Shortly after Clare arrives in Havana, Cuba, she finds her husband, Richard, standing outside a museum. He's wearing a white linen suit she's never seen before, and he's supposed to be dead. As the distinction between reality and fantasy blurs, Clare finds grounding in memories of her childhood in Florida and of her marriage to Richard, revealing her role in his death and reappearance along the way

No one thought that The Third Hotel was a bad book -- all initial ratings were at least average. But the argument of the meeting was about how much we cared about the narrator and her story. We all could see how Clare's solo journey to Havana for a film festival that her dead husband was supposed to attend was meant to be a depiction of the surreality of sudden grief, but the main issue was how much we cared about Clare's plight. We spent a lot of time talking about Clare and Richard's relationship as we could understand it -- how much they loved each other, why Clare traveled so much during the marriage, whether Richard was planning on leaving her or even committed suicide when he was hit by a car on a lonely and dark street -- and our understanding of the relationship lead to the strongest feeling people had about the novel. If you thought Clare was disconnected from Richard and not in love, the novel was boring. You were just watching a cold eccentric stumble around Havana and have a bizarre encounter with what could have been her husband's ghost. Certainly, we all agreed that van der Berg could have given the reader more context for the relationship at the beginning to make the love more palpable. But those of us who saw connections between certain details -- how drunk Clare was at the start of the story, the emotional roller coaster she feels seeing Richard again, and the fact that she remains with her mentally declining father in the finale -- saw the book as a powerful, en media res depiction of the madness of grief and how it dislodges a sense of reality. We all thought the parallel discussion of film in the novel was interesting. The connection between horror and intimacy in Clare and Richard's first encounter and the constant flirting with danger in Clare's life and relationship flowed nicely into the vague horror she experienced wandering through Havana, and fellow conference attendee Arlo's observation that documentary is the real horror because it's not safe became a core theme of the book for us. The fact that Clare's experience in the train crash was filmed, showing her dazed shock, reflecting her uncomprehending confusion about her father's illness and her husband's sudden death, whose mysteries can never be answered, paralleled beautifully with the discussion of the zombie film and the actress's much more disturbing footage of the torture she was forced to endure on set and how little the director was punished for it. But all of this consistent plot was coupled with random observations -- finger nails in desk drawers of hotels, bags of mangos being carried, licking murals -- that to those who liked the book were more of the oddities of travel and to those who didn't were more signs of the randomness the book was using to try to be clever. Ultimately, everyone agreed that what van der Berg was trying to do in The Third Hotel was powerful and there were moments where it came together, but we remained split about whether the stark and immersive view of grief and isolation was a powerful depiction of an interior state or a lack of information and sympathetic detail that left us feeling isolated ourselves.