Book 30: "The White Hotel" by D. M. Thomas
Saturday, July 16th, 2011 22:57![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeShe stumbled over a root, picked herself up and ran on blindly. There was nowhere to run, but she went on running. The crash of foliage grew louder behind her, for they were men and could run faster. Even if she reached the end of the wood, there would be more soldiers waiting to shoot her, but these few extra moments of life were precious. Only they were not enough. There was no escape except to become one of the trees. She would gladly give up her body, her rich life, to become a tree, frozen in humble existence, the home of spiders and ants. So that the soldiers would rest their rifles against the tree, and feel in their pockets for cigarettes. They would shrug away their mild disappointment, saying, One did not matter, and they would go home; but she, a tree, would be filled with joy, and her leaves would sing her gratitude to God as the sun set through the trees around her.
The book starts with an erotic poem supposedly written by one of Sigmund Freud's patients, Anna G, followed by his case file on her. In her fantasies, Anna and her lover are staying at a white hotel on the shores of a lake, and although they see it as a cosy place to retreat from the world, it is a place of danger, with their fellow guests dying in various disasters in and around the hotel. the poem is followed by Freud's (fictional) case history of Anna G. written in 1919 when she consults him because of terrible pain that has no physical cause.
The story of Lisa Erdman (the Anna G of the case history) is picked up again in 1929, when she is now more or less cured, but still unmarried and averse to having children, and as the years went by I realised that her visions and psychosomatic pains were actually premonitions of terrible events yet to come. A readable and moving book with a sympathetic heroine.
Reviews of Books 28 to 30 cross-posted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50bookchallenge.
The book starts with an erotic poem supposedly written by one of Sigmund Freud's patients, Anna G, followed by his case file on her. In her fantasies, Anna and her lover are staying at a white hotel on the shores of a lake, and although they see it as a cosy place to retreat from the world, it is a place of danger, with their fellow guests dying in various disasters in and around the hotel. the poem is followed by Freud's (fictional) case history of Anna G. written in 1919 when she consults him because of terrible pain that has no physical cause.
The story of Lisa Erdman (the Anna G of the case history) is picked up again in 1929, when she is now more or less cured, but still unmarried and averse to having children, and as the years went by I realised that her visions and psychosomatic pains were actually premonitions of terrible events yet to come. A readable and moving book with a sympathetic heroine.
Reviews of Books 28 to 30 cross-posted to
50bookchallenge.
