Written by a highly credentialed (published novelist, short stories in lit journals, winner of grants and awards, creative writing teacher at NY University) Nahid Rachlin, Hotel Hafez tells of Mustafa, a young man who’s lost his family and becomes prime fodder for an organization of terrorists that now has landed him in a hotel room with a bomb that is meant to kill at least one specific target while Mustafa escapes to a promise of paid living and studies.
It doesn’t quite work out that way, and the twist that throws off the great plan is not Mustafa’s own strong doubts about the organization and his reluctance to carry out the deed, but rather a simple small act of spite of employee against employer. This is likely the whole thrust of the story: that misunderstandings and discontent on a small scale enlarge in the mirror of the world.
The writing is fine, though it was very telling rather than including any drama via show:
It all sounded harmless to Mustafa–no mention of anything destructive. He liked being with the other members, all young men. They had been, like himself, bereft of what they once had valued and been attached to. (p. 83)
Maybe there’s a purpose to keeping the reader at arm’s length, never quite allowing him to understand enough about Mustafa aside from the facts that even as his feelings change, we don’t care enough (at least I didn’t) about him to worry that he’ll oversleep and blow himself up. What he gains in character by questioning the purpose and motive of his task, he loses in his wimpy manner of making it right: he’ll go to the authorities after the bomb’s done its damage.
The twist ending is a little too pat, giving full explanation which frankly, we don’t need; the plan didn’t work and it changed the outcome dramatically, but it doesn’t really matter why. Except of course, to enhance Rachlin’s premise. There is also a confusing switch from third person to a brief sentence in first and back to third again that must be over my head in meaning and purpose. I just didn’t care enough to go back and reread it. The idea could have been more powerful, though maybe what I’m missing is its subtlety.
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