The Third Hotel

By Laura van den Berg

Farrar, Straus & Giroux     2018

224 pages     Fiction

I have spent 3 days reading The Third Hotel, and I have no idea what I have just finished. One reviewer called it “strange, unsettling, and profound from start to finish.” Ok. I believe that.

Don’t quite know where to start. Here is the summary:

“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.” 

Yeah! I told you. The Third Hotel is strange and unsettling. I looked up the definition of magical realism in my search to put a name on the genre in which the book might fit. Wikipedia defines it this way: “a genre of narrative fiction that, while encompassing a range of subtly different concepts, expresses a primarily realistic view of the real world while also adding or revealing magical elements.” I believe this fits the bill, although in many ways, van den Berg’s writing defies categorization.

At its heart The Third Hotel is a meditation on grief and loss. Clare has just lost her husband Richard. Her level of grief is profound, and when she sees him from a distance in Havana, she follows him as she seeks answers to all the unanswered questions of her life and marriage. When she finally meets up with him and they take a journey into the mountains of Cuba, the mystery that is her husband is amplified and her grief is compounded rather than appeased. The reader never comes to a conclusion about who or what Clare is seeing when she discovers Richard; is he a ghost, a doppelganger? “She ordered herself to stop recognizing him, since what she was recognizing was plainly impossible, but then she crept closer and saw just how possible it was.”

What is absolutely certain is that Laura van den Berg is an incredible writer. The setting, the imagery, and the language is absolutely breathtaking. I loved the descriptions of Cuba, and I felt like I was on the scene every moment, even if I didn’t quite see Richard like Clare did (or did she actually see Richard?). We are so very clearly exposed to the inner workings of Clare’s mind; “the gap between her inner reality and the world around felt so enormous she feared she was going to be swallowed up.” All the way through the novel, we are privvy to Clare’s inner reality. We are never sure what to believe—what she is seeing. One of my favorite lines relating to Clare is: “the ice cube she had pressed against her heart in childhood was proving slow to thaw.”

The New York Times reviewer cautions the reader looking for noir, a mystery, or a thriller. He says,  “Don’t take the bait when “The Third Hotel” starts voguing like a thriller. Instead, read it as the inscrutable future cult classic it probably is, and let yourself be carried along by its twisting, unsettling currents.”

In his praise for the novel and its author, the Washington Post reviewer says, “The most transforming kind of fiction is capable of causing a dislocation of reality: a bit of the bizarre, a lot kept beneath the surface and worlds opening within worlds.”

I recommend The Third Hotel with caution. Look out so that you don’t become crazed trying to figure out the plot; rejoice in the vivid descriptions of Cuba and the incredible writing; and breathe a sigh of relief when it is finished—if indeed it is finished. 

Additionally, I am done reading about grief-stricken widows for a while. I feel like my summer has been filled with their stories. On to other stuff.