This is not first rate literature, for the literati and erotomanics will surely find no insights of interest here. But it brings a given time and place to life so well that it deserves to be read, and reread, and loved. Here too, a heretical thought could be reinforced: the characters seem more modern than we are...

She was reusing her successful formula but this is my favourite of her novels. Interesting description of China before the revolution. Baum deserves to be rediscovered.

Many very different characters will meet at the Shangai Hotel... A Japanese businessman; A Russian aventurière; A Chinese rickshaw coolie; An American couple; A Chinese millionaire; Two Jewish refugies from Germany.

Every page of this novel is spellbinding.

Ms King has really written a very authoritative book on that literary phenomenon of the 20's and 30's who was Vicki Baum.

I used to read a lot in the family library when I was a boy. I remember that my father had in very high esteem the collected works of Vicki Baum. There were four volumes of them in a beautiful Madrid de luxe Edition, with leather and everything. I was very curious about a writer who had been able to write so many novellas (she wrote like 50).

To put it shortly, I decided to study chemical engineering because of her novel WEEPING WOOD (A history of the Rubber Tree). And also, HEADLESS ANGEL (a romantic novel about the Mexican years of the Colony) made me long for adventures.

Many years have elapsed and I always wanted to re-read those books, but with more information at hand, so I could savour what was before me.

I found that information in the essay BEST SELLERS BY DESIGN by scholar Lynda King. She didn't write a biography in strict sense, but rather went very succesfully to explain why Vicki Baum was such an exceptional literary phnomenon in the Berlin of the 20's and 30's. According to her exhaustive survey, Ms King says that Germany in those years was (because of the economic depression with an inflation of 5000%- people had to carry money in wheelbarrows) hungry for reading things that the man-in-the-street -like the enormous majority of the population was-, could achieve in life. The House of Ullstein (Germany's largest editorial Firm) found in the person of Vicki Baum the writer who could address the hearts of the ordinary people. And so and with the fashion of the epoch of delivering chapters each month in Ullstein's different publications destined to housewives, workers, even professional people, they were able to read a whole story on woman emancipation (THE STORY OF HELENE WILLFEUER) which produced antagonistic reactions. But it was Baum's first best-seller. And then came the quintessence of dreams-come-true, her most famous novel GRAND HOTEL in which Baum takes pains to show that an ordinary man as the heroe who comes to Berlin from a small town manages to be admitted into the exclusive and aristocratic Grand Hotel and mingles with all sorts of important people before he dies (he's terminally ill). Grand Hotel has been used to explain what a best-seller is, but Ms King has written a very comprehensive allegory of it.

I thoroughly enjoyed this essay with b/w rare photographs of Baum. And yes, it helped to recreate in my spirit those scenes of boyhood. It also helped to understand that Baum was a very talented writer, deep and skillful, and that the accusations of her being a writer of TRIVIALLITERATUR were not shared by all literary critics of the day. Even today, says Ms King, opinion is divided. Baum chose otherwise because she needed the money and decided to write best-sellers. But what is true is that she remains a fascinating writer who can get you into the plot of her rich imagination.

In short this is an essay which will appeal to all those interested in the making of a best-seller and some desription of that most fastidious of cities which is Berlin.

Just wanted to add that my previous review has an error. In it, I credit a "Dr. Fabius" with supplying author Vicki Baum with invaluable cultural notes on the Balinese. Actually, as Adrian Vickers points out in his marvelous book, Bali: A Paradise Created (also available here through Amazon), Dr. Fabius is simply a pseudonym for the phenomenally influential German artist and long-term Bali resident Walter Spies.

This oddity is probably of little consequence to one's enjoyment of the novel by Vicki Baum. However, it is food for thought; Spies had a singular interpretation of what was the essence of Balinese culture. Artistocratic, gay, and cultured, Spies had firm ideas about what the Balinese needed from the outside world. In a position of ambassador between Balinese royalty and western glitterati, his guests included Baum, the electrifying Margaret Mead and Charlie Chaplin, and through these contacts he did much towards what he thought was best for Bali. He was a highly influential afficianado of Balinese art and music. Vickers suggests that as Spies would patronize one artist and ignore another, he was very strongly shaping the culture of Bali. It would have been in Spies' interest, also, to show Bali and its colonizers in a certain light. Baum produced a novel that highlights Spies' general views, interestingly very much like those of today's usual western visitor to Bali. So this novel is a significant part of the image we have, today, of Bali and its people.

Slightly dry but straightforward writing builds a fine drama about Bali's puputan (the horrific mass suicide of the royal court before a full assembly of attacking Dutch troops).

The novel's characters are nicely painted through their thoughts and deeds; Baum does not rely on elaborate physical description. In the style of Grand Hotel (which later spawned the genre of human interest disaster movies), the novel's characters are only human, poignant in their foibles. Among them are the pretty little dancer Lambon, her selfish but likeable brother Pak, the proud entertainer Raka, the bored Dutch bureaucrat Boomsmer. There is royalty and slavery and peasants and mystics: Baliphiles will love this re-release of a classic.

The book never belittles the Balinese with colonialist tactics, and Baum compiled the story from the meticulous notes left to her by Dr. Fabius (longterm resident of Bali). It is a fine story about human error, human virtue.

A bit fat and unwieldy, this paperback would be better read BEFORE you hit the road for Bali. Other good Bali reads: Island of Bali (Covarrubias) and Bali Behind the Seen (Cork).