Eating Pavlova [Hardcover]

D. M. Thomas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1994

A grieving Anna Freud, who has devoted her life to fit the needs of her famous father, reads his shocking diaries where his secrets are exposed, is unsure of his motives for writing them, and explores his conscious and unconscious world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Thomas, whose best-known if not best book remains The White Hotel, is his haunted, obsessive self in this tour de force that combines two of his passionate interests: the dark corners of psychiatry and the ironies of history. He imagines Sigmund Freud as he lies dying in London just before WWII, tenderly nursed by daughter Anna. A tumble of reminiscences, dreams and regrets fills Freud's mind as he recalls his wife, her sister, Freiberg, Vienna and such towering figures in his life as Fleiss and Jung. Fragments of his diary may or may not be true-they may in fact be designed to mislead the faithful Anna about difficult passages of his life. He imagines scenes as they might be fictionalized, showing himself alternately priapic, jealous, remote, complaisant. After a concluding series of dreams, Thomas slyly offers Freud's unconcerned, cut-and-dried interpretations, whereas the reader can see the dreams for the prescient visions they are of the Holocaust, the nuclear bomb, the postwar world. It is a brilliant performance, but unlike such more strongly felt recent Thomas novels as Pictures at an Exhibition and Flying in to Love, it seems no more than just that.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

What ought to be an intriguing glimpse into the amazing mind of Sigmund Freud is instead a rather tedious tale of Freud's deathbed delusions under the influence of morphine. This, his purported memoir, wanders through memories, hallucinations, lies, dreams, sexual fantasies, and sexual recollections involving his parents, wife, daughter Anna, patients, and colleagues. Even after his death in 1939, Freud continues to observe and reflect on the world around him. Or is the observer Anna, also an analyst, who identified so strongly with her father? Thomas's technique of teasing the reader with the truth about identity and memory, so effective in Pictures at an Exhibition (LJ 10/15/93), never catches fire here. The touches of humor toward the end, as Freud/Anna tries to understand the contemporary world, are engaging. But accounts of sexual activity are unintentionally humorous, portraying Freud as slightly ridiculous. A disappointing effort from a major talent. Recommended for literary collections.
Patricia Ross, Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 231 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub; PF edition (October 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786701420
• ISBN-13: 978-0786701421
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,231,745 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Freudian or Frivolous, May 10, 2000

By 

Michael D. Parker - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eating Pavlova (Paperback)

Any reasonably sized trash dump is loaded with multi-layered complexity and interesting items for us to discover, but it still smells rather bad. Thomas presents a dying Freud, his mind awash with drugs and inconsistent memories flowing into a quasi-fictional Freud drawn from the admitted lies of his journals and finally a strangely clairvoyant Freud who sees snippets of the future and completely misinterprets the message each time -- a bumbling mortal that seems to only remember the naughty bits with any clarity. What was the point?

3.0 out of 5 stars Stick with it, May 11, 2010

By 

Manola Sommerfeld (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eating Pavlova (Paperback)

This is one of the most bizarre books I have read. It is a fictionalized memoir of Freud in his last days. Reality and dreams mix freely, and until you realize that, the book will be confusing. But stick with it! Remember you're reading about the "brain" of the father of psychoanalysis, so indeed he is going to have weird dreams, interpretations, plus his medications exacerbate everything to unsuspecting points. I was quite entertained with this novel, and just because it is not linear and follows an A-B-C scheme, it should not be dismissed.