THE THIRD HOTEL
Laura Van Den Berg
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
ISBN 978-0-374-16835-3
Hardcover
Fiction

THE THIRD HOTEL is neither a long book nor a dense one. The whole of it, however, is much greater than the sum of its parts. Author Laura Van Den Berg explores a number of themes in this haunting tale of unresolved grief and loss against a backdrop which is by turns tarnished and shimmering. One does not have to have had the same experiences as the book’s haunted protagonist to crawl into her skin and become trapped beneath.

The story within THE THIRD HOTEL is told from the third person point of view of Clare, who has recently become widowed as the result of the hit and run death of her husband Richard. Clare as THE THIRD HOTEL opens, has come to Havana to attend a festival of new Latin American cinema. Richard was a horror film scholar, and the work of a practitioner of the genre --- one who Richard believed to be groundbreaking --- is being featured there. The title of the book and its circumstance foreshadows the mood of the book. Clare, upon arriving in Havana, found herself at two different hotels before arriving at the correct one, which she refers to throughout the book as “the third hotel.” While there are barriers that any innocent would encounter when traveling abroad, from language to differences in culture and currency, Clare’s biggest problem lies within herself. She almost immediately makes herself mildly notorious at the festival site by engaging in some bizarre behavior, possibly alcohol-induced but probably not. Again, this incident --- which comes back to haunt her later --- foreshadows the book’s major focus, which is Clare’s repetitive sighting of Richard in Havana. She follows his apparition through the streets of Havana with varying degrees of success as her already tenuous hold on reality becomes increasingly slippery. Her shadowing gives her the opportunity to review the problems which had existed in her marriage and her life, even as Havana seems to quietly implode in the wake of her passage. Some of the incidents, such as when one of the actresses to be featured at the festival, goes missing. Others, including the escape of several animals from a zoo, may be coincidence. When a train accident occurs, however, one wonders to what extent Clare’s presence is inadvertently influencing matters. Yet Clare, who is the personification of the unreliable narrator, creates her own major issue. One never knows if what she describes as occurring is actually true. By the time THE THIRD HOTEL is complete, the reader might be forgiven for wondering if Clare ever really traveled to Havana at all. Among other things.

My favorite fiction has always been that where the lines of what is real and what is not are gently and questionably blurred. THE THIRD HOTEL fits that description perfectly. Van Den Berg’s exquisite descriptions of Havana, the film festival, the attendees and of Clare herself gently but persuasively propel the reader deeper into the book in search of what may or may not be the mystery at its core. One is never quite sure if the question posed in the first sentence of THE THIRD HOTEL is answered, but the book’s last sentence --- one of the best I have read thus far this year --- leaves little room for doubt as to what will occur in the story’s unwritten future. Recommended.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
© Copyright 2018, The Book Report, Inc. All rights reserved.

Laura van den Berg’s haunting new novel, “The Third Hotel,” defies classification.  Is it magic realism?  Is it horror?  It doesn’t quite matter:  this poetic, genre-crossing novel is eerily gorgeous. And it is more sophisticated than her  first book, “Find Me,” a beautifully-written dystopian novel about a plague of forgetfulness.

In “The Third Hotel,” the heroine, Clare, a widow, no longer understands the meaning of her life. She has been numb for some time, and is now mourning the loss of  her husband.  In December, she flies to Havana for the Festival of New Latin American Cinema he’d planned to attend.  Cuba is not her kind of place:  she is an elevator sales rep whose favorite state is Nebraska, because of the blandness and flatness. But her husband, Richard, killed in a hit-and-run accident in New York, was a scholar of horror films, and she wants to meet the director of the first horror film made in Cuba, “Revolución Zombie.”

Cuba is gorgeous, hot and disturbing:  dazed by beauty and unmarked streets, Clare keeps getting lost.  She calls her hotel the “Third Hotel,” because she had to ask concierges of two other hotels for directions before she found it.  Clare travels often for work and is usually at home in hotels, but she has seen some bizarre things. Once she found a human fingernail in a drawer–and that haunts her.

