The third hotel

Title:

The third hotel

Author:

Van den Berg, Laura, author.

Personal Author:

Van den Berg, Laura, author.

ISBN:

9780374168353

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

212 pages ; 22 cm

Abstract:

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. The Third Hotel is a propulsive, brilliantly shape-shifting novel from an inventive author at the height of her narrative powers.

Subject Term:

Grief -- Fiction.

Genre:

Psychological fiction.

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

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Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

"[A] future cult classic." -- The New York Times Book Review

"There's Borges and Bolaño, Kafka and Cortázar, Modiano and Murakami, and now Laura van den Berg." -- The Washington Post

Finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Award. Named a Best Book of 2018 by The Boston Globe, Huffington Post , Electric Literature and Lit Hub . An August 2018 IndieNext Selection. Named a Summer 2018 Read by The Washington Post, Vulture , Nylon , Elle , BBC, InStyle , Refinery29, Bustle, O, the Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, Conde Nast Traveler, Southern Living, Lit Hub, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.

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 ofher childhood in Florida and of her marriage to Richard, revealing her role in his death and reappearance along the way. The Third Hotel is a propulsive, brilliantly shape-shifting novel from an inventive author at the height of her narrative powers.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

Grappling with the sudden death of her husband, a new widow floats through the streets of Havanawhere she seems to see him everywhere.Clare arrives in Havana for the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema alone; her husband, Richard, a scholar of horror films, was supposed to attendhe had been particularly interested in a film called Revolucin Zombibut he can't, because he's dead. Five weeks earlier, he was killed in a hit-and-run in New Scotland, outside of Albany, New York, his book unfinished. "As a married couple, they'd had perfect years and they'd had shit years," van den Berg (Find Me, 2015, etc.) writes, "but she had never in her life experienced a year that so thoroughly dismantled her with confusion." They'd become unknowable to each other in the months before Richard's death. " 'Who are you?' they seemed to always be whispering to each other, in this peculiar middle passage of their lives. 'What are you becoming?'" The night before he died, he'd said they needed to talk, but then he died, so they never did. And then, outside the Museum of the Revolution in Havana, she sees him: Richard, in a suit she's never seen, staring up at the sky. She follows him through the city: buying mangoes from a fruit cart, reading the paper at a cafe. In this surreal dreamscape, Clare's past blends with her present as she reflects backward, recounting her childhood in Florida, where her parents managed a hotel; her career as an elevator technologies Midwest sales rep; her father's death; her relationship with her husband, which is still unfolding in the present; and her own role in his strange and sudden death. Laced through with sharp insightsnot just on marriage and grief, but also on the pull of travel and the dynamics of horror moviesthe layers of the novel fit together so seamlessly they're almost Escher-esque. The line between the real and the imagined is forever blurry, and the result of all that ambiguity is both moving and unsettling.Gorgeously haunting and wholly original; a novel that rewards patience. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.