by D.M. Thomas
The heroine of this astonishing novel is a woman called Anna, in analysis with Sigmund Freud. (She shares only a name and illness with the subject of Freud's classic study of hysteria but is otherwise fictionalized.) Her pain and disabling illness were the result of sexual traumas that began when she was a child. Freud himself is a major character here, not just a walk-on as he was in Ragtime. He grieves over the death of a daughter and his face becomes marred by the cancer that will kill him. When Freud asks Anna to write about her dreams, the resulting journal describes a visit to a resort, the hotel of the title, with a young soldier she encounters on a train. She says the soldier is Freud's son. Anna and the soldier are obsessed by sex—vividly described sex, which goes on despite a fire, drownings and an earthquake. The jargon of Freudian psychiatry becomes the language of a powerful poetry, while Anna's life shudders to a shocking climax that is painful to read. The White Hotel is a dazzler that lingers in the mind long after its last unearthly sequence. Thomas, a British poet, is the author of two other, heretofore obscure novels. (Viking, $12.95)
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