![]() ![]() 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.Īt the novel’s start, Clare is in Havana, Cuba, attending a horror film festival in her husband Richard’s stead. 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. The Third Hotel, Laura van den Berg’s gorgeously eerie second novel, begins with a question, one that protagonist Clare returns to again and again: “What s she doing in Havana?” Dense and uncompromisingly intelligent, The Third Hotel is uninterested in leading the reader to a simple answer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux | August 7, 2018 ![]()
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