White Hotel

The White Hotel

Cover of the first US edition
Author	D. M. Thomas
Country	Great Britain
Language	English
Genre	Fantasy
Publisher	Gollancz
Publication date	January 1981
Media type	Print
Pages	240 pp
ISBN

The White Hotel is a novel written by the English poet, translator and novelist D. M. Thomas. It was first published in January 1981 by Gollancz in Great Britain and in March 1981 by The Viking Press in the United States. It won the 1981 Cheltenham Prize. It was also short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1981, coming a close second, in the view of some.

Set in 1919, the book's first three movements consist of the erotic fantasies and case history of an imagined female patient of Sigmund Freud, Frau Anna G, a semi-successful 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 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. Freud does not consider the possibility that either her erotic journal or her pains might arise from an incident in not her past, but her future.

Following inconclusive treatment, Frau Anna G - revealed to be Elisabeth (Lisa) Erdman of Vienna - pursues a moderately successful musical career and marries a Russian Jewish opera singer, with whom she moves to Kiev in the 1920s. When he disappears in a Communist purge, she falls upon hard times and the third movement is set in 1941, when German troops capture Kiev. Lisa and his young son are ordered, along with the city's Jews, to Babi Yar.

An other-worldly ("in Palestine or Purgatory", according to the author) epilogue ends the narrative.

A number of efforts have been made to make the novel into a film, which some have described as unfilmable or unadaptable. These have included attempts by Bernardo Bertolucci with Barbra Streisand, by David Lynch with Isabella Rossellini, by Simon Monjack with Brittany Murphy, and by Emir Kusturica with Nicole Kidman.