A fine New Yorker story (Enright) that is more than it at first seems

Surprising story by Anne Enright, Irish novelist, in current New Yorker, The Hotel, which at first seems as if it's another one of the tired laments about wayward international travelers. The narrator has just completed a complicated flight with a few legs - on closer examination the route makes no sense - and arrived in an airport where she has to make one more connection. Gate is closed or it's been changed at the last minute, she's all confused, seems to have a hotel voucher, figures she can get to the hotel and get 4 hours or so of sleep before an early-morning departure, wanders about, not even sure what country she's in though signs seem to be in German (sometimes w/ an unhelpful sign in "French," such as Hotel w/ a circumflex over the "o"), noone's around, sees some soldiers who tell her the hotel is "just over there" or something like that - by this point the story seems Kafkaesque, strange and moody, but to be honest up to this point I didn't really care, thinking the narrator is obvious a veteran traveler and just feeling sorry for herself, but then even stranger things happen, as the narrator steps out of the airport and sees the "hotel" across the street, but it turns out, dreamlike, that the hotel is more like a warehouse and there's a long queue of people waiting to get in - not the smart international set like the narrator, but impoverished, people living filth and near starvation, desperate to keep their place in line, there's no way for the narrator to enter or join this queue without giving up her comforts and her identity - and subtly the story has shifted from a Kafkaesque nightmare narrative to a commentary on contemporary civilization, as we sense that her life has crossed w/ the lives of migrants and refugees, and we sense that all of our lives, even privileged lives of the international business set, are just on the margin of these sometimes invisible lives of chaos and torment that we have created or at the least that we endure.

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