The White Hotel (Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature)
At a glance:
- Author: D. M. Thomas
- First Published: 1981
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Fantasy—inner space
- Time of Work: Primarily the 1920’s, with flashbacks and flashforwards
- Setting: Austria and Eastern Europe
- Genres: Long fiction, Fantasy
- Subjects: Memory, Homosexuality or homosexuals, 1920’s, Incest, Rape, Singing or singers, Hotels, motels, or inns, Hallucinations or illusions, Nazism or Nazis, Letters, Austria or Austrians, Eastern Europe or eastern Europeans, Psychoanalysis or psychoanalysts, Genocide
- Locales: Europe, Austria
The Plot
The White Hotel is a chronicle of the life of Lisa Erdman, known as Anna G., a fictional patient of Sigmund Freud whose story is based loosely on actual Freudian case histories. The novel traces Lisa’s life from when she enters psychoanalysis, through her return to the world after treatment, to her subsequent execution by the Nazis. D. M. Thomas uses the discrepancies of interpretation inherent in psychoanalysis to explore the relationships of fiction to life, of reader to text, and of the cultural layering of experience to the contextual meaning of...
[The entire page is 978 words long]
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