Customer Reviews

Pictures at an Exhibition

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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.

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.

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.

I hated this book almost as much as I disliked The White Hotel. The holocaust is used as a thematic device for Thomas to twist; there is no empathy here for concentration camp victims. Indeed, his main character -- in the guise of a jewish camp doctor (psychiatrist) in the first part of the book -- hates his jewish peers. By the tilt of Thomas's pen, this doctor comes to "treat" the bad dreams and visceral discomforts of the camp commander; he cures him so that the camp commander can continue the killing mission of the camp without discomfort.

There is an abrupt transition after about a third of the book; no longer in Nazi Germany, the scene changes to England after the war. The cast of characters however, does not really change. Instead, Thomas cleverly disguises their identities. Now, the concentration camp commandant is a prominent, ailing psychoanalyst. The trick of the book is to figure out/pair the war-time identities with the postwar characters that flitter in and out of scenes with the ailing shrink. But the characters are despicable; so really, who cares.