The White Hotel

Psychoanalysis & Surrealism Together At Last

This book was a huge hit in the 1980s. I remember seeing it at the top of the best seller lists when I was in college. Recently I came across a short article by the author, talking about all the craziness he went thru trying to get a movie version made, the different scripts he wrote for different producers and coked-up directors, the sudden disappearance of financing. I decided to get the book and finally read it.

This turned out to be a very interesting and unusual novel, and I was left pretty amazed that it had ever been a best-seller and a candidate for the Hollywood treatment. Thomas is definitely a literary writer. He is an Oxford grad who is interested in Russian culture and has written translations of Akhmatova. I think this book is his only big hit. Parts of it are surreal and profane, and it is not that comprehensible to anyone who does not have some knowledge of Freudian theory. The story is somewhat eccentrically divided into sections that present the different sides of a woman's life. Throughout there is a curious distance that goes on, as if one is always standing a couple of steps back from the unfolding story. There is not a lot of dialogue, and some characters appear without much description.

The novel begins with an exchange of letters between Sigmund Freud and a colleague, followed by a strange poem. The poem is followed by an even stranger piece of prose that concerns a woman named Anna (whose real name turns out to be Lisa Erdman), who picks up a younger man on a train. They go to a white hotel in the mountains (Bad Gastein, I think it is called) and have an intense sexual affair. The young man seems to be the son of Sigmund Freud. The woman seems to be psychotic, or they have entered some sort of a twilight zone, where fires rage and stars fall from the sky and people engage in wild sexual scenes. The whole section is vivid and strange and a little haunting too.

Then the scene shifts to Vienna, where Freud is analyzing Frau Erdman, a second-level opera singer. The writing turns out to be hers, and she is suffering from some sort of hysterical pains and neurotic feelings. They discuss her life, and Freud eventually comes to some very questionable conclusions about her. The story moves again, this time into a realistic depiction of her life with an omniscient narrator. There is much description of her relationships with family and friends, but I won't give too much away here.

The scene shifts jarringly again, this time to a World War 2 concentration camp. One wonders what the point is of bringing that into it - up until this segment, The White Hotel had been a fairly polite novel focusing on sexuality and psychoanalysis. Then - and this is effective - Thomas moves back into the land of the surreal. The feeling is peaceful and still strange, with people staying in some resort-like place. I guess the book does have a point - that painful reality and pychoanalysis and all that are ultimately trumped by the life of the mind and the imagination. This was an interesting book, but I never really felt moved by it.