The Third Hotel

(Hardback)

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Description

In Laura van den Berg's surreal, mystifying, and deeply felt second novel, Clare, recently widowed, arrives in Havana, Cuba, to attend the 36th annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema, which her horror-loving film-professor husband, Richard, had purchased tickets for. The day after the screening of the movie Richard wanted most to see, Clare finds him standing outside the Museum of the Revolution. He's wearing a white linen suit she's never seen before, and he's supposed to be dead. Meticulously constructed and brimming with layered, poetic imagery, The Third Hotel follows Clare through her time in Havana as the distinction between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly blurred. In van den Berg's Havana, animals escape from zoos and trains fly off the tracks while Clare follows her once-dead husband and charts her less-than-perfect marriage. As her search for clarity becomes increasingly opaque, the reader is forced to consider not only what is real and what is not, but what truths are lingering behind Clare's own involvement in her husband's disappearance and reemergence. 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.

Reviews

"Always vivid . . . There's no denying [van den Berg's] skill at rendering this material; her sentences, at their best, are extraordinarily lucid, lodging places and people indelibly in memory . . . Read [The Third Hotel] as the inscrutable future cult classic it probably is, and let yourself be carried along by its twisting, unsettling currents." --J. Robert Lennon, The New York Times Book Review

"There's Borges and Bolao, Kafka and Cortzar, Modiano and Murakami, and now Laura van den Berg. The acclaimed author of two story collections and a novel, van den Berg has always been good, but with The Third Hotel she's become fantastic -- in every sense of the word . . . The fantastic plot is elevated by van den Berg's fantastic writing and unique twists of language . . . ." --Randy Rosenthal, The Washington Post

"This is no Hitchcockian tale of a double life but an insightful portrait of grief's power to create 'a dislocation of reality.' Mischievous details and winningly bizarre characters . . . help the book avoid melodrama and memorably capture the 'thundering mystery' of marriage and heartbreak." --The New Yorker

"Strange, unsettling, and profound from start to finish, The Third Hotel is a book teeming with the kind of chaos that can only emanate from the mind. It could be fairly described as a meditation on grief, or marriage, or travel; fresh insights on each materialize regularly, at enviable levels of nuance . . . [van den Berg] gets under your skin and hits bone." --David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly

"Laura van den Berg is an artist of the uncanny. As with some surrealist painting, devour her work quickly and the trick will not snag . . . Clare's eerie perceptional wobbles are conjured beautifully by van den Berg, who sees like a painter and narrates like a crime reporter. To read The Third Hotel sometimes feels like following a character based on Joan Didion sinking deeper into a universe whose laws were written by Patricia Highsmith." --John Freeman, The Boston Globe

"The Third Hotel contains all of the ingredients for a classic work of horror . . . Not every author can make a character both fly through supernatural events and remain grounded in a place the way van den Berg does with Clare. The strength of van den Berg's storytelling comes from Clare's attempts to solve the mystery of why Richard has hunkered down in a different country, layered with grief from back home that continues to haunt her. She's a "final girl" whose denouement horrifies in a modern, bloodless way." --Bethanne Patrick, TIME

"Van Den Berg doesn't do neatness. She does elegance. She writes with off-kilter beauty and absolute relaxation; the less peaceful a sentence should be, the more peaceful it is . . . The Third Hotel is a novel that operates in symbols and layers, which means you can read it however you like."--Lily Meyer, NPR.org

"Wonderful, lucid, mysterious." --James Wood, Conde Nast Traveler

"Beautiful and unsettling . . . Julio Cortzar could see himself walking the partially erased and re-inscribed streets of van den Berg's imagination, but in the end those streets are, without a doubt, van den Berg's own." --Christian Kiefer, The Paris Review (Staff Pick)

"The Third Hotel sets a creepy, unsettling mood . . . . Steeped in magical realism, The Third Hotel is a dreamy and lushly rendered study of bereavement, the loneliness of travel, and the intricacies of a marriage. This is a gorgeous and layered novel that will haunt you for days after you've finished." --Samantha Irby, Marie Claire

"Eerie and uncanny, layered and sharp . . . Though subtly drawn, what it means to be a woman becomes just as central to The Third Hotel as the mystery of Richard's reappearance. Powerful and atmospheric, van den Berg's novel portrays a haunting descent into grief and the mysteries we can't quite solve while advancing a thought-provoking exploration of marriage, misogyny, and the loneliness that lurks within unwavering privacy." --Lauren Sarazen, Los Angeles Review of Books

"A twisty exploration of grief and perception as well as the ways in which we contribute to our own undoing." --Julia Pierpont, O, the Oprah Magazine

