Pictures at an Exhibition [Paperback]

D. M. Thomas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1994

The author of The White Hotel returns to sinister themes of the Holocaust in the haunting story of an S.S. officer at Auschwitz suffering from severe headaches and the young inmate appointed to cure him. Reprint.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Thomas's new novel is a return to the fascination with the horrors of war and the labyrinths of psychoanalysis that informed his bestselling The White Hotel , and has some of that novel's mesmerizing power. It begins with a young Jewish Czech inmate of Auschwitz, Galewski, who has some rudimentary knowledge of psychotherapy, trying it on one of the camp's Nazi doctors, Dr. Lorenz, who is tormented by headaches; the countless deaths and unending human agonies that surround them both come to seem like a mundane background to their hauntingly strange relationship. Most of the rest of the book takes place in Britain 40 years later during Margaret Thatcher's tenure, centering around the relationships of a celebrated elderly analyst (can it be Galewski?) with some of his patients and pupils who, as a group, tellingly represent the contemporary English intelligentsia. As is often the case in Thomas's work, art and music play an important role-- here, the paintings of Edvard Munch and the music of Gustav Mahler are prominent. There is an enigmatic visitor from Syria (can it be Dr. Lorenz?), a hideous but offstage act of terrorism, a fascinating interweave of lives, memories and motives. There is sometimes confusion about who is speaking, and the machinery of monologues and letters that moves the narrative forward (and, often, sideways and backwards) sometimes clanks a little. But there is no mistaking the stark compassion of Thomas's world, his mastery of the modern psyche and his ability to draw the reader into the darker corners of the human heart.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Organized around an exhibition of Edvard Munch paintings portraying love, jealousy, despair, and death, Thomas's novel is a stunning commentary on the effects of the Holocaust on society today. The opening chapter is a harrowing portrait of Auschwitz, as Dr. Galewski, a young Jewish inmate, analyzes Dr. Lorenz, a Nazi who suffers from headaches and nightmares. With his love for family and music, Lorenz seems almost sympathetic, while Galewski is morally corrupted by his participation in a perverted sexual experiment involving Judith, a Jewish girl he had saved from death. The setting then changes to London 50 years later and revolves around elderly Jewish psychoanalyst Oscar Jacobson and his wife, Myra, an Auschwitz survivor. The reader initially assumes that Oscar and Myra are really Galewski and Judith, but as their stories are tantalizingly revealed, each character's identity becomes suspect. Thomas, best known for The White Hotel ( LJ 2/1/81), has written a highly complex, ambitious, and brilliant novel that touches on the morality of abortion, fetal tissue research, and euthanasia, as well as the genocide of the Holocaust. Essential.
- Patricia Ross, Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 278 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub (September 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786701471
• ISBN-13: 978-0786701476
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,226,131 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read it again, this time more carefully...., March 12, 2001

By 

menachem feuer (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pictures at an Exhibition (Paperback)

After reading this book, I was curious as to how other people received it. I remember the problems many people had with the White Hotel and I wondered if similar issues or concerns would be repeated again. The first reveiw I read was from Kirkus Reviews. They hacked the book into pieces and, unfortunately, didn't understand it. The sole review of this book for Amazon was also hasty and spiteful. I suggest that the reviewers re-read the book and take into considration how D.M. Thomas juxaposes art, psychoanalyisis, and the empty dramas of everyday life to history. These juxtapositons have the affect of emptying out the over importance we give to our daily troubles, accidents, and deaths, as well as the art that we exalt to represnt them. This indeed is the pastiche that Kirkus Reviews points out. However, this pastiche is not a matter of circumastance or evidence that this is a "trashy novel" (as Kirkus reviews argues) it is the pastiche that emerges against the unthinkable historical "event' called the Holocaust. (I suggest they read Fredric Jameson's reading of "pastiche" vs- "parody" in his book Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism p. 16-18). Furthermore, Thomas brings out, through his brilliant juxtapositons, the failure and perhaps death of psychoanalysis, a death that people have yet to mourn with the other inventions of humanism and modernity, inventions that are obsessed with totality, with explaining, humanising, and "demysitfying" everything including death (but not including senseless mass murder). J.F. Lyotard likens the Holocaust to an earthquake that shatters all instruments that try to measure it (psychoanalysis and humanism included). Of all the books I have read on the Holocaust, I have to say that this is one of the best. It stands amongst books like See: Under Love. The Painted Bird, Survival in Auscwitz, The Messiah of Stockholm and Maus I and II. I have taught these books in the universtiy and if I were to teach a class on the Holocasut again, I would include this title as well. D.M. thomas asks us, as the above authors do, to take seriously the fact that any writing that approaches the holocaust must articulate the tension between history and art and the limits of representation. In the PostModern world, Pastiche is one way of marking these limits. To miss this, as these reveiwers have, shows a lack of understanding the challenges that art and fiction face after the Holocaust.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and Important, August 20, 2004

By 

Kannada (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pictures at an Exhibition (Hardcover)

This novel is stunning. I mean that in both senses of the word. I've read few novels as an adult that have had such powerful effect. A second reading of the novel was a bit more ambivalent, as I felt all of the characters to be so completely contemptible. I don't know whether that lowers my estimation of it, however. What sets Thomas' work apart is his fearless sensuality. Not just of sex, but also dark emotions and compulsions, complex relationships, etc. The lack of inhibition is truly rare, especially by one who can write so well. Some people may be turned off by his treatment of sacrosanct subjects, such as the Holocaust. However, I find his treatment extremely humanistic, in that it doesn't shy away from the various complications on the lives of various individuals. To assume that survivors (of whichever aspect) should hold specific, stereotypical qualities and characteristics is far from humane. More the point is the absolute obviousness of connecting the Holocaust to Freudian psycho-analysis. Thomas does this in several of his novels, and there is enough material to go around for several more. One cannot overlook the fact that Hitler and Freud are quite literally sons of the same place and time. The darkness, psycho-sexual undertones, and power dynamics are intrinsic to our understanding of the early 20th Century. (As an aside, in _Eating Pavlova_, Thomas gives a dying and doped-up Freud dreaming premonitions of the Holocaust, which Freud analyzes as he would any other dream. It is a sensational device which allows an imagined Freudian analysis of what was to come.) However, I would not recommend this book to anyone who is squeamish about sex, violence, or the darker elements of human psychology.

5.0 out of 5 stars The book I wish I could have written., November 1, 2005

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DC reader - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Pictures at an Exhibition (Paperback)

This book explores issues of identity and responsibility that are universal. Are we the same people we were many years ago? And how much responsibility do we bear for past actions if our core (soul) has changed in some essential way.

The issues that Thomas deals with in this book are very similar to those in Philip Roth's "Operation Shylock". However while Roth explicates these issues through the soliliquies of his protagonist, Thomas allows the force of the narrative to carry the reader into the midst of these quanderies. As a result this is a much better book than "Shylock".

At the same time this is a fascinating book that keeps the reader interested and questioning throughout.