Laura van den Berg

this book requires a slow, slow read to absorb and reflect on what is going on. it's confusing and disorienting and unsettling and reading it makes you feel unmoored and like you have no idea what's going on and what is reality. which, of course, is just putting us directly in clare's shoes. clare, who is in a sea of grief and who doesn't have a foundation of good communication and a support system to lean on, who doesn't know how to navigate it. clare whose compass is taken away when she show more most needs it.

when richard, clare's husband dies, there are unfinished conversations, secrets untold, and so much for clare to process. but because of her childhood, she's not so great at facing hard thing head on, she leaves when sometimes she should stay, she turns her back when sometimes she should look. and so she is thrown, and finds herself both leaving and staying, turning around and around, coming and going. she's all over the place and she is haunted by conversations she never finished with richard, by not knowing those secrets and so wondering how much they knew each other in the end. she's haunted by him as she deals with the grief of his death, and what she knows is the upcoming death of her father.

she really is driven nearly crazy by this grief time, but it's what finally enables her to be there for her father as he is dying, what brings her back to herself in the end.

the writing is really, really good. it can be hard but it's so worth it. the way she uses the ideas of the horror movie and the tropes you find in it as a through line in the book is pretty brilliant. and then, also how that relates to the theme of seeing people in general; we are seeing what they're projecting, and there is this constant push/pull of the public persona versus the private person and who they when they're alone. how she grew up without being seen as herself and how she is so often pretending with the people she meets.

there is so much to think about here, and i love that. this is fantastic.

"Some forms of watching were designed to obliterate the subject."

"Behind every death lay a set of questions. To move on was to agree to not disturb these questions, to let them settle with the body under the earth. Yet some questions so thoroughly dismantled the terms of your own life, turning away was gravitationally impossible. So she would not be moving on. She would keep disturbing and disturbing."

"She had started to notice people almost exclusively in fragments. An arm under a desk, reaching for a fallen pencil. A back bent over a water fountain. A hand frozen under the amber beam of a lamp."

"What was it about men and humiliation? Clare had wondered...and would keep wondering as she watched killer after killer respond to humiliation with masks and knives. Was humiliation supposed to be any easier for women to take? She didn't think so, even though the world kept insisting they were built for it."

"She could go on into infinity, and yet she understood that knowing another person was not a stable condition. Knowing was kinetic, ineffable, and it had limits, but the precise location of those limits, the moment at which the knowing stopped and the not-knowing began, was invisible. You would know you had reached the border only after you had surpassed it."

"She did not know how to grieve in the context of her life." show less

There’s an episode of the podcast "Hidden Brain" about counterfactuals. Counterfactuals are basically a reimagining of past events, an answer to “what if?” and all of the events that cascade from a different choice or circumstance.

The episode is specifically about counterfactual thinking in the wake of tragedy. The woman whose story they share talks about how just before she and her husband ascended the mountain on which he would be killed in an avalanche, he told her that he had a bad show more feeling about the day. Together they’d decided to continue with their plans. If nothing had happened, she might not even have remembered that conversation. But because something did happen, something very bad, she reviews that instant and imagines what would have happened if she had suggested that they just skip the trip.

The Third Hotel is essentially an account of Clare’s counterfactual. What if Richard hadn’t died? What if she’d acted on the signs she’d been noticing in him for months? What if they’d both been more open with each other from the beginning of their relationship? She takes the trip to Cuba they’d planned to take together, and she replays their relationship, digging into details she and he had never addressed during their life together, trying to put the pieces together into a narrative that makes sense, and trying to come to grips with the unknowable.

The woman in the podcast was seeking some locus of control, something she could have done to change the outcome, and she focused in on that moment before their trip that seemed like a crossroads. This led, to one degree or another, to a sense that she was responsible for her husband’s death. Clare feels a similar sense of responsibility and blame but without a single moment to look at, she sees her husband’s death as an accumulation of poor choices and in some ways even a result of a flaw in her own character. She imagines not just that she could have stopped his death, but that she was the one who killed him, and neither she nor the reader can be certain that this isn’t the case.

In her blurb on the back cover, Lauren Groff writes that “you read [Laura van den Berg’s] work always a bit perturbed.” This was definitely my experience. The novel is dizzying, the line between reality and Clare’s imagination blurred. I oscillated between “I love this book!” and “Do I love this book?”

In addition to this main story, the novel addresses the three-way relationship between the author/artist/filmmaker, the story itself, and the audience. One character talks about the tacit agreement between the filmmaker and the audience of a horror film, a genre of which Clare’s husband was a scholar. “The screaming was only pleasurable because the audience knew the terror had an end,” he asserts.

Throughout the book, Clare is trying to place her life with Richard and his death into a narrative, a story with boundaries to comfort her with the knowledge that “the terror has an end.” As she traces her marriage back to its beginnings, Clare sees that the decision to marry someone in the first place carries with it the knowledge that, either through death or divorce, that relationship will end. A beginning implies an ending.

