From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction” (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most, her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.
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The Dream Hotel is a chilling examination of the surveillance state, the incarceration industrial complex, and capitalism and even though the book is billed as a dystopian, the setting of the novel feels very much too close for comfort.
We follow the harrowing experience of Sara Hussein, a Moroccan American archivist whose unpleasant interaction with customs officers at LAX turned into a nightmare when she is sentenced to retention by the government agency Risk Assessment Administration (RAA) which has predicted that she will commit a crime against her husband. As a retainee, Sara finds herself at the mercy of Madison, a private retention center run by corporation Safe-X, where her chances of freedom depend on the whims of the complicated bureaucratic system full of arbitrary rules designed to keep Sara and her fellow retainees in a perpetual miserable, profit-maximizing existence inside Safe-X.
It is definitely a depressing and rage-inducing read. There are many moments where I found myself needing to stop the book and take a breath to calm myself down at the numerous injustices facing Sara and her fellow retainees at Madison. While the resolution at the end of the book is not the just desert that one may be expecting, I am grateful for the message of solidarity and organized action in the face of corporate greed. A theme that is very prevalent during this time of renewed union strength alongside repressive corporate crackdown on workers in the US. The hopeful tone at the end of the book of course does not resolve or erase all of the injustices, but it marks the beginning of something that can be greater, which is perhaps the best gift Laila Lalami gives us.
Like many dystopian novels, the horrors depicted in The Dream Hotel are very real. Perhaps the exact technology used is still thankfully not a reality just yet, but the issues of our willingly sign away our privacy and rights to tech companies promising “convenience”, to the growing surveillance state promising “safety and security”, and the ugly, exploitative, and dehumanizing nature of for-profit prisons are integral aspects of our society. And I appreciate Laila Lalami drawing attention to these realities through her story. I hope The Dream Hotel will begin to open the door to these conversations, no matter how difficult people may find them.
03.5 stars
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