Dominic Smith: Writing The Electric Hotel

Rare Air with Meri Fatin

Dominic Smith’s fourth novel, the New York Times best seller "The Last Painting of Sara de Vos" won both Indie Book of the Year AND the Australian Book Industry awards Literary Fiction Book of the Year in 2017.

For Rare Air, he joins me to discuss his most recent novel, The Electric Hotel. Set around the birth of cinema, as the Lumière Brothers sent commission agents around the world to demonstrate their cinematographe, The Electric Hotel introduces us to French filmmaker Claude Ballard.

One of the original Lumière commission agents, then silent film heavyweight, now in his eighties, a dedicated mushroom forager and long-term resident of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. It's a truly captivating story, beautifully researched, where even the most staggering human experience feels entirely plausible.

Smith says his goal was to fall in love with silent film. He watched over one hundred of them for research. Preservation of these films has been an issue. It was reported by the US Library of Congress in 2013, that 75 percent of silent films made in the US between 1912 and 1929 had been lost. This formed part of Smith's motive to write a book set in the era as he tried to imagine a comparable situation in the world of literature.

In this conversation Dominic Smith also speaks about the formation of his writing discipline and muses about being an American, born and bred in Australia. He spoke to me from his home in Seattle, WA.