The White Hotel
By D.M. Thomas (1981)
1. A rare novel that achieved both literary and commercial success, “The White Hotel” remains wildly original nearly 40 years later. Opening with a series of invented letters purportedly by Freud and his disciples, D.M. Thomas then gives us a lascivious journal composed by a fictional opera singer in treatment with Freud. What follows is an account of the imagined patient's psychoanalysis in a voice so convincingly Freud's—“The incompatible idea had to be suppressed, at whatever price; and the price was an hysteria”—that it might be mistaken for one of his actual case studies. Mr. Thomas layers onto this rich concoction a third-person version of the events in the singer's life before catapulting us forward to an unflinching view of her murder at Babi Yar, the site of the massacre of 34,000 Ukrainian Jews in September 1941, and then a magical realist redemptive ending. The novel powerfully plumbs Freudian theories of hysteria, the role of narrative in psychoanalysis, and the foreshadowing of the Nazi horror in secular European society.
The Fig Eater
By Jody Shields (2000)
2. In lush and vivid prose, Jody Shields reimagines, as a murder mystery, Freud's account of his brief treatment of young Ida Bauer, to whom he gave the pseudonym Dora in his “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (1905)—commonly called the Dora case. As in Freud's paper, Ms. Shields's fictional Dora is caught up in a lurid drama: Her father, with the implied assent of his friend Herr Zellenka, has been having an affair with Frau Zellenka, while Herr Zellenka, in apparent collusion with Dora's father, has been courting the adolescent. When Dora is discovered strangled in Vienna's Volksgarten, the police inspector, a devotee of the new science of criminology, commences an investigation. The inspector's wife, Erszébet, a practitioner of mystical techniques, also secretly sets out to identify the murderer. Whereas the novel's momentum sputters on occasion, it's impossible not to read on, propelled by Ms. Shields's deft portrait of the stew of cultures that “snake underneath the city”—an undercurrent in the enduringly erotic and tender marriage of the inspector and Erszébet.
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