The White Hotel

The White Hotel is a novel written by the British (Cornish) poet, translator and novelist D. M. Thomas. It was first published in January 1981 by Gollancz in the United Kingdom and in March 1981 by The Viking Press in the United States.

The narrative is told principally in the form of an erotic journal and letters between the female narrator and a fictionalized Sigmund Freud as well as Freud's case history analysis of the narrator.

The White Hotel won the 1981 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the 1981 Cheltenham Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the same year's Booker Prize.

Development

Thomas wrote some of it in Hereford, where he was living, and at New College, Oxford, where he was on a sabbatical, and used two typewriters, one in each city.

Summary

Set in 1919, the book's first three movements consist of the erotic fantasies and case history of a patient of Sigmund Freud, "Anna G", an opera singer referred to him for analysis and treatment of chronic psychosomatic pains in her left breast and ovary. Freud attempts to identify some incident in her past that would explain these pains, and elicits from her a long erotic narrative – called "Don Giovanni", because she had written it on this musical score – in verse and then prose. Freud draws inferences from the incidents described and discusses these with his patient, with Anna notably deducing that her father may have been unfaithful to her mother with her mother's twin sister (Anna G's aunt). Anna is an unreliable narrator, changing key details in the account of her life she offers Freud. Only late in the treatment does she reveal that she considers herself to have second sight.