Clare, in her struggle to stay grounded, keeps striking odd balances. Van den Berg’s knack for turning expectation on its head is one of the novel’s many pleasures. She understood that some women would want to do the opposite: actual name, fake age. No one had asked her age, but if they did she would’ve told them the truth, thirty-seven. Yet even in near-delirium, Clare reveals smarts and a quirky integrity: five weeks ago,” and now his widow spends her first hours on the island as “an imposter,” borrowing names like “Ripley,” the heroine of Alien. But Richard was “struck by a car and killed. Her husband was the film scholar, specializing in gore-fests. More than that, she was supposed be in Havana as a tagalong. “Third Hotel” is the name she gives to where she’s staying in the airport she had it so wrong the cabdriver first tried two other places. In the opening pages, van den Berg twice deploys the phrase “dislocation of reality,” and Clare proves far from clear. 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. In spite of these genre trappings, The Third Hotel amounts to more than thrills and chills. The protagonist, Clare, has come to Havana for a movie festival featuring an edgy new horror flick, and swiftly finds herself in a horror trope, coming upon her own private zombie: her dead husband Richard. Laura van den Berg’s second novel, The Third Hotel, piques our interest on the basis of setting alone: Cuba just after the easing of US restrictions.
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