The White Hotel book cover
Last night, at approximately 11:30 pm, I finally finished The White Hotel.
Where to begin… well, first I feel it’s necessary to offer some background. So, courtesy of Wikipedia:
The White Hotel is a novel written by the English poet, translator and novelist D. M. Thomas. It was published in 1981 …
Introduced by Sigmund Freud, the book’s first three movements consist of the erotic fantasies and case-history of one of his 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.
The book begins with a long poem, full of erotic imagery and near-incoherent description. Following this is a prose version of the story that we learn is written by a young woman who is a semi-successful opera singer who comes to Sigmund Freud for analysis as she suffers from acute psychosomatic pains in her left breast and her womb. Her character and the pseudonym Anna G. might draw on examples of real case studies (Freud’s “Wolfman” also appears as a peripheral character in the novel), but the novel is indeed fictional. Thomas lets the reader in on Freud’s analysis, as well as his ambiguous feelings towards his patient. At several stages, Freud is ready to throw up his hands and tell her that he won’t continue his treatment as he feels she is not forthcoming enough to make any real progress. He always relents, however, because he senses that “Lisa” (the opera singer’s real name) has enough redeeming attributes to warrant his time.
As the novel progresses, the reader learns more and more about Lisa’s past and the seminal childhood incident (occurring when she is 3-years-old and vacationing with her parents in Odessa) that estranged her from her mother, and more particularly, from her father. This provides the central motif of the novel as well as Lisa’s Cassandra-like ability to see the future through her dreams and her imaginative powers.
The average rating of this book on Amazon.com is 4 stars (out of 5). I don’t know what I would give this book. The book is graphic and intense. After reading the first half, I took about two weeks off and had a hard time bringing myself back to the novel, even though I had passed the sex-therapy sections.
The book is unusual in its construction (among other things). It’s one of these “pomo” books where it’s divided into parts — six parts plus a prologue — that attempt to form a coherent story. In this way, I am reminded of Divisadero (and, my dear readers, you may recall that I was not particularly fond of said literary technique). Too often it results in a choppy narrative that does not really hang together at all.
In my mind, this book could really be divided into three parts: illness/crazy sex dreams/therapy (sections 1 to 3), post-therapy life, love, and horrifying death (sections 4 and 6), and dreamy-afterworld postlude (section 6). The first section hangs together as a strange yet coherent whole. Section 2 is a prose retelling of the poem that comprises section 1. Section three is an interpretation of Sections 1-2 and describes the therapy Lisa undergoes to become well.
Section 4 shifts towards happier days. Lisa has recovered, is able to love again, and, after receiving some correspondance from Freud, feels that she is now able to reveal some important details she held back when she was undergoing therapy. Among other things, she reveals that she is Jewish and the real reason why she could not consummate her marriage was because she knew her husband and his family hated Jews.
Of course, at the end of the novel [SPOILER ALERT], in what proves to be a truly awful and unexpected — from both the characters’ and the reader’s point of view — scene, Lisa and her adopted son, Kolya, are brutally killed for being Jewish, bringing Lisa’s fears and her neurosis full circle. The horrific hallucinations she once had while making love to her anti-Semitic husband are acted out; her earlier loss of a child through miscarriage, for which she blamed herself, is revisited in the death of Kolya, despite her best efforts to keep him (and herself) alive. It does indeed appear, as Freud points out, that she has some kind of psychic gift.
In the dreamy-postlude, Lisa journies to “the white hotel” of her dreams, which has become a “refugee camp” for those who have died. She encounters her mother, they talk, etc.
So where I am going with all this?
I suppose I’m hesitant to pass judgment because it’s generally just not my kind of book. At the beginning and the end, it nearly straddles the line of TMI-harshness. In that sense, it was quite hard to read.
As I alluded to above, I’m also not particularly keen of books that do the whole pomo let’s-incorporate-lots-of-different-kinds-of-writing-and-different-narrative-voices-and-people-will-think-it’s-really-deep thing. I think I complained about this a bit while reading The Stone Diaries. When did it become so “awesome” to write this way? What happened to good storytelling — storytelling that doesn’t need these kind of “devices” to seem clever? Bah.
At least I can say that this format generally worked with this book.
Anyways, I wouldn’t say this book is recommended reading — unless you’re into Freud — but I’m also not saying it was bad.
NEXT UP: The Cellist of Sarajevo
AFTER THAT: Who knows? I just picked up four new books from the “free pile” in my building, plus I’ve got a bunch more sitting on my shelf. I’m thinking something dark and Russian … Dostoevsky, perhaps. Any suggestions, readers?
