The Two Hotel Francforts was published by Bloomsbury in 2013. The novel is set in Lisbon during the summer of 1940 — the period when the Portuguese capital became a bottleneck for refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe. Thousands of people crowded the city, waiting for visas, for ships, for some means of escape to the Americas.
The narrator is Pete Winters, an American car salesman traveling through Europe with his wife Julia when the German invasion of France traps them in Portugal. They encounter another American couple — Edward and Iris Freleng — staying at the other Hotel Francfort (Lisbon had two hotels of that name). Edward is a writer; Iris is elegant and mysterious. The two couples are drawn together, and the attractions that develop — Pete toward Edward, Julia toward a different kind of life entirely — threaten to unmake both marriages.
Leavitt uses the historical setting to create an atmosphere of moral urgency: with Europe burning, the ordinary rules of social behavior seem both more important (as the last vestiges of civilization) and less important (what do marital vows matter when millions are dying?). The refugees waiting in Lisbon cafes and consulate queues provide a chorus of desperation against which the Americans’ romantic complications play out.
The novel’s homoerotic dimension — Pete’s attraction to Edward — is handled with characteristic Leavitt subtlety: acknowledged, explored, but never resolved into simple categories. Pete is not “coming out” in any contemporary sense; he is confronting a desire that his era has no acceptable framework for.
Collecting The Two Hotel Francforts
First edition (Bloomsbury, New York, 2013): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Very good/very good: $5–$15