![]() ![]() This interview was conducted via email, this spring. Though I’ve admired van den Berg’s fiction for about a decade now, we first met in 2015, when we were on a panel together at the Brooklyn Book Festival. And, “If you leave a woman, though, you probably ought to shoot her, Hemingway had once written in a letter.” The novel’s clear-eyed scrutiny of the treatment of women in horror films made me rethink a lot of my own viewing habits as a kid. “Torture the women, Hitchcock was reported to have said when a young director asked him for advice,” she writes. ![]() Part of the book’s appeal is the way van den Berg shines a light on the casual misogyny of some of our once-revered artists. It’s the perfect premise for a novel that, in van den Berg’s hands, is both emotionally nuanced and philosophically profound. There, she sees her deceased husband Richard and everything she knew-or thought she knew-about their marriage is thrown into turmoil. In The Third Hotel, Laura van den Berg’s phantasmagoric fourth book, a recently widowed woman named Clare travels alone to Havana to attend the Festival of New Latin American Cinema. ![]()
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