THE WHITE HOTEL D M THOMAS

THE WRITER

Donald Michael Thomas, known as DM Thomas, is a Cornish novelist, poet, and translator. He was born in 1935 in Redruth in Cornwall, the part of England he has described as “the sadly haunting, wrecked tin-mining area of West Cornwall, its symbol the square ugly granite harmony-filled Wesleyan chapel”. This suggests two of the crucial factors in his upbringing: his tin-mining ancestry, which is often explored in his poetry, and the Methodist values instilled in him by his parents. A third significant factor is Cornwall's separate status in England, isolated geographically on England's extreme south-west coast and in a strange position culturally, too—a Celtic region in England, which once had its own language.
Thomas attended Trewirgie Primary School and Redruth Grammar School before graduating with First Class Honours in English from New College, Oxford in 1959. He lived and worked in Australia and the United States before returning to his native Cornwall.
He published poetry and some prose in the British Science fiction magazine New Worlds from 1968 onwards and has published many novels. In the 1950s, at height of the Cold War, Thomas studied Russian during his National Service. He has retained a lifelong interest in Russian culture and literature. This culminated in a series of well-received translations of Russian poetry in the 1980s.
THE WHITE HOTEL
The White Hotel is the story of a woman undergoing psychoanalysis, which has proved very popular in continental Europe and the United States and remains D.M. Thomas's best known novel. When it was published in 1981, it was an almost immediate critical success, winning both the Cheltenham Prize and the Pen Silver Pen. American readers in particular found the Freudian tones of the novel attractive. Many of the themes of the novel, in particular its use of Freudian ideas to deal with the memory of the holocaust, reappear in a later novel by Thomas, Pictures at an Exhibition (1993).
The novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1981 coming a close second to the winner, Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children'. It provoked considerable controversy, as some of its passages are taken from Anatoly Kuznetsov's Babi Yar, a novel about the Holocaust. In general, however, Thomas's use of such "composite material" (material taken from other sources and imitations of other writers) is seen as more postmodern than plagiarist.
The book's first three movements consist of the erotic fantasies and case-history of a patient of Sigmund Freud, 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 goes to Sigmund Freud for analysis, suffering from acute psychosomatic pains in her left breast and her womb. 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 novel also makes use of epistolary form with postcards from the fictional hotel guests included as part of the narrative.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

The form of the novel is startlingly original. Is the novel written as a piece of classical music in movements that expand and deepen its central theme? Why did Thomas write the novel in the way he did?
What do you feel about the ending of the novel? Is it meant to represent a real place or an emotional state?
Is Anna a metaphor for the collective madness that overtook Europe? Is her story more than the story of one person?
For an interesting online review:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/236067/challenges_to_our_understandings_and.html?cat=4