The Third Hotel

by Laura van den Berg

In Havana, Cuba, a widow tries to come to terms with her husband’s death―and the truth about their marriage―in Laura van den Berg’s surreal, mystifying story of psychological reflection and metaphysical mystery.

Shortly after Clare arrives in Havana, Cuba, to attend the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema, she finds her husband, Richard, standing outside a museum. He’s wearing a white linen suit she’s never seen before, and he’s supposed to be dead. Grief-stricken and baffled, Clare tails Richard, a horror film scholar, through the newly tourist-filled streets of Havana, clocking his every move. As the distinction between reality and fantasy blurs, Clare finds grounding in memories of her childhood in Florida and of her marriage to Richard, revealing her role in his death and reappearance along the way.

Filled with subtle but striking meditations on grief, marriage, art, misogyny, and the loneliness of travel, The Third Hotel is a singular, propulsive, brilliantly shape-shifting novel from an inventive author at the height of her narrative powers.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Literary Fiction, Horror, Magical Realism, Mystery Thriller, Thriller

212 pages, Hardcover

First published August 7, 2018

About the author

Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of five works of fiction, including The Third Hotel, a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Award, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Laura is currently a Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard. Her next novel, State of Paradise, is forthcoming from FSG in July 2024. She lives in the Hudson Valley.

Reviews

[Roxane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, atmospheric novel about marriage and grief. Also very strange, diffuse. Mostly set in Cuba, and the country is rendered in lovely ways. So much precision of language. The ending... doesn't quite work for me, or, better put, I did not understand the ending. I admire the amount of work that went into this book--lots of interesting stuff about horror movies. Fascinating novel.

[Iryna *Book and Sword* · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5 (rounded down)

"What in the world did I just read" - sums up this book very well. At least for me. Aside from giving it a low rating I actually do not think that this is a bad book, I think that this is a brilliant book - for the right audience.

​The closest thing I can compare it to is The ocean at the end of the lane by Neil Gaiman, so if you enjoyed that one you will probably love The Third Hotel. Myself? Not so much. I didn't enjoy Gaiman's book and I didn't much care for this one, although it was still very readable and I wanted to get to the end to see how it plays out. Which it didn't, not really.

I like a little ambiguity here and there, but The Third Hotel is ambiguous on top of ambiguous - and at that point what is the story even? When the author leaves too much to reader's interpretation the story telling ceases to be, it looses its direction and it loses its own voice.

Everything would be made okay if the ending at least gave us something, but it doesn't. I finished the book, but I feel like I haven't, I still have so many questions and absolutely no answers. Sure, that is the point of this type of writing, but to be honest I'd rather have hard, but set in stone truths than delirious musings that go nowhere.

I had the same problem with The ocean at the end of the lane, if only the ending made it worthwhile, if only some things were confirmed. But nothing was, and I just end up wondering about the book that wasn't probably even a book, just a figment of feverish imagination, on author's part that they wanted to share with the world. A brilliant figment nonetheless, but you have to be in a state of mind for it. And I just wasn't, because those types of books are just not my cup of tea.

​The writing itself was absolutely gorgeous - that was the main reason I kept going, I absolutely loved it. It was simple, but yet complex. It gave away nothing, but at the same time it told so much.

​I cannot tell much about the story without having to explain the whole thing, but I did enjoy the side exploration of Agatha Alonso, I also felt like her story was the only one that got some sort of finish. Mostly I was just left with questions about Clare:
​ "Did she do what I think she did?" "What is she?" "What is wrong with her?" "Why? Why? Why?"

Big thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux as well as NetGalley for a digital copy provided for a review. All opinions are my own, and come from the heart. The Third Hotel will be published on August 7,2018.

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[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite work of the author's yet. After her husband's death, Clare travels to Cuba on the trip they were supposed to make together, to a horror film festival. Her husband was an academic studying the genre. But then she sees him in Havana....

The remarkable thing is that in just over 200 pages, the author creates so many layers - horror films, Cuban culture, psychological thrills, grief, the questions of if we can truly know another person - but at the same time manages to help the reader see all of it through Clare's eyes. Her observations and thoughts are beautifully and painfully written, and if I had a final copy I'd be quoting like crazy.

And since I rarely give five stars, I'll say it's the great writing added to a layered, interesting, nuanced story that did it.

This will be a great late summer read!

