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 can open within worlds. There’s Borges and Bolaño, Kafka and Cortázar, Modiano and Murakami, and now Laura van den Berg ... The fantastic plot is elevated by van den Berg’s fantastic writing and unique twists of language ... so much subtextual lava is coursing under the surface of every page of The Third Hotel the book feels like it’s going to erupt in your hands.
If Clare is obsessed with negation and absence, The Third Hotel is eager to abet her: The book enthusiastically (and, I presume, deliberately) derails itself again and again. Scenes begin with clear goals in mind, then are sidetracked; questions, pointedly asked, go unanswered ... What we get instead of narrative momentum is a richness of theme and an abundance of detail. Van den Berg’s previous work, her short stories in particular, are prized for their thoughtfulness and descriptive intensity, and this book seems to me a refinement and intensification of those skills ... The Third Hotel is at its best when it makes no claim to psychological realism. It is in its weirdest passages that a reader is most likely to accept, even embrace, these instances of arch self-consciousness; at these times the book is thrilling ... 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.
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 ... Laura van den Berg channels genre masters like Hitchcock and such evocative literary works as, particularly, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. She gets under your skin and hits bone. Hers is a terror tale as mercurial as life, veering between the grisly and the gentle ... An award-winning writer of short fiction, van den Berg is a storyteller of astonishing detail. Her descriptions — whether concise or elongated — simply demand attention ... Van den Berg can be heavy-handed with the parallels she draws, the big ideas she’s confronting, but it’s all in service of this masterpiece of life and afterlife.
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 ... The other writer who comes to mind reading The Third Hotel is Gertrude Stein, sometimes reduced to Hemingway’s patron, but whose cubist rendering of consciousness in prose is a lost footbridge between visual modernism and literary modernism ... We are anchored by loss, set free by love, clichés tell us. What, this exquisitely written book asks, if it’s the opposite? In doing so van den Berg drives home an inversion far scarier than any zombie film: The truth is odd. That ringing bell in our minds isn’t the tinnitus of pop culture, the sign of something wrong. It’s the part that knows how to survive saying: You’re awake.
On paper, The Third Hotel has all the makings of a horror movie itself. But much like Twin Peaks: The Return, van den Berg only allows us slight glimpses of terror before yanking us back, insinuating a greater meaning, a deeper connection than just fear itself ... he tinges of surrealism are just enough to keep the reader on their toes — a touch of Lynch without the violence, or Cronenberg without the gore. At its heart, The Third Hotel is a novel about precarity — the fragile nature of memory, sanity, and how the reality we perceive constantly changes.
...van den Berg uses the nightmarish logic of the horror genre and the critical insights of film theory—especially in the feminist mode—to weave a narrative that is continually interrogating and re-shaping itself, daring us to uncover what is lurking beneath the people we purport to know, the things we say, and how we view ourselves ... To van den Berg’s credit, the novel doesn’t provide easy answers to these or really any of its questions surrounding intrapersonal relationships, conception of the self, or art’s warped mirror to reality. Which isn’t to say that her writing is unsatisfying or evasive, but rather that it operates according to the dream—or nightmare—logic of, say, the best David Lynch movies.
Richard isn't a zombie — that would be too silly, and too neat. 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 ... You could read The Third Hotel as an ode to watching. You could read it as a fever dream, a horror movie, a love letter to film theory or Cuba or women who keep secrets. The Third Hotel is a novel that operates in symbols and layers, which means you can read it however you like. There's no one ending, no right answer, and as a result, it will take away your internal compass. It will unmoor you, send you wobbling around your house in a haze. It will slide some eels under your skin. My recommendation? Let it. We can all stand to learn some new truths.
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 ... a surprising and surreal travelogue of emotional discovery that plumbs the depths of one woman’s unsettled psyche ... Passages in this novel demand to be read aloud and savored, paragraphs that, taken by themselves, could pass for poetry ... 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.
