The White Hotel has been on my reading list for years and years. My English teacher at school in the 80s was always on about it, and I think it had a certain following then. There was an unspoken knowledge that it was a bit dirty, which was pretty exciting as a school kid.
The reality is correspondingly disappointing. It turns out that much of The White Hotel is a wildly overwritten account of a woman’s sexual psychology, and makes the fatal mistake of taking Freud seriously. Thomas uses an array of different techniques, such as letters, poems and journals to lay out what seem to be the themes of the novel, before continuing with a more conventional narrative, albeit one taken up by different narrators.
The protagonist is a woman, first Anna G. then Lisa, who feels a pain in her left breast and leg that cannot be explained medically. We gradually unpick the woman’s life through various means, including two different accounts of the same erotic encounter in the eponymous Austrian hotel. The account of the woman’s stay at the hotel feels much more like a dream, and perhaps this is deliberate given the thematic link to Freud. It is, as promised, delightfully filthy.
Rather unexpectedly, the narrative shifts and begins to focus on the tragedy of the Holocaust, which Lisa, who is Jewish, becomes engulfed by.
By far the most effective element of the book is an unbearably harrowing account of the Babi Yar massacre. With growing dread, we edge towards an understanding of what is happening just as Lisa does as she edges towards the front of the queue to be thrown into the pit. The only better fictional writing I’ve read about the Holocaust is in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and the relevant passages closely resemble each other. Here, we finally learn the reason for Lisa’s psychosomatic pains, as an SS officer stamps on her rib cage and leg as she lies in the pit, shattering her bones as he does so.
For all the book’s failings, and there are many, this is an amazingly powerful moment. It somehow manages to preserve the tragedy of the individual death among millions, without lessening our horror at the size and scale of the events that have consumed the individual. This is a problem that so many fictional attempts to deal with the Holocaust face and fail to deal with. We cannot be convinced of the Holocaust’s truth and evil because one character is destroyed by it, only by understanding the almost unimaginable brutality and monstrous scale of the slaughter.
The final section of the book is a total failure in my opinion. It seems to be set in a “camp” where the Jews who have died in the Holocaust go after their deaths, and this seems to bear some resemblance to Israel. It just seems weird to use the highly-charged word “camp” in this context, and the now overt mysticism is simply jarring. It has the inevitable effect of lessening our sorrow at the terrible events at Babi Yar. We need to understand that the Nazis’ victims died for nothing and entered oblivion as a result. We can’t pretend that there’s a happy ending, and doing so is lazy and stupid.
It’s easy to see why The White Hotel was so notorious in the 80s, but it is very much a controversy of its time. Reading it nearly 30 years after publication, it just seems rather dated, and the Freudian parts seem even more absurd than they would have done back then. It’s a deeply flawed book, but contains a nugget of brilliant writing about the seminal event of the 20th century. For that alone it deserves a place on everyone’s reading list.
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