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.
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