The Third Hotel is eerie and uncanny, layered and sharp. It will not be that book slipped into the beach bag to read in fits and starts while waiting for friends to arrive. It will be consumed in lieu of being present ... Strikingly, van den Berg allows the novel’s central mystery to stand unchallenged. The Third Hotel is not bound up in a neat little bow ... Moreover, van den Berg’s use of details furthers the novel’s uncanny atmosphere — particular and unexpected, they evoke the bizarre certainty of the dream world ... Van den Berg also subtly captures the nuances of the female experience ... Powerful and atmospheric, van den Berg’s novel portrays a haunting descent into grief and the mysteries we can’t quite solve.
The Third Hotel contains all of the ingredients for a classic work of horror. But van den Berg is up to so much more than that ... Things go bump in the night, and so do ideas, with the overall effect that readers will be as unsettled as the protagonist at every turn. Clare tells us on the first page, 'I am experiencing a dislocation of reality,' an excellent description of grief, but also of modern Havana ... Van den Berg throws Clare again and again into uneasy situations with inexplicable outcomes; this author has no fear of magical realism—and while she’s already been compared to giants of the genre, The Third Hotel owes its eerie power to no one else ... 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.
...[a] brooding, often-surreal, funereally bemusing second novel ... 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.
As in Van den Berg's short stories and her novel Find Me, the writing is lovely and fluid. She is comfortable with ambiguity, and The Third Hotel isn't intent on resolution. It reminds me of another hotel, that one in California, where 'you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.' Haunting.
In spite of these genre trappings, 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 ... Van den Berg’s knack for turning expectation on its head is one of the novel’s many pleasures ... 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.
Lush in description and psychology alike, The Third Hotel is a literary horror novel that will haunt you long past its final page ... Beyond the novel’s ghostly husband and zombie movie viewings, these horror elements are mostly drawn out in Clare’s character. She is not your typical protagonist ... All this dissociation and desire for non-identity make Clare’s interactions with the world uncanny and tense, and create a tone that drives home the horrors of loss better than a single ghost ever could ... The Third Hotel doesn’t just take away its readers’ compasses—it takes away its protagonist’s ... I was amazed by Laura van den Berg’s prose and deftness of expression in this novel, but it’s hard to say that I enjoyed it. It makes for an unsettling reading experience, and often an anticlimactic one. It is perhaps more weird fiction than horror.
...gorgeously eerie ... Buoyed by van den Berg’s sinuous, marvelous sentences, the novel is...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 ... The Third Hotel is undoubtedly the creation of a singular imagination, and though van den Berg writes into and around theories of horror cinema, she does so without sacrificing the enigmatic ephemerality of fiction.
...[an] eerie yet compelling second novel ... A major theme of this slim novel is mystery...Did she find Richard, or someone who looks like Richard, or is she just imagining him altogether? All the alternatives seem equally plausible through van den Berg’s adeptly disorienting storytelling ... A little slow to start, the pace picks up in the second half as clues planted by the author come full circle ... The Third Hotel is a chilly, thought-provoking study of loss, loneliness and life after death.
This Lynchian vibe, present throughout The Third Hotel, never feels forced or contrived. Instead, it creates a disconcerting and uneasy atmosphere, only accentuated by Van den Berg’s stubborn refusal to provide straight answers to the question of Richard’s resurrection. As much as I enjoyed the overall weirdness of the novel, I struggled to sympathise with Clare, in particular with how she views the world ... This claustrophobic style is perfect for a horror novel or psychological thriller, especially when you’re trying to capture a certain Lynchian quality. It’s not so great when the subject matter is intimate, personal, and, frankly, emotional, as is the case with this novel ... The Third Hotel is a smart piece of writing, layered in such a way that I’m sure I missed all manner of references, winks, and nods ... And while I did struggle to engage with Clare or invest in her broken marriage, the strangeness of the novel, that feeling of the uncanny, made for a fascinating, if sometimes frustrating, reading experience.
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.
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.
