Welcome
Mline Books was started in 2006 with the goal of publishing engaging fiction in softcover format.
Our inaugural title, Notes from Hotel Misterioso, by Michael Bugbee is an instant classic of Postmodernism. It explores the ways in which memory and desire infuence how we interpret and make meaningful what we believe we know.
The conceit is that the narrator, Miles Hyde (not Miles Reveal), a retired photojournalist who once did contract work for the CIA, is simply jotting down a few notes from a run-down beach resort that he owns in Mexico. The Notes appear to be written for Hyde’s eyes only, and in a temporal shorthand that promises neither a plot nor a resolution. The words “Notes from” in the title establish thematic neutrality–these might be notes about nothing–and they should alert the reader that these are only fragments, pieces of something.
Each of the novel’s eighteen chapters represents a separate entry in Hyde’s undated journal, which, while not specified, appears to have been written over several months in the early 2000s. The chapters, which range from the ridiculous to the sublime, do not always progress in a logical or sequential order. An entry’s change in tone and content invites a change in perspective (for both reader and narrator), and allows the story to move forward on multiple levels with a variety of interpretations–including the possibility that Miles is not the actual writer of the Notes. The seeming disjunction of the entries can undermine expectations, but it allows a sophisticated reader to step out of his traditionally passive role in the artifice of storytelling and become engaged.
Hyde does not address the reader directly, but his chatty, informal tone allows us to glean some background. He is twice divorced and the middle of three brothers. His older brother, Tim, suffers multiple personality disorder and has recently escaped from a mental institution. His younger brother, Jack, a self-destructive under achiever has died the previous year. Miles had an aborted career in Hollywood, has owned the Hotel Misterioso for over a dozen years, and is financially secure. A rogue CIA agent named Carlyle played an integral role in both Miles’ and Jack Hyde’s past.
Linking the Notes are the inviting, though perhaps insane, narrative voice of Miles Hyde and his relationship with the urbane Peter Bergen, who seems to be the only guest registered at the Hotel Misterioso. Indeed, the halls of this hotel are as quiet and desolate as a mental hospital. Bergen is like Miles Hyde’s alter ego, or, one of several–the idea of an alter ego, of multiple selves, repeats throughout the book. Bergen is the little voice in Hyde’s head with whom he can quarrel without rancor about the deepest subjects in a most superficial manner. Or, depending on one’s interpretation of the Notes, Bergen could be Hyde’s shrink. Sustaining such ambiguity as the story progresses to a surprisingly hopeful ending is part of the novel’s achievement.
Surface is important in this book, and Miles stays unrelentingly on the surface of the people and events about which he writes. His languid relationship with motive might be the result of some past trauma, his palpable disdain of psychology, or simply viewing the world like the photographer he once was. Surface might or might not be as telling as depth, but the key to the novel–and what infuses the book with its mad power–is that Hyde makes little attempt to explore the relationship between what he is writing and what it means. It is precisely this disconnect that allows him to write the Notes with an almost naive dispassion, and what gives the book its ludic surface and, simultaneously, its undercurrent of loss and betrayal. To say more about the Notes would only deny you–as the liner notes suggest–the singular pleasure of roaming the lush resort of your own intuition.
To order Notes from Hotel Misterioso, click here.