Thanks to the publisher for providing access to this title through Edelweiss and NetGalley. It comes out August 7, 2018.

[Kylie D · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Mike Scalise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book if you like any of the following, or all of the following, and you'll be utterly entranced:
(a) horror movies
(b) smart discussions about horror movies
(c) ghost stories
(d) ghost stories that kind of maybe aren't ghost stories, but also maybe are?
(e) strange, confounding protagonists
(f) metaphysical mysteries
(g) deep considerations of marriage and what it means
(h) short, finish-in-one-sitting novels with unique, irresistible voices

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Third Hotel is such a complex and meaningful novel, so deceptively smooth yet so loaded with significance. It's almost too big for me to sum up without spinning into endless ruminations. It's about tourism, grief, and misogyny in the arts. It is also a startling piece of weird fiction in which a woman encounters her dead husband alive again. This is not a case of mistaken identity, but whether he is a ghost, hallucination or alternate self we cannot be sure. On the first page, protagonist Clare imagines being asked what she is doing in Havana and answering, I am experiencing a dislocation of reality. This book is a dislocation of reality.

Just over a month ago, Clare's husband Richard was killed in a hit-and-run. Still reeling, she has travelled to Havana for a film festival Richard had wanted to attend. Richard was a film studies professor, specialising in horror; Clare herself works in sales. She wanders the city, talks to strangers, and goes to the premiere of a zombie film her husband had particularly been interested in seeing. And then something impossible happens: she sees Richard, dressed in an incongruous white linen suit, standing outside a museum.

Clare is a perfect symbol of liminality, always on some kind of threshold. Her work requires her to travel all over the USA. To Richard's chagrin, she enjoys the 'secret, second self' she becomes on these trips. She wanted to be married and she wanted to leave; the two did not seem mutually exclusive. Her job is to sell elevators, themselves transitional spaces. The title comes from the nickname Clare gives the Havana hotel she stays in; it's the third one she enters, having been – of course – dropped off in the wrong place. But hotels are something of a motif in this story, and they pop up at every turn. Having grown up as the daughter of hoteliers, Clare has been in and out of them all her life.

In Havana, Clare carries a small white box that was among Richard's possessions when he died; she has never opened it (an act of self-control that is perhaps the most unbelievable thing in an often surreal story). She gives false names to everyone and in one scene is mistaken, at length, for someone else. Other mysteries lurk in the background – the maybe-disappearance of the lead actress from the film whose premiere Clare attends, for example. The Third Hotel is endlessly intriguing, multiplying its puzzles as it goes along. And in the background is a rich vision of modern Havana in which crumbling courtyards and formidable seawalls bump up against Wi-Fi parks and tourists taking photos of graffiti.

What The Third Hotel reminded me of most was Martin MacInnes' Infinite Ground – the lush and exotic setting, a series of uncanny doubles, a slippery dreamlike plot in which characters and motives are difficult to pin down. It is Infinite Ground with a stronger focus on the feminine and the pop-cultural. I would also compare it to Vendela Vida's The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty (a woman relinquishes her identity in an unfamiliar place; nothing is as it seems) and the novels of Alison Moore and Hugo Wilcken (the sense of in-betweenness, an indefinable oddness even when everything seems ordinary. Clare concealing herself in a wardrobe to spy on not-Richard particularly seems like something straight out of Wilcken).

This is an extraordinary book and I could spend days writing about the reams of subtext that underpin every line. While reading The Third Hotel I loved its inscrutability; having finished it I find myself delighted by the infinite connections revealed by the full picture.

I received an advance review copy of The Third Hotel from the publisher through NetGalley.

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[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Third Hotel follows a newly widowed woman named Clare, trying to come to terms with the death of her husband and the illness of her father, while attending a film festival in Cuba. One day in Havana she thinks she sees her husband standing outside a museum and she decides to follow him. Much surrealism and existential angst ensues.

I think my biggest issue with The Third Hotel was that I did not feel the slightest emotional connection to this story. I really don't need to feel an emotional pull to every single thing I read - I am happy for something to appeal to me on a more intellectual level if that's what the author is trying to achieve - but when a book is about something as intensely personal as grief, I want to feel... something? Sad or unsettled or moved in some way? Anything other than bored.

