by Vicki Baum
Grand Hotel is of most interest as a cultural time capsule from the 1920s. Ninety years ago, what sort of novel captured the public’s imagination?
First published in 1929 and later an Oscar-winning film with Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and the Barrymore brothers, Grand is about guests at a ritzy Berlin hotel whose lives intertwine briefly, with both romantic and tragic results. It’s the same kind of overwrought soap opera that grips many readers today, with illicit affairs, lust-filled men, fading celebrity, and the vain struggle to stave off aging and death. Baum’s writing is often sentimental and melodramatic, but her characters are timeless.
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