Each time I read The White Hotel, it provides a deep and lasting pleasure (when I consider its construction), and an even longer lasting pain (when I’m struck yet again by the force of its content). It’s at once beautiful and violent, wonderful and terrible, arousing, funny, disgusting, devastating. More simply, it is, as The New York Times put it, “heart-stunning”.
The highly sexual physicality (the delightful wonder of blood and guts and cum) is underpinned throughout by an uneasy violence. Alongside wild and radiant life, death is everywhere present in this book, constantly surrounding the characters that populate “the white hotel”. The deaths are sudden and catastrophic, yet treated with a strange, dreamlike indifference. There is a relentless and dangerous velocity to the early stages of the book that gives it a trance-like, animalistic quality, rounded out by the slow, gasping despair of the end.
Its shape mirrors life. In a text perhaps best described as a fugue, DM Thomas takes what seem to be joltingly disparate sections, styles and subjects, only to reveal through skilful interweaving the pattern of the whole. The book opens in the epistolary form, moves into poetry, then into the third person, describing the same but slightly altered events. It then jumps to a fictional rendering of a case study of Freud’s, written about the female protagonist in previous sections, and so on and so forth.
At first, there’s a confusion to this, but it is the confusion of life lived, where perspectives shift, minds trick, experiences happen in real time, suddenly and without explanation or analysis. The analysis, when it does come, is limited and misguided. There is nothing, Thomas makes clear, that psychoanalytical science can tell us about the raw and brutal facts of genocide.
This book is a parable of the 20th century. A lament, as well as a warning shot. It is raw, honest, valuable, even essential – in its searing truth, it’s almost unbearable. It’s difficult to re-enter the world, after reading The White Hotel. It’s one of those books that changes things.