But this book's darkly sardonic and disaffected tone just left me cold, and didn't give me enough to chew on that I put it down feeling intellectually stimulated enough to compensate for the emotional hollowness. Laura van den Berg certainly has some interesting ideas, but unfortunately none of them are developed past their infancy. The ruminations on the role of the traveler and the tension between the internal and external selves in particular had the potential to be intriguing - and I also liked the commentary on horror films - but I'm sorry to say that for the most part this was just tedious and lacking in focus.

[Trudie · Rating 3 out of 5]

So this was ok, fine, mildly diverting ? It has elicited a vague shrug and nodding admiration from me but now almost 24 hours after finishing I find it leaves no real lasting impression.

The writing is good, it's easy to read, even has some light humour but nothing jumped out and demanded serious attention from me. The individual disparate elements of this book were interesting but I missed the point of the unified whole. The setting of Cuba for example added a lush tropical holiday vibe but there was no obvious reason to base this novel in Cuba and the idea seemed wasted. Likewise, Clare the recently widowed protagonist and elevator salesperson attends a horror film festival and while we get some interesting asides on the "Final Girl" trope, most of this feels like it has come straight from an essay on film theory. I went into The Third Hotel with an impression that it might be slightly scary or at least disconcerting but the most disturbing thing to occur was a fingernail in a drawer.

All this is perhaps being a little harsh on a novel that will hold appeal to certain readers, particularly those that enjoy books similar to Fever Dream . I seem to need a little more by way of explanation in my reading. There were several sustained passages of writing I did admire, particularly about the discombobulations of dealing with grief, and an exploration of your "secret self". I will say however that my own "secret self" has never wanted to lick a wall mural in a hotel foyer, maybe my secret self is just not as reckless as it should be. Some soul searching on my behalf required there then ;).

I believe this book could have worked exceedingly well either as a focused short story or alternatively a more fully realised novel with a discernible plot. As it stands, it is frustratingly ephemeral, doomed to slip from my mind entirely in a few days.

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cuba, zombies, and loose molars - this is a fever dream turned into a novel. Laura van den Berg writes about grief and the power of the subconscious: Clare, a traveling sales executive for an elevator company, loses her husband in a car accident. Richard was a film scholar who did research on horror movies, and overcome by grief, Clare feels like she is plunged into a horror flick of her own. Will she be the "final girl", the one who survives the slaughter, or will the zombies that possess her - the past for which she hasn't found closure yet - destroy her? And haven't her emotions turned Clare into some kind of zombie herself?

This is an unsettling book filled to the brim with ideas, and the unreliable narrator contributes to the overall feeling of disorientation which permeates the narrative. Clare has lost the ground under her feet, she is propelled through the story mainly by subconscious urges that might provide some emotional relief, or so she thinks. She travels to a film festival in Cuba that Richard intended to attend, following her impulses and trusting (mis)perceptions. She is free to roam the island, but there is an oppressive feeling of claustrophobia throughout the story, as no physical movement allows Clare (and us) to leave her mind.

Laura van den Berg sure tried a lot with this novel, and there are a myriad of interesting ideas throughout the text. Unfortunately, I found that there was just too much crammed into this rather short book, and I felt like many themes could have been elaborated further (like decay; the theme of privacy; Clare's and Richard's complicated marriage; the ghost of Richard, etc.). Surely an interesting book, but I can't say I loved it.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 4 out of 5]

But maybe a person became even more themselves when away, liberated from their usual present tense

I read this sentence only a few days after returning from my own vacation, and I paused for a minute to consider how true it was: On my first trip in a few years, I felt liberated from my routines and obligations, which made me relaxed and happy and therefore more easygoing and nicer to the people around me—more myself, as I would be without all the stresses that typically grind me down. Then I went back to the book and read the rest of the sentence:

But maybe a person became even more themselves when away, liberated from their usual present tense and free to lie.

So that's where The Third Hotel is coming from.

If you've read the description here on Goodreads or on the book's flap, you know The Third Hotel is about a thirtysomething woman named Clare, whose husband Richard has died recently and unexpectedly. While on a trip to Havana the two of them were supposed to take together, Clare actually sees her husband, alive and apparently well. It sounds like a thriller, but it isn't, really. This novel is slow to get going. It tries hard to be profound and intellectual; sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it just feels forced. Its portrayal of grief felt a bit dubious to me—of course there are all kinds of ways to grieve, but from what I've seen and experienced, grief causes total discombobulation much less often in real life than it does in fiction.

