“The legacy of Baum’s novel is not just the 1932 MGM film starring John Barrymore and Greta Garbo (and the 1980s Broadway musical), but all those star-stuffed movies and fat popular novels…in which some institution or event serves as the setting for the intersecting individual dramas. What distinguishes the book from its plump progeny is not only its relatively modest length but the delicacy of Baum’s writing…The book is kin to both the stories of Stefan Zweig and the films of Max Ophüls, both artists who chronicled devastating loss but drew our eye to the exquisite fluidity with which the most precious things slid through their characters’ elegant, manicured fingers.”
—Kirkus starred review
“Through the revolving doors of Grand Hotel pass multifarious stray souls: some resigned to their drab fates, others searching eagerly for life—all persuaded that it has somehow passed them by. We meet them as they come under the practiced eye of the staff, expert in Weimar Berlin’s taxonomies of class. Like George Grosz, Vicki Baum renders human foibles at their most pathetic, despicable, and comical, then turns her characters inside out, until we recognize our own hopes and fears refracted in them.”
—Holly Brubach
“The author’s strength is creating compelling characters with sexual attitudes that feel contemporary. Grand Hotel prefigures Downtown Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs by examining multiple characters from different classes (both guests and the hotel staff) in a single-setting microcosm of society and lives up to its reputation as a modern classic.”
—Kevin Howell, Shelf Awareness
“A spiritual motion picture of modern life, the characteristics, the cross-currents of thought and emotion, of this new age.”
—J. B. Priestley
“[Told] with unusual skill and distinguished by an acute perception of minor detail.”
—George Dangerfield, The Bookman
“One of the most perfectly constructed popular novels in modern literature.”
—Frank N. Magill, editor of Masterplots, Revised Edition
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