“Grand Hotel Europa” is an insightful and entertaining novel
Published 2026-06-22 13.39
“Grand Hotel Europa” by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer
Do you always have looking for a humorous novel of doom filled with intellectual conversations, cinematic sex scenes, art treasure hunts à la “The Da Vinci Code”, reflections on mass tourism, Arab oil capitalism and the art of wearing a tuxedo during a forest walk without getting stuck in the brambles?
Then you should read Ilja Leonard Pfeijffers “Grand Hotel Europa” which has just come out in Joakim Sundströms elegant language suit. It’s like Thomas Mann’s “Bergtagen” 100 years later, although the hotel is not in the Alps but in an indefinable European nowhere and the patients are not tuberculosis sufferers but nostalgics with equally incurable consumption damage who enjoy feeling complicit in the world’s decay. Welcome to the very last apocalypse, room service included, seems to be the hidden refrain.
The novel begins with that Ilja, an arrogant dandy with the same name as the author, lands in a beautiful but dilapidated hotel to write a novel about his beloved Clio. She is a dramatic art historian with a penchant for Armani suits, from whom he has just separated. It doesn’t take long until Ilja gets to know the hotel’s wonderful guests and Mr. Wang, a Chinese businessman who has just bought the hotel and wants to modernize it. Ilya is drawn into a series of intrigues as he tries to analyze what went wrong with Clio, among their endless Woody Allen-quarrels and travels to all corners of the world in search of Caravaggio’s last, lost painting.
The hotel’s majesty major domus Montebello, the European superego in human form, is the novel’s most perfected creation. He conjures clothespins out of thin air and recites French poems by heart to break awkward silences, apologizing for the plastic flowers on the landing with a sadness that seems to encompass the moral breakdown of the entire modern project.
Pfeijffer loves to play with the reader in this winding, 500-page novel that has become an international bestseller. Sometimes you don’t know if you’re reading a novel about other novels, a more luxurious travel guide or a sociological essay on “European identity”. Ilja reflects on globalization, mass tourism, waves of migration, how tourists in the Mediterranean bathe in a mass grave and how Venice is still fully booked even though it is literally disappearing under water. It is Europe’s narcissistic wound: the belief that we deserve the beauty we are in the process of destroying.
Most of all he is bothered by the tourists’ shorts, which recurs as a hangup throughout the story. It probably is Beau Brummellthe greatest dandy of the ages had seen our world. When Ilja has sex with an underage girl, also at her request, he is disappointed to have been forced to sign a consent agreement. Where has the romance gone? Houellebecq doesn’t feel far away, either Žižek among all the philosophical one-liners. The only one who feels far away is the editor, who would have liked to have shortened the conversations, which sometimes look like long thesis chapters with chat minus signs pasted on.
But Pfeijffer can be forgiven for this, especially thanks to Clio’s incessant advances which gradually turn Ilja into the story’s most unexpected object of sympathy. When Clio finally chooses to leave Ilja to work in a museum in Abu Dhabi, the stronghold of the Arab world’s consumption of European cultural history as a status project, a quiet irony is completed. It is not Ilja who is abandoned, but Aftonlandet itself. The shoe actually squeezes in a completely different place.
In 2017, Damien Hirst showed his spectacularly pompous exhibition “Treasures from the wreck of the unbelievable” at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice It was based on a fictional sunken civilization, with giant sphinxes and gods that looked like they came from Louis Vuitton’s latest shop window. This profoundly kitschy exhibition, which I happened to visit when it happened, is praised by the author, who does not seem to realize that Hirst’s scam is possible precisely because the big capitalist art collectors, the Pinault family and similar giants, have turned cultural capital into financial capital in a way that has radically changed what art is and can cost. Pfeijffer dwells on the contrast between the permanence of the bronze sculptures and the ephemeral circus of the Venice Biennale with rambling papier-mâché installations, but the real question, who owns the right to decide what lastshe lets it lie.
It is a blind spot in an otherwise very sharp and entertaining novel that had become a very successful film, somewhere between “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “La grande bellezza”, not to say La grande tristezza.
NOVEL
» Grand Hotel Europe
Ilja Leonard Pfeiffer
Trans. Joakim Sundström
Ersatz
