Anything is possible in the present tense

All I want on the screen, Arlo said, is the present tense. Anything is possible in the present tense. Failure and love and stillness and change.

He's an artist, Davi said. Artists are mercenaries.

What drew me to The Third Hotel, by Laura van den Berg, was the promise of walking in the footsteps of love (where did it go?), an attempt to retrace and delimit a relationship.

What hadn't registered with me when this novel first came on my radar was that it has horror story elements — but then what love story doesn't?

Her husband Richard was a horror film scholar; he recently died in a car accident. So Clare ventures to the film festival in Cuba on her own. And there he is. (Did he really die? Why is he here? Where do the dead go?)

Weird things happen in this book.

Visitors longed for not a dislocation of reality but an insulation from reality — yet these layers of insulation were supposed to be invisible, imperceptible. People did not like to be too sharply reminded of their status as tourists.

I've often explained to people that one of the things I love about traveling is the opportunity to become someone else — in a place where nobody knows you, you can be anybody. But conversely, traveling lets you shed the baggage of your everyday life, to become more yourself. I think about this a lot when I travel, and I hold both these things to be true. This is my dislocation.

The traveling self was supposed to be temporary, disposed of when it was time to go home — there, how could this self be held responsible? But maybe a person became even more themselves when away, liberated from their usual present tense and free to lie. Maybe travel sent all that latent, ancient DNA swimming to the surface.

Clare has a secret self, the one that goes on the road alone for work. She's not working in Cuba, but she gives everyone who asks a different name. (Who is she really? Does she even know?) She suspects her husband had a secret life too.

Clare struggled to imagine what, forty years into a life, would cause a person to suddenly change the way they walked. There were alien, interminable silences when she called from the road, and when she was home he took long, solitary strolls in the evening hours, a symptom that would eventually lead to his demise.

There's unease simmering beneath every page. I'll leave analysis of the horror-story tropes to the academics, but there's the thing about the order the girls get killed in, the girls are always killed. There's the girl who goes missing. There's Clare being followed, and Clare following. (Will Clare be killed?)

I liked the idea of this book more than the actual book. Clare's past didn't interest me so much as her present with un-Richard.

In the lobby of the festival hotel, a mural of a forest spanned the length of a wall. On her first night, in the middle of a reception, she found herself standing in front of that mural. She peered into the shadows, imagined the secrets living in there. She rubbed the green leaves. The paint was smooth, the treetops tinged with gold. She licked a tree and tasted chalk, feeling wild.

Is she crazy? Has she always been crazy? Did she kill him? What is past and what is present?

(Apparently this novel owes quite a debt to Yoko Tawada's The Naked Eye, which quite coincidentally I have queued up on my shelf. Stay tuned.)

See also
Entropy: What Quivers Under the Surface of Laura van den Berg's The Third Hotel

The Paris Review: The Vocabulary of Tourism: An Interview with Laura van den Berg

Tin House: To Thicken and Complicate through Linear Time: A Conversation with Laura van den Berg

The empty drift

In the elevator, the silence made her arms itch and she was relieved when the foreman broke it, until he informed her that he had just observed her soul leaving her body. Apparently souls left bodies all the time — what entity didn't need a break every now and again? He believed this was only a problem if the soul in question lacked a reason to return. He explained that he had seen her soul climb right out of her chest — he stepped forward and pressed a freckled hand against her clavicle — and perch like a gargoyle on her shoulders, and when it was clear that she was utterly oblivious to what was transpiring, well —

The foreman sighed and shrugged, as though the departure of a soul was a terrible shame, but a situation for which there was little recourse. She told him she was under the assumption that souls only left bodies when people died, and he began to laugh and — his tone pivoting to indicate this was among the more idiotic things he'd heard in his life — said, You thing that's what happens when people die? [. . .]

The foreman had been possessed by a completely different notions of how the spiritual realm operated and he had spoken about it with a confidence that seemed preposterous in the moment, but who could say for sure that he was wrong, that the empty drift that gripped some people at certain moments in life was not in fact due to their souls — perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently — abandoning their bodies.

— from The Third Hotel, by Laura van den Berg.

How often does your soul leave your body? (What if another soul crept in while your body was "empty"?)

Cracking up the concrete like claws

I was reading in the metro this morning and I read a sentence that reminded me of another sentence. I made a mental note of the sentence and read on. Something made me want to check the author’s resources — I’d noticed that she includes research notes at the end of the book. That something — I don’t recall now what is was — was possibly not fictitious, but a reference to something (a book, a movie) in our nonfictitious lived reality.

The sentence was this:

From the Third Hotel, the closest CADECA was on La Rampa, on a street corner shaded by a banana tree, the roots cracking up the concrete like claws.

And the sentence it reminded me of was this:

It's just one of those pieces of Rome that cracks through the concrete of the present day like a bad memory, a way in for grass, for all kinds of untidy thoughts.

And it made me think of the difference between a horror story and a love story, and it made me think that maybe they're the same thing.

I am reading The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg, which put me in mind of one little sentence from Break.up by Joanna Walsh, whose Hotel was listed in the notes. Coincidence, of course, like the coincidence of all horror stories.

There's this thing about how horror springs up when someone's compass is taken away, leaving them unable to navigate the world. Rural horror tends to rely on some literal abyss or dislocation from "reality"; whereas urban horror relies on a different kind of gap in our reality — abandoned lots, alleyways, cracks in sidewalks.

The Third Hotel and Break.up are indeed very similar, women traversing an urban landscape, tracing a lost love, following their footsteps, repeating their words. So they are both horror stories. (The horror of a break-up?) How are they different?

[Possibly I should spend more time writing about books while I'm reading them instead of waiting till I'm done.]