Van den Berg researched horror films exhaustively, and her analyses of the meaning of such films is enlightening.  Clare attends screenings, parties, and a panel discussion on a “zombie school.”  And then suddenly she catches sight of her husband, or thinks she does.  But what is she seeing?  It is easier for her to see it as a film through
Richard’s eyes than to stop and wonder. She writes,

"Screens were vehicles for the subjective, he had once written. No eye was objective and thus no lens could be either. In turn, the viewer’s response to the images became the third subjective eye, an invisible revelatory force. Screens and images revealed the viewer as much as they revealed to the viewer."

We’re not sure if he is the real Richard, a ghost, or a zombie.  As she follows him through the steamy streets, we feel that we are watching a film, and indeed she takes pictures with a camera.  Their eventual meetings are puzzling yet at the same time provide closure for Clare and the reader.  Van den Berg is a brilliant writer, and I admired this novel.  Supernatural meetings?  Maybe.  A lyrical, offbeat book.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 7, 2018

The Third Hotel is about the transitions in life that relate to death and loss. Clare is 37 and alone in Havana. She had planned to go there with her husband Richard to attend the screening of a zombie apocalypse movie, but Richard (a horror film scholar) died in an accident five weeks earlier. As will the reader, Clare finds herself wondering why she came to Havana without him. She seems to think she will see him in Havana, and from time to time she does.

Richard was carrying a wrapped box at the time of his death that Clare brings to Havana but refuses to open. Instead, she wanders the streets, visits tourist attractions, and remembers Richard’s theories about horror films, all the while keeping an eye out for Richard. She also thinks about how Richard changed during their marriage. From her description of his new self, she might be better off without him, although the novel encourages the reader to wonder whether Richard might have thought that Clare was the one who changed.

The story draws a parallel between the “undead” movies that Richard analyzed and Clare’s perception of her suddenly “undead” husband. The undead have power over the living precisely because they cannot be killed; they are “free to rage and rage.” In Clare’s case, the ghost of her undead husband has power over her because he will not let her move on with her life — unless his undead presence is telling her that she needs to move on.

Clare also ponders the horror film tradition of killing “bad girls” while the virginal good girl survives, and compares it to her own experience. She talks to a professor about explanations of death that appear to reject death as a concept, given the multiverse theory that all things are simultaneously possible (e.g., death and undeath coexist). Bizarre things happen in Cuba, apart from Clare’s stalking of her dead husband. Yet if all things are possible, Clare might not be a reliable narrator, even as she remembers events from a past that seem real to her.

Later in the novel, when Clare interacts more fully with her dead husband — chatting with him in a hotel room and in a cave — it isn’t clear whether her mind is taking a break from reality or whether, as she believes, an event has occurred that cannot be explained by the laws of the familiar world. Since Richard lectures her on the dangers of grieving and talks to her about how strange her behavior had been in the months before he died, one might think all of this happens inside Clare’s head, but perhaps all things are possible, so readers can draw their own conclusions.

Clare’s contemplation of death extends to her still-living father, who has asked her to do something when he nears death that his growing dementia will not allow him to do himself. She considers his request an unfair burden. Whether we are chasing ghosts of the people we love or are dreading their demise, death is a burden to the living, and that is the novel’s theme.

A good bit of ambiguity remains at the novel’s end (particularly concerning the contents of the mysterious box and Richard’s actions at the time of his death), but the novel emphasizes that life and death are necessarily ambiguous, that we are all on a journey that may end at any time or that may continue for eternity. Maybe Richard is alive and Clare is dead. Maybe we are all simultaneously dead and undead. The story is unsettling but it is told in such effortless prose that it is easy to be swept along before pausing to wonder about its hidden depths. Readers who hate ambiguous literature will hate The Third Hotel, but readers who wonder about the wonder of existence will enjoy the novel’s challenges.

RECOMMENDED

I found this book confusing much of the time. I reread and reread parts trying to tie events together but it still didn’t seem to flow to tell the story. I was so looking forward to reading a story set in Havana, thinking I would learn more about their culture or the island itself. There were some descriptive passages, but not what I was hoping for. Thank you to Laura van den Berg, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for affording me the opportunity to read this ARC.

I received an advanced reader's copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book is not a mystery or thriller in the proper sense. The protagonist is "haunted" by her dead husband and the "spirit" of her past relationships. The metaphor is externalized, but the book is a narrative monologue of her inner life and emotions regarding these affairs. It's not a bad book, it's just not what I wanted it to be, the style of writing is not my cup of tea. It is a very well-written narrative, and the emotions ring true. Not a beach read. 3.5 rounded up.