Fortunately, none of these flaws were fatal. Eventually The Third Hotel began to pick up speed and I became totally engrossed. At the same time, it became a bit more concrete and also more emotionally moving and poignant. In the end, though, its abstractions were what intrigued me the most. So what's Richard doing in Havana when Clare buried him six months ago? The book eventually made a move toward resolution, but it was vague enough that my mind was still haunted by possibilities: Was Richard not actually dead? Was there someone out there who looked just like him? Was Clare losing her mind? Was Richard alive on a different plane of existence, and by traveling to the city they'd planned to visit together did Clare somehow break through to that other plane? At one point I wondered if maybe Clare was the dead one. Sometimes these ambiguities can drive a reader crazy, but that wasn't the case here. I'm sure if I read The Third Hotel again in a few years I'd pick up on some clues I missed, but for now allowing this mystery to remain unresolved feels like the most fascinating resolution of all.

[Marchpane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I spent most of my time reading The Third Hotel in a state of déjà vu, trying to work out what it was reminding me of. This tale of an American in a foreign city, tailing a doppelgänger who may or may not be a figment of their imagination, felt so familiar but I just couldn’t place it. Perhaps it is not one, but an amalgam of many books & films that are variations on this theme, which it brings to mind.

The book follows recently widowed (or is she?) Clare around Havana during a film festival. Her deceased (or is he?) husband was a film studies professor specialising in horror movies and the festival will include the premiere showing of Cuba’s first example of the genre. The Cuban film lightly fictionalised as ‘Revolución Zombi’ is clearly based on Juan of the Dead (I wish Van Den Berg had been more inventive there, rather than repurposing an existing film, she could have created her own narrative from scratch and had some fun with it).

For me the book started out somewhat atmospheric, but that atmosphere was quickly lost to the flattening effect of Clare’s dissociative state. Perhaps it was a failure of empathy on my part, but Clare’s grief and personal crisis just didn’t resonate, and despite the book’s striving for oddness, it didn’t manage to surprise or even disconcert me. Wilfully inscrutable, it was never sufficiently mysterious, and seems to withhold information just for the sake of it.

I did enjoy some of the weird characters Clare encounters along the way, who treat her with a glib callousness that goes unremarked upon and gives these scenes a darkly comic tone. And there’s some really interesting stuff about how travel can allow for both reinvention and annihilation of the self. But ultimately, for me the whole was a good bit less than the sum of its component parts.

[Heidi Wiechert · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange and confusing ride through a world seen through the eyes of a grieving widow. A short time prior to attending a film festival in Cuba, Clare's husband Richard was killed. Now, she sees him on the streets of Cuba.

"Clare had never before seen her husband operate a motorbike, but he navigated it like he had been riding one all his life, like he had been riding one in Havana all his life, like he had not been struck by a car and killed in the United States of America some five weeks ago." pg 13

What is going on? The reader isn't sure what's real and what's only in the mind of Clare. Laura van den Berg raises mammoth questions and leaves the interpretation to the reader.

My book club picked a heck of a read for March. Reactions to this book ranged from the disgusted to the mystified to the fascinated. I'd put myself somewhere in between.

I like having complex symbolism to pick apart and magical realism to consider in a story. I like having an open-ended mystery. I don't need to have all the answers.

But I do like to have more hints at the possible interpretations than van den Berg gives us.

"She might have said, I am not who you think I am. She might have said, I am experiencing a dislocation of reality." pg 3

Or she might have said, I have no idea what's going on in this story. A character in the novel itself explains this confusion (in the guise of talking about horror films), suggesting it's purposefully created by the author, and says it is designed to create a sensation of "eels under the skin." This book definitely had that type of impact on me.

"Besides, he added, raising a finger, the foundation of horror is a dislocation of reality, a dislocation designed to reveal the reality that has been there all along, and such dislocations happen all the time." pg 9

As I said, it's weird, but there's something genius about it too. Van den Berg's words are beautiful, but they don't always make sense. I turned the last page and was infuriated at how confused I was.

"She wondered what the eye would see and what she would see in what the eye saw. She imagined the suspension transforming into a warm flood of inevitability as the gate swung open and she stepped into whatever new dislocation of reality lay ahead." pg 32

In conclusion, it's a hard book to read, but perfect for groups who are looking to spur a literary discussion. There's so much to unpack.

Is she in an alternate reality or having a psychotic break? Or is she just grieving the whole time? What does her life now have to do with her childhood? What is the secret Clare shares with her father? Is there hidden meaning in her trip to the southern part of the island?

