Freud's Alphabet: A Novel
by Jonathan Tel
On This Page
Description
Freud - dying of cancer - has come to London to escape persecution in Austria, bringing with him his famous couch, his collection of tribal totems and his insights into the English. Cared for by his biographer and doctor, Jones, Freud explores the city of Woolf and Eliot, of bankers, fishwives and travelling tradesmen, considering everything in the light of his own desire to find an underlying, rational explanation for irrational behaviour. The city, in turn, asserts its own surrealism, show more defying explanation, happy to prove one thing and also its opposite. In the background, the nation prepares for its greatest act of rational madness - war. Jonathan Tel's first novel is a small masterpiece: a brilliant and playful insight into Freud and the English; and a beautiful evocation of the period, with its buses and fogs and housewives and men in suits. It is a surrealist Wasteland, a post-modern MRS DALLOWAY. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
hdcanis A novel starring a historical person (Marco Polo or Sigmund Freud) exploring a city (Venice or London) in fragmentary manner, each fragment handling a different aspect of the city.
Member Reviews
Picked this up at a little free library in Maryland on our great summer road trip of 2018. Interesting little "what if" nugget, with bits of the esoteric dotted throughout. Not to my taste, entirely, but it had its moments. Releasing it in Asheville, on the run from Hurricane Florence. In my care, this book has travelled through 13 states and two countries, roughly 3000 miles. That's further than Freud travelled to London.
Ratings
Members
- Recently Added By
Author Information
5+ Works 127 Members
Jonathan Tel is a UK author who won the 2015 Commonwealth 2015 Short Story Prize for his story 'The Human Phonograph'. The £5000 (A$10,987) prize is presented annually to the best piece of unpublished short fiction, selected from the five regional winners of the prize. (Bowker Author Biography)
Common Knowledge
- People/Characters
- Sigmund Freud; Ernest Jones
- Important places
- London, England, UK
- First words
- Summer is far from over. It is going to be a beautiful day.
- Quotations
- Alphabetical order! As arbitrary as they come, nevertheless not without its uses. What would a telephone directory or an encyclopedia or an index to a Collected Works be without it? Even a dream-book has need of it, to cast a... (show all) skein of logic over the unconscious. It divides up; it sets out; it offers us marvellous juxtapositions. That there is no ultimate pattern yet what we have suffices, is the moral it teaches us.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)The this too eases off.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 40
- Popularity
- 731,653
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (2.67)
- Languages
- English, Italian
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 4