Laura van den Berg creates an atmosphere of geographical and emotional dislocation in The Third Hotel. It is haunting in it's acute sense of outsiderdom, even within the context of a marriage. The protagonist ventures through Havana trying to approximate the interest and excitement her husband had for a particular film-making niche. She desires to remake herself while on vacation, often giving fictitious details about her life, and while the narrative comments on how that sort of situational deceit is common among most people, Her's is striking in its use as a defense mechanism. That her loss was so sudden and devastating, that to disassociate would be preferable is obvious. She seems to focus on details around her, rather than her own feelings, and she begins to lose her understanding of spoken Spanish (which should not be an issue for her), there is a sense of her stripping away her history and her own self, and yet her husband appears to her, and she gets pulled back into the mystery.
At one point, she remembers a conversation she has with her husband about horror movies, she asks "Well why not make a movie about things that really happen?", it is possible that horror movies, in their unreality, can be structured and formulaic, where the experience of loss among humans is wholly personal and can not be formatted. The story is at its best when in her search for order and signs, she slowly succumbs to the unreality of a movie trope such as seeing—and more importantly—believing in a ghost. Maybe we cling to the order of formulaic films, with their expected order, that we can study and predict, with the causes and effects in the aftermath of tragedies in our own lives because we want to deny that the real world is chaotic, that even in something as chaotic as a zombie film, there are rules.

This is an essential summer read, especially in our times.

Mysterious, unsettling and enthralling--that's The Third Hotel, by Laura van den Berg. In this novel, recently-widowed Clare sees her late husband, Richard, at a film festival in Havana, Cuba. Is he a ghost born of her grief-stricken imagination, or something more substantial. Clare soon crosses the boundary between reality and fantasy, and the reader begins to see connections between his death and appearances. This book has won all kinds of praise; it's an Oprah magazine pick, a Washington Post pick, and an August 2018 IndieNext selection. Highly recommended.

"If death was uncertain, a life in turn was made uncertain-or the uncertainty that had always been there was exposed."

This book isn't for everyone and, frankly, I'm still not sure that it was the book for me either. Equal parts beautiful and disquieting I was filled with a strong feeling of unease for the duration of nearly the entire book but I've no doubt that this was by the author's masterful and unique design.

The Third Hotel follows Clare, a thirty-something widow, a few short weeks after the unexpected death of her husband. Clare is in Havana, on a trip planned by her husband before his passing, to attend the international film festival being hosted there. Rather than really attend the film festival, Clare aimlessly wanders the city lost in her thoughts and reeling from the sudden loss. On one of these many meanderings Clare sees someone that can be none other than her husband in a pale linen suit. This is a short book and though it's not particularly plot driven I won't go any farther to keep from spoiling anything.

The writing itself is beautiful and the structure of the narrative was very well done. Winding back through time as Clare navigates both Havana and her new state of widowhood. It truly reads like your own mind being drawn back in thoughts of times pasts and key events that need reexamining. Clare is trying to make sense of her new life without her partner and you can see her internal struggle perfectly by use of this wandering mind narrative structure and it adds to the overall discomfort as you wonder at her mental stability and her inability to maintain focus.

Speaking of discomfort, this book was definitely uncomfortable. Clare's husband, Richard was a scholar of horror movies and these horror themes are very present. I really enjoyed the way it was done, both with the creeping feeling of a horror movie but also with the self-examination of Clare, someone who knows all about them through her husband. The book is full of allusions to horror tropes, like Clare's wondering at herself as a "final girl" or Clare's feeling of something being wrong with her body compared to alien-like creatures living under her skin. While I really do enjoy horror movies and the occasional horror novel, this combined with the close look into the sudden death of a spouse made for a very anxious read and sometimes a struggle to continue reading.

I do think that this was completely intentional by the author and it is very successful, making for one of the most striking and unique books I've read for a long time. If you're up for it, I would definitely suggest this book as your next adventure.