That's just what pops into my head when considering the title of this book. Recommended for readers who don't mind being totally confused and left with eels under their skin.

[Jerrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the writing in this slim book about grief, losing yourself in travel, and daring to take a look at your ‘secret’ self. Parts of the plot are vague, which would normally bother me, but in this case the vagueness added a subtly creepy element to the story. We go deep into the protagonist’s psyche here, and there is some musing about what we choose to see or not see about ourselves. And, if we do see, how do we cope with it?

[Connie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is real and what is in the imagination of the mind? Laura Van Den Berg's "The Third Hotel" takes us through a surreal experience where the characters are in a liminal space between real and unreal, and between dead and not dead.

Recently widowed Clare travels to Havana to attend a film festival that her husband, a horror film scholar, had originally planned to attend. Then she sees him standing outside a Cuban museum--but he died five weeks earlier in a hit-and-run accident. The novel goes back and forth in time examining their relationship, grief, and Clare's inner life. How observant are they, how well do they really know each other, and what rests in the secrets of their minds?

The director of a Cuban horror film explains that "to plunge a viewer into a state of horror meant to take away their compass, their tools for navigating the world, and to replace it with a compass that told a different kind of truth....it was a secret transaction between their imagination and the film, and when they left the theatre, those new truths would go with them, swimming like eels under the skin." (9) In a similar way Laura Van Den Berg's gorgeous writing also takes us away to another version of the truth. It's a very creative work that will leave the reader deep in thought with many questions.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mysterious novel about a woman visiting a Cuban horror film festival in the stead of her husband, who-- we slowly learn--is dead. Or is he? The book is a riddle, moving backwards and forwards in time, following strange occurrences which could be the result of the protagonist's grief or of a slippage in reality itself--or a combination of the two. I recently saw van den Berg at a book festival, and when asked if this was surrealism or straight narrative, she said, "I'm from Florida, and there are things I've written about which people have labeled surreal which were absolute fact."

The fragmented narration told in quick quick quick cuts, was for me the real treat of the book. The delight of putting the book together in my mind, dislocating us in exactly the way travel dislocates and defamiliarizes.

The narrator of The Third Hotel, Clare, travels for a living as a sales rep for an elevator company, and over the years this became a source of conflict with her husband Richard. (The restless need for travel shares overtones with the last book I read, Olga Tokarczuk's Flight--is this a cultural trend, a fragmented moment of craving flight?) The idea that you become or can become a different person while traveling is what keeps her on the road and infuses the entire narrative. Here's a conversation Clare has with a man she meets in the Cuban hotel:

"He added that travel turned his wife into a different person and she loved to travel, loved getting to be that other person, but he dreaded meeting this unpleasant twin, and would be content to never go anywhere again."

The divisions within a person, this doubling, appears again and again, the surface and the mystery of the hidden self is the mystery which attracts van den Berg here. I loved the insights about travel Clare has--even as a child she'd been exposed to the strangeness of travel and tourists, growing up the managers' daughter at Florida motel called the Seahorse:

"She remembered the way guest after guest shrank her home to fit their version--paradise, tourist trap--uninterested in local consultation... In Havana the signals were manifold and often contradictory, making it easy for a person to find support for whatever narrative they had decided to seek."

On the tourist's relentless search for 'authenticity': "The past is a product, said Clare. So is romance." ... "Or maybe the real product is nostalgia--even if people tended to be nostalgic about times about which they knew little. It was, in fact, this not-knowing that made such a candied nostalgia possible"... "Visitors longed for not a dislocation of reality but an insulation from reality-- yet the layers of insulation were supposed to be invisible."

It's a small book which unfolds in a smart, absolutely unpredictable way.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

"...the foundation of horror is a dislocation of reality, a dislocation designed to reveal the reality that has been there all along..."

In this moody, liminal novel of ideas, Van den Berg immerses the reader in a hallucinatory narrative that is highly cinematic. And, like a surrealist film, the results are variable and largely dependent upon the spectator's interest, focus, and willingness to abandon all attempts at making good sense of the proceedings.

"...to plunge the viewer into a state of terror meant to take away their compass, their tools for navigating the world, and to replace it with a compass that told a different kind of truth."

Clearly this is about feeling rather than understanding. There were times I was quite absorbed but, to be honest, these episodes became less frequent as the story progressed. "The Third Hotel" did ultimately feel too long to me.

