Hotel Amalfi

Shortlisted for the Cultural Endowment Annual Prize for Literature (Best Book of Fiction)

""Hotel Amalfi" is a book where everything is precisely in place. Perhaps this is the strength of Raud as a writer that he is able to create a compact world that does not throw you off your feet, but delicately guides you through the reading experience" - Tõnis Parksepp, Sirp

"Raud writes well. Clearly and well. About this day. With irony." - Heili Sibrits, Postimees

Published by Tuum in 2011.

"The story opens with a mysterious event: the main character, called Roland, an interior designer, finds a slip of paper in his shoe with a message that promises surprises. Soon, two strangers approach him and offer him an extremely inspiring commission to design a perfect hotel where all guests, from a tourist who seeks affordable comfort to a CEO who is accustomed to luxury and refinement, will feel absolutely comfortable and at home, as if the place was created for them. The commissioner demands that only Roland and none of his subordinates be the designer, and Roland accepts the fantastic, challenging commission. He borrows the name for his hotel from the small seaside town of Amalfi in the Italian province of Salerno, which is, earlier in the book, briefly related to some events in his private life. Having failed with his initial design and realising that this extraordinary interior design has to use plays of light, the protagonist starts to see the still incomplete interiors in his dreams. And his life lived in this dream space – separate from the real life, but with the same (hopeful) characters who all have the same dream on the same night – takes a direction of its own, “But there, in that hotel, I was as free as I knew how to be and I could do everything that I ever wanted to do.”
In this dream hotel, Roland is naked and invisible to all, until a person arrives who is able to see him. “Although outside this hotel everyone can see my physical body, hear me talking and see me moving, none of them can see my real self, the Roland who is able to create a world by using only his spiritual strength, to create such a world where, right now, we two can move mountains, erect cities and melt the ice. Nobody sees it. Only you.” The one who can see him is, naturally, a woman – Regina – who has both business and emotional private relations with Roland in real life. Thanks to her, Roland learns to experience new feelings, to see what is truly important and, having corrected the mistakes in some of her house designs, he finally starts to understand perfection, “... no perfection is complete if it does not hide a discord”. These two stories, one in the real world and the other in dreams (and the latter may even be more intriguing than the former), progress on their parallel paths towards a fatal point
where the dream life proves to be more vigorous than the real life. The interior designer has finally realised that, although routine work can be fatal to a creative soul, absolute freedom can be as fatal. Ultimately, it is the reader who has to decide whether Hotel Amalfi is a story of self-discovery or self-loss." - Brita Melts, Estonian Literary Magazine