The Third Hotel

A very strange and lyrically beautiful novel that owes as much to film as it does to fiction. Patricia Highsmith is name-dropped in the work. Lauren Groff reviewed the novel, and beyond influences from these two authors, I was reminded of Drew Magary's The Hike. As with this work, reality and fantasy (or at least a very strange alternative world) become increasingly blurred in The Third Hotel; or, as the narrator implicitly notes, the action occurs “outside the constraints of time”. Essentially the novel is about how we deal with grief at the passing of loved ones, when death is unexpected and so much is left unexplained. “The story you invent for yourself went unchallenged”. It is through this device that the protagonist sees her dead husband alive again. By the novel's close, it was still unclear to what extent the protagonist had been deliberately responsible for her husband's death. The overall action is highly filmic and the setting (even just as a travelogue) in Cuba, superb. The overall effect is discombobulation, but there is a lot to take away; not only on grieving, but ultimately about what it means to be human. 8.5/10.

By Laura van den Berg