A review by mmcloe
The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg

adventurous challenging dark funny mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

A strange, minor key of a novel that caught me off guard with how solid it was. An offhanded mention of the similarities between light fixtures and suicide got me thinking about the frailty of analogy and the odd little analogies the novel constructs. What similarities exist between movies, death, and travel? The Third Hotel limns a portrait in which all three dissolve barriers between our world and a haunting world. Movies haunt us with the future, death haunts us with the past, and travel haunts us with the somewhere-else; these hauntings force our own identities/identifications to buzz and morph, with the physical space we find ourselves in now being the medium for that change. All three at once? The only option is for the hauntings to materialize for us to confront directly. Will we join them or try to carve out something new?