Common themes include mysterious exchanges and secret selves, ghosts and "ghosting", voyeurism (binoculars, keyholes, shrubbery, viewing rooms, a zoo), grief and loss, absence/presence, and "interior zones of vulnerability". That last one is a big deal and much of the novel occurs in shared spaces which are designed to persuade members of the public that their experience is personal: "comfortable, accommodating, spotless, secure, safe".

I tried to settle in and soak but the bathwater was lukewarm. I'm not sorry I read this but I could absolutely have lived without it.

[Paltia · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I felt like I was sucked into the land of deja vu. Something about this story, no more like the actual choice of words, felt eerily familiar. Did I already read this book? Impossible, it’s too new. Nonetheless, there was that feeling that stuck on my brain till near the end. This is a mysterious story about a ghost like woman who goes in search of, or to hide from, life. She has recently lost her husband. She thinks she has found him again, far away from home in Cuba. Suspend your rational judgment and float into the mystical here of this tale. It was so very good. There are many pieces carved out here that you may find familar. This is what kept me hanging on to the breathlessly magnificent end. Please write another novel Ms. Laura.

[Eilonwy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Suddenly and newly widowed Clare (5 weeks as the story opens) has gone to a Latin Horror Movie Festival in Havana, not because she’s into horror movies, but because her husband was. She mingles a little with the other attendees, but mostly wanders around isolated and alone. Then she sees her husband on the street--

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this book. I was hoping a bit for fast-paced, gripping psychological suspense. It’s definitely gripping, and incredibly intense, but it’s essentially a very literary novel about someone living in that awful period right after someone dies, when you’re still in shock, numb and walking around inside a cotton ball, separated from everyone else, your whole life muted and suspended, when what happened is real, but … maybe … not quite real yet.

I give the writer huge credit for the writing style in this. The whole book feels like it’s taking place underwater. Even the conversations between characters are silent, with no quotation marks to indicate they’re making any sound. (I found that really disconcerting at first, but soon got used to it.) This is pretty short, and every sentence earns its place with description and mood. I felt completely absorbed into Clare for the two days I was reading this.

The first half to three quarters of the book kept me flipping pages as fast as I could while also trying to savor the writing. What was going on? Was Richard a ghost now, was Clare just going crazy, was this a horror novel or some kind of mind-trickery on the reader? What was the meaning of the actress who had reportedly disappeared just before the conference, but whose shoulders Clare kept seeing on the Havana streets? What about the woman who thought Clare was “Liesel,” disloyally traveling alone instead of with the woman’s group tour? Why does Clare seem so blank, so unable to exert herself as a human being, not just now, but for seemingly all her life?

Well, those are not questions that are ever going to be answered, at least not in the pages of this book.

There are maybe some reveals at the end, but I didn’t understand any of them, so I’m not sure if I was really being told anything or not. This is the very definition of “Too Literary for Me,” because I suspect there was something deep in this book -- certainly a lot of Clare’s thoughts and observations over the course of the novel are very profound and insightful -- but whatever that deep thing is, it flew right over my head, which I am left scratching. The ending-ending seemed slightly seedy to me compared to the antiseptic feel of the rest of the book. Did Clare murder her father’s girlfriend in Iowa City, or something? What kind of “case” was her husband preparing against her? Did she have something to do with his death after all? Why isn’t this a genre novel so I can have answers, darn it?

But aside from my discomfort at the ending, I did mostly enjoy reading this book and feeling wrapped in its atmosphere, weird though that may sound considering the loneliness, lostness, and disjointedness of that atmosphere. It was a powerful character in and of itself. I may give this author’s short story collections a try, just because she sure can create a mood.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m really not entirely sure how I feel about this novel, so I’ve given it the benefit of the doubt. This review should be read with the understanding that I have a fairly high tolerance for ambiguity in a novel- in that I enjoy ‘ideas reading’ as much as I do ‘plot reading’.

In terms of narrative- I’m not really sure what this novel is ultimately about. A woman suffers loss and trauma, and in a state of extreme grief goes to Cuba, to a horror film festival. As a reader I didn’t get too invested in the minutiae of the plot, especially past the halfway point. At this moment, I felt, maybe it wasn’t that important to think about what was or wasn’t “actually” happening, or how any of these vignettes fitted together. What mattered (perhaps?) was what these moments, events, experiences show us about ourselves; the human psyche.