"Reading Laura van den Berg's disquieting new novel, The Third Hotel, is akin to walking out of a dark movie theater into bright sunlight. Part of you is still living in a cinematic dreamscape. The real world is what's imaginary . . . the writing is lovely and fluid. --Nancy Pate, Minneapolis Star Tribune

" In evocative, lucid prose, van den Berg conjures the psyche of a woman unmoored, and examines how marriage and solitude, travel and domesticity, and other forces create and stabilize our identities. The Third Hotel is dense with everything that makes a novel memorable: psychological complexity, sensory vividness, narrative tension and ideas about humanity and art." --Claire Fallon, Huffington Post

"The Third Hotel is both a meditation on sorrow and longing--for answers, insight, closure--and a haunted and haunting quest narrative whose slimness belies an ocean of eerie power . . . An utterly transfixing, dreamlike descent into the depths of a psyche stricken by grief and confusion, The Third Hotel is miniature marvel and the most unsettling book you'll read all year." --Dan Sheehan, LitHub

"Laura van den Berg's brilliant new novel, The Third Hotel, is a quasi-supernatural tale of loss and grief, told with an exquisite flair for language . . . The Third Hotel is van den Berg's second novel and fourth book of fiction, and with it, she has firmly established herself as one of this country's premier stylists. A dreamy otherworldliness haunts these pages, and will, I wager, haunt you, as it did me, long after you finish this slim and masterful mood piece." --Nick White, Chicago Review of Books

"Gorgeously eerie . . . Dense and uncompromisingly intelligent, The Third Hotel is uninterested in leading the reader to a simple answer. Buoyed by van den Berg's sinuous, marvelous sentences, the novel is instead a deep dive into memory, love, and loss as filtered through film theory, metaphysics, and the humid, sunstroked cityscape of Havana. A lesser writer might have lost themself in this byzantine world of maybe-doppelgangers and maybe-zombies and maybe-madness, but Laura van den Berg is one of our most accomplished storytellers--it is no surprise that she has elevated the uncannily horrifying into something achingly human." --Chase Burke, Ploughshares

"It's a quicksilver novel -- just when you think you have a possible grip on its plot and meaning, it slithers out of grasp. The Third Hotel works its magic at the level of the subconscious, where nightmares are made." --Jenny Shank, The Dallas Morning News

"The Third Hotel amounts to more than thrills and chills. Van den Berg has swapped out the stages of grief for an alternative recovery process, one that refreshes old notions of female power and identity . . . This story, adapting horror tropes to new ends, releases "the widow thrashing within." By catching and seducing her zombie--and then finally letting him go--Clare's stages of grief deliver her not to Zen-like acceptance, but to a place of potent new monsters. " --John Dimini, The Sewanee Review

"Enter The Third Hotel like a portal, and surrender to a surreal, vivid, impossible yet clearly realistic adventure . . . Van Den Berg uses cinematic language, imagery and structure in this impressionistic portrait of a marriage that has come undone, a woman whose reality is skewed and a sea swept island filled with seductive art, strange vistas and unexpected danger." --Jane Ciabattari, BBC Culture

"The Third Hotel will play tricks on you--and that's the point . . . The Third Hotel is a meditation on the thin fault line between imagination and reality, on grief, and on marriage. It's Twin Peaks meets literary fiction." --Elena Nicolaou, Refinery29

"Van den Berg's clean, descriptive prose brings full images and sensory detail to life without drawing attention to the writing. The shapeshifting city of Havana is a riveting character in itself, and contributes greatly to the atmosphere. The Third Hotel explores the oddities of travel and relationships; silence and noise; and the effects of past trauma. Like Clare, it is an engrossing, thought-provoking enigma." --Julia Kastner, Shelf Awareness

"A reality-blurring rumination on the power of grief and alienation . . . Lush in description and psychology alike, The Third Hotel is a literary horror novel that will haunt you long past its final page." --Emily Nordling, tor.com

"Laura van den Berg's new novel, The Third Hotel, covers a thematically sprawling range of subjects, from zombie films to the secret flaws of a marriage to the process of grieving someone who may not be as dead as initially expected. The result is a haunting, ambiguous novel, cerebral and tactile in equal measure." --Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"Laced through with sharp insights--not just on marriage and grief, but also on the pull of travel and the dynamics of horror movies--the layers of [The Third Hotel] fit together so seamlessly they're almost Escher-esque. The line between the real and th

Author Bio

Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida. Her first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her second collection of stories, The Isle of Youth (FSG Originals, 2013), received the Rosenthal Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her first novel, Find Me (FSG, 2015), was long-listed for the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize. She lives in the Boston area.