In an attempt to find footing in the material world, she slips further away from it. Clare dubiously presents herself to an interesting array of supporting characters, misleading them with tactics that range from slight lies to, at one point, impersonating another woman. The author incorporates subtle surrealism as she ushers Clare between her surroundings and her psyche. But despite that, she persists in her pursuit of Richard and the veneer of normality, determined to reconcile the two opposing elements of her life.Īs Clare explores Cuba, which is appropriately filled with traditional façades covering its own transformation into modernity, van den Berg’s prose reads at once like vivid travel writing, combined with a nuanced mystery where clues seem to bring us further away from its solution.

In flashbacks of her work travels, we see her eating quesadillas in empty bathtubs and lying naked and alone on the beds of rented rooms, experiencing the existential ennui that seems to be a more substantial element of her character than her domestic experiences. This contrasts with the more revealing depiction of her character in the present and during her life on the road, both of which take place while she stays in temporary lodging. As she pursues Richard, the story recalls the mundanity of their marriage as it unfolded at home.

It is perhaps because of this biographical detail, that we experience this character more deeply when she is a hotel guest. And she should know something about tourists she grew up in a Florida inn run by her parents. She is a voyeur to a degree that only a tourist can achieve. Once she spots Richard, Clare stalks him, viewing his unusual life in Havana from distances, through windows, and from behind the slats of a closet door. But thirty-five days after he was killed by a hit-and-run driver, she has elected to make the journey alone, in order to meet the director of the first horror film shot in Cuba. Her trip was initially planned by her husband Richard, the late horror film scholar. This dichotomy is the fulcrum by which the story twists and turns from the moment that Clare sees her recently deceased husband standing, seemingly alive-and-well, before her on foreign soil. Clare is an American elevator salesperson that travels to Havana to attend a film festival, and the author lets us know from the start that there is a discrepancy between how Clare appears to others and the complex psychological labyrinth that lies within her. Façades are a key factor in Laura van den Berg’s second novel, The Third Hotel.

Laura van den berg the third hotel