What I found engaging about this novel, was the exploration of central ideas. Grief and trauma are foregrounded- how do we respond, what do we become in the face of it, how does it consume us, and does it ever let us go? Most interesting though, was the discussion of marriage, the people we become in partnership with others, and how we know and don’t know each other within and beyond these unions. This was tied closely to some really introspective discussion of the self. Who are we? Are we always the same person, or do can we have many selves?

In the end, I found this interesting, if confusing and somewhat obscure.

[Marialyce]

Unfortunately, this is another book that is going into my DNF file. I truly tried not only to like this book but to also understand what it was trying to relate to me. I managed to get to the 60% mark, but in reality have not a clue what I have read and how it all comes together. I did try but know that to attempt to read the last 40% will leave me just as muddled as I currently am.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is an amount of ambiguity and vagueness that can be great in a novel, but unfortunately that is almost all there was in The Third Hotel. Quite readable but I had absolutely no idea what was going on for almost the entire book - safe to say this was just not for me.

[Katie Long · Rating 4 out of 5]

A creative and atmospheric exploration of grief and, especially, the hidden depths and secret desires of ourselves and those we love. It is about the impossibility of truly knowing ourselves, let alone anyone else. The imagery is heavy handed at times, but overall, definitely worth a read.

3.5 rounded up

[lucky little cat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lyrical but opaquely Kafka-esque novel set in Havana, where an alienated, recently widowed tourist either does or does not trail the ghost


of her dead or perhaps not-dead husband. If you need clarity, appealing characters, meaningful linear plot, or anything resembling a resolved ending, you'll want to skip this one.


Familiar.

p.s.
The book doesn't say boohockey about the nature of grief. The narrative's way too absorbed with being detached and self-consciously arty to slow down for mere grief. And I normally love artiness.

[Stephanie (Books in the Freezer) · Rating 5 out of 5]

4

So, this is a book that is definitely not going to be everyone's cup of tea. It's surreal and hazy. Clare's husband died in a hit and run, and she is going to a film festival in Cuba to see a horror film her husband was going to write about. She wanders around the city and sees her husband outside of a hotel wearing a linen suit. Throughout the narrative, Clare reflects on her and Richards marriage, grief, her sick father, her love of business travel and
solitude of hotel rooms. Richard was also a horror film professor and she uses a lot of horror film logic and theory to view the world through her grief. There was so much going on this book that I just want to dissect it!

Changing it to 5 stars because I can't stop thinking about this book!

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it and the writing but I still don’t know quite what to make of it. The book felt unfinished.

[Jenifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can’t decide whether to give this book a 2 or a 3. I keep changing the rating. The writing is beautiful and I loved the premise. The plot was intriguing and dark and kept me guessing until the end. Unfortunately, it kept me guessing a little too much because about 3/4 ways through the book derailed into something so abstract I kept asking myself, “what the hell am I reading”? I continued reading through to the end because it was a pretty short book, and also, I hoped the end would shed some light on things or reveal something more concrete. It didn’t. So now I’m left with mixed feelings. It wasn’t the book I wanted it to be, even though it started out as exactly what I hoped it was. If you like feeling perplexed after reading then this is the book for you.


I received a free digital copy of this book from NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review.

[Darryl Suite · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can see why this one is polarizing (it’s that type of book), but I was under its spell. The vibe felt like a quieter sibling of “Mulholland Drive” and “Hot Milk.”

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a highly unusual take on a familiar subject, accomplished with originality and wit. Laura van den Berg had me at the location and setting, but her protagonist stepped off the page and became real, a viable character flaws and all. I was even intrigued by her line of work. Havana also comes alive, and Clare's long walks through her streets are filled with sensual detail. I was somewhat reminded of Daphne du Maurier's description of Venice in Don't Look Back, which serves almost as a template for this updated novel.

[Kalen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just didn't get this one and I suspect it's more me than the book itself. I'm actually sitting here feeling rather stupid that I didn't get this one, pretty much at all.

I suspect that if you're a fan of horror films and books, you'll get it and that's who I recommend it for. I also suspect I tried to read it/take it too literally.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a cerebral text about liminal spaces. A woman pursues the ghost of her dead husband through Havana. He was a academic specializing in horror films which leads to some gorgeous brilliant insights on the techniques, purposes, and psychology of horror films.