D M Thomas - The White Hotel

This was recommended to me by Nicolette (from Mallesons) and I just got round to borrowing it in the midst of my Derrida/Fowles paper-writing flurry. Expected it to be fairly heavy going, and so it proved to be (good grief, the holocaust comes into it about three-quarters of the way in). I always struggle with this kind of literature - 'this kind' being, I suppose, the kind which doesn't offer me any obvious hooks (the foregrounded 'textuality' and postmodernist-y elements notwithstanding) - and suspect that my enjoyment would have been considerably increased were I more familiar with Freud, psychoanalysis and 'sexual hysteria' (my knowledge of those subjects is fairly scattershot, having been picked up in an ad hoc fashion whilst doing other things). It's cleverly put together in the way that it gradually lays out its extensively (and often deliberately misleadingly) documented 'case history', and I'm sure there are quite a lot of layers to the novel (the imagery seems very rich, and there seems to be some kind of underlying, circular structure to it all), but I didn't really get it.