Clara travels to Havana, Cuba, to attend a film festival. She is there on professional terms she tells the people, but actually, she works as a sales representative for ThyssenKrupp. She watches a horror movie, Revolución Zombi, due to its renowned director and she is looking for Richard - her lately deceased husband who was actually working on film. During her endless search, memories come up, the last days together with Richard before he was killed in an accident, their wedding day, her childhood when her parents owned a hotel in Florida that she roamed like a ghost.

Just as Clare wanders the streets of Havana, so do her thoughts and the reader accompanies her in her search which will lead to nothing – quite the contrary, the longer she roams, the more she herself seems to get lost. At times, she is self-conscious, understands exactly what is going on, that her mind is in exceptional circumstances due to the loss she has just experienced, but then again, she is talking to Richard as if he stood right next to her.

“The Third Hotel” – the name Clara gives her accommodation in Havana since twice before the taxi driver had taken her to the wrong one – is a psychological study in what can happen to a person whose life is turned upside down. Even the simplest things become obstacles hard to overcome:

“What was she doing in Havana? A simple question and yet she could not find a simple answer.”

Clare experiences as she calls it a “dislocation from reality”. There are phone calls when the phone never rings, there are people at the other end of the line that could be herself – she is lost in a parallel world that collides with other peoples’ reality but then again, there are walls that clearly separate those two spaces. Towards the end, a short dialogue perfectly sums up how Clare feels:

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, Clare said, with bitterness.
What doesn’t kill you leaves you alive, Richard countered. (...)
What doesn’t kill you only leaves you feeling broken and insane.”

She is not herself anymore, just like her father who also suffered metal degeneration, she at times cannot differentiate between what’s real and what’s imagined anymore.

The strongest parts of the novel are the descriptions, Laura van den Berg has an eye for the detail and particularly for the sensory aspects. Her protagonist might be gone mad, but her feelings are real. Apart from this, I liked the travel metaphors a lot. The characters are constantly moving in the novel, everybody is travelling, alone in a group, going here and there, on trains, buses, airplanes – yet, does anybody every arrive? Figuratively, aren’t we all relentlessly roaming and searching for our self, not knowing if we ever arrive?

This is a strange little gem of a book, I'm not quite sure I liked it, but I can certainly appreciate it for how well done it is. It took a while to figure out what I was reading, but I think it can best be summed up that it is a novel about dealing with grief. The sentences in here are beautiful, you have no doubt as to what our protagonist is thinking or feeling. The setting mostly takes place in Havana, and the way the author describes it is just beautiful and you can see yourself right there with the characters. The horror movie backdrop and constant references to horror films took away from the book for me, as I do not like horror at all, but it will be a wonderful bonus for those who are fans. The more I sit here, the more I continue to think about this book, and I probably will do the same for the next week or so, therefore I give this book 4 stars. Thanks to NetGalley for an electronic ARC of this book to review. All opinions are my own.

This is a rather strange book. The descriptions of Cuba are beautiful and some of the insights are interesting, but the rambling and the unfocused feeling just isn't my favorite kind of writing.

This is one of those polarizing love it or hate it literary novels. Clare's husband Richard is dead but she sees him (or does she) at the film festival in Havana that she attends after his death. He's a horror film expert but is he now a zombie or is this a manifestation of Clare's grief? This is not an easy read because it's very much out there in terms of metaphysics and I don't know what else. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I'm not sure who to recommend this to but try it if you like the stars of literary fiction.

An interesting delve into dealing with grief. Clare has travelled to Cuba in order to attend a horror movie festival she planned to see when her husband was struck by a car and killed. She then sees her husband in Cuba and proceeds to follow him. The character development and descriptions of how she deals with the stress and grief of this situation are rich and all-encompassing. This is an amazing and compelling tale of how to deal with the after effects of something so shocking and sudden while continuing to find yourself in this position. Having not read previous writings by this author, I was not sure what to expect, but it is very richly interpreted and extremely fascinating and I found myself seeking it out when I was not reading it. An interesting concept to be sure and I will be curious to read this author’s previous works as well after having enjoyed this book.