I’ve been reading everything lately with an eye for how I can use it to develop character in myself. In applying this filter to The Third Hotel, I’ve identified a primary idea with character-building potential: We can’t run from ourselves.

Like in a horror film where the victim is running frantically from a killer who walks steadily, methodically behind, no matter how fast we move whatever truth or pain or past we’re trying to evade will eventually catch up with us. It’s difficult to escape our patterns of behavior, difficult to stop running, but it happens whether we do it by choice or let it happen on its own. Sometimes (most times?) it boils down to being there in our relationships, with those we love and who love us, holding their hand, looking them in the eye, making physical contact while they cry, and allowing them to do these things for us. Our culture doesn’t encourage this simple but profound connection. It promotes independence and transactional relationships and solving problems by buying things rather than through the cultivation of family and community relationships. When it appears that our corporatocracy is encouraging us in these directions, take a closer look and you’ll generally find it’s actually an ad for a car or a credit card, an eyeliner or an app. It might look an awful lot like personal connection but peel back the veneer and it’s a ploy to get us to give away some aspect of ourselves---our thoughts, our preferences, our photos---that can be sold for someone else’s profit. And along the way we become convinced that we’re the mere sum of our parts, a collection of likes, dislikes and moments curated for public consumption.

So my takeaway is to maintain constant vigilance, to be aware always of who’s offering a solution to my particular problem and of who’s defining the problem in the first place. What are they selling and who stands to profit if I buy it? Does it bring me closer to people I love, closer to people in my community, closer to myself, or does it just offer the illusion of closeness? If all it costs me is money, it’s guaranteed to be the latter. show less

In the imminent future, Joy Jones is immune to the brain dissolving flu that is decimating the American population. She has been recruited for a clinical study at a hospital in Kansas dedicated entirely to monitoring those apparently immune or in a latent state in an effort to find a cure.The chilling scenes with the strange Norwegian Doctor Bek play out with cinematic detail. The narration of Joy’s sterile daily routine at the hospital is interrupted by flashbacks of her previous life show more clerking in a convenience store, self-medicating with Benylin to ease her loneliness, and childhood stints in several foster homes. Orphaned at one month, Joy’s mother left her in the cold on the steps of hospital. When baby Joy was discovered, frostbite was just setting into her tiny nose and fingers. Her heart was damaged too: there was a huge mother-shaped hole right in the middle. Adult Joy doesn’t really care that she is immune. Tracking down her birth mother is the only goal worth living for. Joy and another patient venture out into the devastated landscape.

FIND ME is a coming of age story set in the middle of an apocalypse. The epidemic is sweeping the country like a hurricane. All Joy wants is to find her real home, her mother. She has no idea how dangerous or difficult the journey will be.Think Dorothy--another orphan from Kansas--from THE WIZARD OF OZ + ON THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy.

Author Laura van den Berg asks the reader to consider how we can know who we are without knowing where and who we came from. This is a big question in FIND ME and the fact that the flu erases the victim’s memory before it kills them is significant. Van den Berg makes you feel the intensity of Joy’s emptiness and pain, makes you understand that for Joy the risks she takes aren’t as frightening as never knowing why her mother abandoned her after living with her for one month. Why not right after birth? What awful thing did Joy do to turn her away?

FIND ME is almost unbearably saturated with the negative power of one person’s abandonment and loss. Days after finishing the novel, I am still wondering why the author chose an apocalyptic setting. Intriguing. A stunner of a first novel!

Highly recommended to all readers who like to ponder. show less

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for my ARC.

Laura Van Den Berg kicks off the collection with a quote by Clarice Lispector - Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself? Berg's invocation really resonates by the end of the first story and wholly makes effect at the close of the collection. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is features stories told from the perspectives of different women and Berg explores many more themes throughout the collection. Each story is really well put together with all show more ending in a punchy finish. That is to say that they close most often in a line that wraps things up in a unique way I have not seen in some time. The stories really do well at pulling you in and turning pages and in that way it is a very fast read but it is not light reading. It was been a very long time since I have come across a writer quite like Laura van den Berg; her writing is laser focused on moments - details - slices of life repeated and masticated and re-worn over and I found the stories to be highly original. There is something of Ray Bradbury and J.G. Ballard in these stories in the inner-monologues and inner-space explored, in the emotional effects created by way of style and structure. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is a summer read that you will be bound to be treading over again into the fall, winter, and well into 2021. These are stories not only worth reading but rereading and living with. Also of special note is the structuring of the book itself. The stories like a great anthology are paced and set against / paired with each other in a way that feels purposeful.

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears in the best way possible treads over well worn ground but in highly unique and nuanced ways that will stick with you. Highly recommended. show less