The White Hotel

This is a tough book. Partly, it is the 'post-modern' style of the narrative, wherein actual events and non-fictional material is interlaced within the writing. Partly, it is the intense sexual fantasy in the (supposed) sessions between the main character and Freud that might put people off, and the knowledge we have of the doom awaiting those who lived between the wars of the 20th century. Or it might have been the iterative views of what is portrayed, each one changing the one before like a psychological Rashamon. How can we trust the narrator? How can we trust the portrayal of Freud, just reaching his ideas about the connection between love and the death wish?

And all along there is love, in various forms, and death, natural and show more otherwise. Ultimately, we follow the main character all the way from trauma and pain and love to barbarous death, and something more.

An excellent novel for those open to its method and frankness. show less

Sigmund Freud attempts to treat a woman suffering from hallucinations that set explicit sexual acts in the foreground while mass death events are occurring in the background (drowning, fire, falling, buried alive). Getting into this novel is a bit of an uphill climb, since it's front-loaded with the hallucinations part but, on the far side of that, Sigmund goes to work as he tries to rationalize what's been shared, looking for the symbols he can tie into his patient's life and history.

There's a bit of a trick going on here, first hinted at and then increasingly evident (if you know your history, or you've just been reading the LT tags). The rising tension is mostly due to predicting what's coming rather than the plotting, although the show more hallucination element adds some ominousness. Its climax includes the most gut-wrenching description of this particular scene I've ever read, although I understand Thomas has Anatoly Kuznetsov to thank for its power. The final section ends on a mercifully happier note, the only one available. show less

It's funny how sometimes you end up doing things in themes - I read this book shortly after watching David Cronenburg's new film about Freud and Jung, and also after reading Primo Levi - so Judaism and psychoanalysis coming together in this book which centres around a female singer, a 'case study' of Freud, and a central European/Russian Jew in the 1930s. It's a fascinating read; it starts with two different meditations on feminine sexuality and the erotic, very circular and repetitive, capable of reinterpretation in a myriad of different ways, by Freud and also by Anna the subject - but who owns the analysis - the analyst or the analysand - the male authority or the female subject? The more linear narrative, that takes us into the show more ghetto and the slaughterhouse, into the dark heart of man's inhumanity, brings fantasy against a dark reality of group psychosis. Is analysis and self knowledge just an egotistical indulgence? show less

A strange, dream-like book, but nevertheless oddly compelling. A large chunk of the book is devoted to an imagined case study meant to be written by Freud, and it was almost as fascinating as one of his actual case studies -- though really, a little too perfect, but I imagine that's inevitable, in a fiction. Still, I loved the way this story kept circling back over the events of the heroine's life and the psychoanalytic interpretations of her symptoms, denying the reader (and Freud) the satisfaction of an easy solution to the "puzzle". Towards the end of the book, the characters (minus Freud) all get sent to Hitler's camps, which I suppose makes a point about the fruitlessness of psychoanalysis in a crazy, cruel world? But I could have show more done without it. show less

She stumbled over a root, picked herself up and ran on blindly. There was nowhere to run, but she went on running. The crash of foliage grew louder behind her, for they were men and could run faster. Even if she reached the end of the wood, there would be more soldiers waiting to shoot her, but these few extra moments of life were precious. Only they were not enough. There was no escape except to become one of the trees. She would gladly give up her body, her rich life, to become a tree, frozen in humble existence, the home of spiders and ants. So that the soldiers would rest their rifles against the tree, and feel in their pockets for cigarettes. They would shrug away their mild disappointment, saying, One did not matter, and they show more would go home; but she, a tree, would be filled with joy, and her leaves would sing her gratitude to God as the sun set through the trees around her.

The book starts with an erotic poem supposedly written by one of Sigmund Freud's patients, Anna G, followed by his case file on her. In her fantasies, Anna and her lover are staying at a white hotel on the shores of a lake, and although they see it as a cosy place to retreat from the world, it is a place of danger, with their fellow guests dying in various disasters in and around the hotel. the poem is followed by Freud's (fictional) case history of Anna G. written in 1919 when she consults him because of terrible pain that has no physical cause.

The story of Lisa Erdman (the Anna G of the case history) is picked up again in 1929, when she is now more or less cured, but still unmarried and averse to having children, and as the years went by I realised that her visions and psychosomatic pains were actually premonitions of terrible events yet to come. A readable and moving book with a sympathetic heroine. show less

This is an astonishing book. It tells the story of a young woman who suffers from debilitating pains in her womb, and mysterious dreams. She becomes a patient of Sigmund Freud, who tries to unravel her dreams and discover the source of her problems. It's not always an easy read, and you may begin to wonder where it is all leading. However, do not put this book down - it is well worth persevering. As you read about the dreams you become mesmerised, and before you know it, you are caught up in events that take you by surprise, leaving you deeply moved. I consider The White Hotel to be the most powerful novel of the last century. Go out and get it now - you will never forget it.

This is a story of eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. The book's first three movements consist of the erotic fantasies and case-history of one of the novelist's conception of Sigmund Freud's female patients, overlapping, expanding, and gradually turning into almost normal narrative. But then the story takes a different course with the convulsions of the century, and becomes a testament of the Holocaust, harrowing and chillingly authentic. Only at the end does the fantasy element return, pulling together the earlier themes into a kind of benediction. One aspect that I found interesting was the use of the epistolary form with postcards from the fictional hotel guests included as show more part of the narrative.
Ultimately it is a vision of the wounds of the 20th century, and an attempt to heal them. show less