Mystery’s plot, writing both fantastic
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.
Laura van den Berg, the acclaimed author of two story collections and a novel, has always been good, but with “The Third Hotel,” she has become fantastic — in every sense of the word.
The novel begins when its heroine, Clare, travels to Havana for a Latin-American film festival. Her husband, Richard, is a film-studies professor specializing in horror, and it’s horror that sets the tone. Five weeks earlier, Richard had been hit by a car and died.
Grieving, Clare goes alone, and some time after being in Cuba, she suspects something strange might be happening, “a world opening within another.”
As the pendulum of narration swings between where she finds herself in the present and her past, it becomes clear that Clare is unhinged. People notice.
“The grieving are very dangerous,” someone tells her. “They are like injured animals with fearsome claws, bloodied and pushed into a corner.”
She’s told she’s deranged. And she just might be. Not only because she’s a serial liar and eats paper but also because the person who tells her this is her dead husband.
Just after watching the only horror film of the festival, she sees Richard. Understandably startled, she follows him into a museum — only to scare him away and lose him.
But she deliberately misses her flight home and finds Richard again so she can finally ask him questions.
His answers unsettle her • “The Third Hotel” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 212 pages; $26) by Laura van den Berg
more than the possibility of talking to a ghost. Birthplace of the zombie and voodoo, the Caribbean is no stranger to the supernatural, and Clare’s uncanny experiences feel right at home there.
The fantastic plot is elevated by van den Berg’s fantastic writing and unusual twists of language.
And then there are larger aspects of the fantastic. Not only the implications of the miraculous, but “there was a mystery at hand, and Clare had given herself the role of solving it.”
There are, in fact, many mysteries. Why is Richard in Cuba? Why did he change so much over the months preceding his death? And what’s inside the box he was carrying when he died — the little white cardboard gift box Clare hasn’t yet had the nerve to open?
While traveling, Clare reads Patricia Highsmith’s “The Two Faces of January,” which she finds unsettling. Not only because of the story, but also because of “the hidden things she sensed quivering under the surface. Subtext, she supposed this was called, and she did not care for it.”
Maybe Clare doesn’t, but the author must, because so much subtextual lava is coursing under the surface of every page of “The Third Hotel” that the book feels as if it’s going to erupt in your hands.