A strange little book that sees our protagonist, Clare, reeling from the death of her husband Richard. Richard was a horror film buff, and was planning to go to a film festival in Cuba when he died in an accident. Clare decides to honour this wish and still go. She does go to some of the festivities, but spends a lot of time wandering aimlessly about in Havana, where she sees her husband outside a museum. She continues to see him around, thinking he may be a zombie, like in the movies he loves. Honestly, this isn't a bad book, though it is a little bizarre. It is a multilayered book about grief, and it's manifestation and therefore would have a lot to offer book clubs. It is beautifully written, at times quite profound, but not really for me.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

apparentely a meditation on grief disguised as an almost horror story with a sort of a ghost, or doppleganger or what it is. Actually a metaphysical meditation on the bounds of reality, on human fears and of human perception of the self and of others. The grief part reminded me Amelia Gray’s two novels (THREATS and Isadora, which deal more or less with the same issue), the horror part is a sort of metafictional retelling of a Stephen King’s plot while the philosphical and metaphysical part bends toward some reflections on the self recently done by Alexandra Kleeman and Catherine Lacey, for example. That said the novel is not derivative but it lacks something , too much is left to the reader's free interpretation, and one has the feeling that the novel would have been much more effective if shorter and more concise and precise. The impression I got is that Laura van den Berg is way better, way more persuasive in the short-story form and that in the novels tends to lose herself.

I loved this thought-provoking novel. It is so complex and layered with meaning, I constantly found myself going back and forth to understand the significance of certain moments and characters. This would be an excellent book club pick as it would make for hours of discussion, and I can't wait to talk about it with other readers. One of the best books of the year.

After arriving in Cuba for a film festival she planned to attend with her recently deceased husband, Clare finds him standing in front of her in an art gallery. She stalks him around Havana for a few days before following him onto a train bound for the other side of the island, where she can get him alone. Some may call this a literary zombie novel, but it feels to me like a perfect depiction of the derangement of grief.

This is a beautifully written book, with an interesting setting (hello Cuba), and an intriguing premise. I found it perfectly enjoyable. This was my first encounter with Laura van den Berg and I am definitely intrigued to try more from her, especially her short stories, as I've heard wonderful things about them. I don't know that this is a book that will stick with me, but I enjoyed it as I was reading it

The insights Laura van den Berg shares on grief and marriage made this book for me. The storyline was intriguing—a woman's husband dies and she goes to Havana for a film festival they were both to attend. She sees her husband all over town. Eventually they meet and talk and we understand a bit why they were together but spent so much time apart, and why losing him split her world apart, even though she wasn't entirely happy with him. Or happy at all.

This is a complex read and I think I need to go through it again to make sense of it. The horror movie analyses were informative and fun, even though I'm no longer a fan of the genre. Van den Berg did her research and integrates it well into the plot, which is a bit of a horror story itself.

I thank NetGalley for a review copy in return for an honest assessment.

Grief makes people act strangely, especially when someone has lost someone very close to them. Movies and TV make grief look a certain way: lots of tears, depression, withdrawal from others, and so on. But in Laura van den Berg’s The Third Hotel, Clare follows an inchoate grief into dark places. When we meet her, we know that she is in Havana for a film festival her husband was looking forward to. We also know that he was killed in a car accident five weeks prior. Clare knows this, too, but then she sees her husband in a crowd in Havana.

Clare is not a fan of horror movies. She’s only in Havana, about to watch Revolución zombi, because her husband was a horror movie scholar. While she crisscrossed the United States selling elevators (yes, really), Richard was at home writing articles about Final Girls and Terrible Places. Neither of them are terrible happy. Because of Clare’s travel, however, they don’t get any opportunities to really talk about their problems and misunderstandings. And then Richard is killed and they never get a chance to make things right.

Perhaps this is why Clare goes to Havana and spends her time in something like a fugue state, catching glimpses of Richard, a man who might be following them, and the supposedly missing lead actress of Revolución zombi. We see her wrestle with her memories, her emotions, and a lot of guilt over her avoidance of Richard before his death and her father’s increasing senility.

The Third Hotel is an emotional journey. I don’t know that this book will make readers cry. The book has more of a creepy vibe most of the time, as Clare seeks out her husband to find out of he’s a ghost or if there’s been a terrible mistake. I can say that this is a wrenching read and a very honest one. Laura van den Berg has done a virtuoso job of drawing a woman’s emotional riot after the loss of her husband, the deterioration of her father’s mental state, and her realization of how unnatural her life as a traveling elevator salesperson was. I would strongly recommend this book for readers seeking honest emotion.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 7 August 2018.