Laura van den Berg. (2018). The Third Hotel: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Laura van den Berg. 2018. The Third Hotel: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Laura van den Berg. The Third Hotel: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

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1. • value: havana
2. • value: literary fiction
3. • value: ghosts
4. • value: contemporary fiction
5. • value: literary works
6. • value: surreal
7. • value: alternate reality
8. • value: missing person
9. • value: magical realism
10. • value: Widows
11. • value: Women Authors
12. • value: grief
13. • value: Travel
14. • value: Dark Humor
15. • value: mourning
16. • value: Spooky
17. • value: black humor
18. • value: horror film
19. • value: Women Writers
20. • value: contemporary literature
21. • value: female character
22. • value: twist endings
23. • value: boston globe best books of the year
24. • value: best fiction 2018
25. • value: fiction about women
26. • value: fiction about cuba
27. • value: latin america fiction
28. • value: fiction about film
29. • value: fiction about loss

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Berg, Laura van den
   • bioText: Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, The Isle of Youth, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, which was named one the ten best fiction books of 2020 by TIME, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and an Indie Next pick, and was named a best book of 2018 by more than a dozen publications. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award and a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 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. Born and raised in Florida, Laura splits her time between the Boston area and Central Florida, with her husband and dog.
   • name: Laura van den Berg

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fullDescription

"[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 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.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: J. Robert Lennon, The New York Times Book Review
   • content:

     "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."

2. • premium: False
   • source: The New Yorker
   • content: "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."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Claire Fallon, Huffington Post
   • content: " 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."
4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     June 1, 2018
     Grappling with the sudden death of her husband, a new widow floats through the streets of Havana--where 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 attend--he had been particularly interested in a film called Revolución Zombi--but 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 insights--not just on marriage and grief, but also on the pull of travel and the dynamics of horror movies--the 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(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     June 4, 2018
     In her mysterious and engrossing second novel, van den Berg (Find Me) tells the story of recently widowed elevator sales rep Clare, who travels to Havana after her horror-film scholar husband, Richard, is killed in a hit-and-run near their home in Upstate New York. The couple had planned to attend the Festival of New Latin American Cinema together, specifically to see Cuba’s first horror film, a zombie picture named Revolución Zombi, and Clare intends on seeing the trip through in Richard’s honor. Shortly after arriving at the festival, between screenings and excursions close to the novel’s titular hotel, Clare spies a man from afar who looks exactly like Richard. Though she knows it’s impossible, Clare soon becomes convinced her husband has somehow been resurrected and begins searching for him. Toying with horror tropes and conventions, and displaying shades of authors such as Julio Cortázar, van den Berg turns Clare’s journey into a dreamlike exploration of grief. This is a potent novel about life, death, and the afterlife. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 1, 2018
     Clare is a strange one. An elevator salesperson often on the road, she seems distant from her film-professor husband, even when she is home. As van den Berg's brooding, often-surreal, funereally bemusing second novel, following Find Me (2015), begins, Clare is in Havana, attending a film festival her husband would have participated in had he not been killed 35 days ago by a hit-and-run driver while out walking by himself, as was his habit. Richard's specialty was horror films, and van den Berg subtly emulates the genre in this spookily metaphysical tale about perception and illusion. Clare meets a documentarian making a film about suicides; she hallucinates and has painful memories, odd impulses, and confounding dreams. Her thoughts are spiked with weirdly violent images. Then she sees her husband on the street. She follows him to his simple home, and they go on a journey together that feels mythic. Has Clare accessed the afterlife? In sync with Vendela Vida's The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty (2015), van den Berg's entrancing, gorgeously enigmatic tale dramatizes the narcosis of grief.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 1, 2018
     

     A surreal meditation on grief and loss, this latest from van den Berg (Find Me) follows Clare, a traveling elevator saleswoman, whose husband, Richard, was killed after being struck by a car. Richard, a film studies professor, was slated to attend a film festival in Havana, and Clare goes in his place. While wandering the streets of Havana, she spots Richard, or perhaps his ghost, and the unfolding narrative explores the idea of Richard's possible reembodiment in this world. After stalking him for days, Clare finally confronts him. While unable to resolve all the questions from the last year of their marriage, she is able to find some peace and finally face her father's descent into dementia. The novel also asks questions about selfhood, particularly in the course of travel. Do we become someone else when we travel or more our true selves? Atmospheric descriptions of Cuba, and references to horror-film tropes (Richard's specialty) are integrated throughout, providing additional layers of richness. VERDICT Reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, this novel has a dreamlike quality that resists narrative structure and logic. Readers are best served by following where it leads rather than trying to solve the mysteries or find definitive answers. [See Prepub Alert, 2/12/18.]--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

     Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 1, 2018
     

     Berg's first story collection was a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and her second winner of the Rosenthal Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her recent debut novel, Find Me, was highly recommended by LJ and long-listed for the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize. So look out for this second novel, set in a magic realist Havana. Clare arrives there to attend a film festival her late film-professor husband, Richard, had eagerly anticipated and finds him standing before the Museum of the Revolution, very much alive. As trains fly and animals trot from the zoo, Clare must consider how she's implicated in her husband's vanishing act and sudden reappearance.

     Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     June 1, 2018
     Grappling with the sudden death of her husband, a new widow floats through the streets of Havana--where 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 attend--he had been particularly interested in a film called Revoluci�n Zombi--but 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 insights--not just on marriage and grief, but also on the pull of travel and the dynamics of horror movies--the 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(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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"[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...

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3. • code: FIC084040
   • description: Fiction / World Literature / American / 21st Century