The White Hotel (1981)

Harold at Twice-Told raved about this novel, but it was Emir Kusturica's interets in bringing it to the screen which inspired my reading. I felt it contrived and flat, though the premise is engaging: the prescience of hysteria. The bits that Thomas stole are the best in the book: shame on you, Donald. ( )

The first few chapters felt like an excuse to write deeply graphic sexual fantasies, but reading on it all ties in. I really liked this book, I need to read it again now I know where it leads so I can get the full picture. My favourite book I've read this year. ( )

Freud + young woman patient; 20 years analysis
tragic

It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of our century, and an attempt to heal them. Interweaving poetry and case history, fantasy and historical truth-telling, The White Hotel is a modern classic of enduring emotional power that attempts nothing less than to reconcile the notion of individual destiny with that of historical fate.

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 part of the narrative.
Ultimately it is a vision of the wounds of the 20th century, and an attempt to heal them. ( )

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 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?