The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg

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.

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