos (2016, etc.).In 1962, 85-year-old Claude Ballard lives in a run-down Hollywood hotel and spends his days gathering mushrooms and photographing street scenes. He has not made a movie since his "grand cinematic experiment," The Electric Hotel, appeared in 1910. As his reminiscences to young film scholar Martin Embry unfold, we eventually learn the reasons for his decision, but first we get a wonderfully vivid re-creation of the spell cast by the earliest films, when photographer's apprentice Claude sees the Lumire brothers' first reels exhibited in the basement of a Paris hotel in 1895: "every inch of the screen was aliveyou burrowed into the screen, dug it out with your gaze." His work for the Lumires takes him to New York, where the audience's loud response to a moving picture next door to her theater infuriates touring French actress Sabine Montrose. She winds up in bed with Claude and in the new medium; buccaneering producer Hal Bender finds them a studio perched over the Palisades in New Jersey, where he hopes to elude Thomas Edison's litigious Motion Picture Patents Company. Smith skillfully blends film history with the adventures of his cast; a Stanislavsky-obsessed acting coach and an Australian stuntman are among the intriguingly idiosyncratic folks who join Sabine, Claude, and Hal, each haunted by damage a parent has inflicted, to joyously invent a new art form. The novel climaxes with a brilliantly detailed account of the filming of The Electric Hotel and its triumphant premiere, followed by multiple blows that have been deftly foreshadowed. The account of Claude's traumatic experiences filming the devastation of World War I is something of a letdown, but a final scene with Sabine ties up emotional loose ends, and Martin's screening of the restored Electric Hotel provides a moving finale.A compelling plot, robust characters, and finely crafted prose richly evoke a bygone age and art. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

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)