Hotel Lusitano

1986. 1st Edition.

Almost 40 years after the first edition, even Eça's quote has aged more than a century in this summary. Hotel Lusitano still portrays us in our entirety and, if it has any expression lines, they only add to its charm: they are lines from smiling.

The rooms will now have television, and there will be a rooftop bar, as you observe in the preface to this edition, that American who could almost be a protagonist named Richard Zenith. But in this Hotel Lusitano, the first novel by Rui Zink, we remain at home, facing the mirror.

Rui Zink, born in Lisbon in 1961, is one of the most singular voices in contemporary Portuguese literature. Writer, teacher, and intellectual provocateur, he has built a body of work marked by irony, social criticism, and the rare ability to transform the everyday into revealing absurdity.

In books such as O Destino Turístico, A Instalação do medo, or Hotel Lusitano, he explores the tension between fantasy and reality: humor as a sharp form of thought.