THE WHITE HOTEL 1981

It’s 1981, I am 33. She was a blind date - Time Out / Private Eye / eDating (I tried them all). A coffee - I forget where. All was going really well, she was really nice and we were hitting it off.

"Have you read 'The White Hotel'?" she asked. ('The White Hotel' was the joint winner with 'Midnight's Children' of the 1981 Booker Prize, and was the talking point amongst the Literati).

“I am afraid I only read non-fiction” I replied – and that was it. She carried on for a short while for form's sake, but on parting came “I wish you luck in the future”.

So this has rankled with me for forty years, and faced with a long train journey in 2020 to Devon for Fiona's memorial service I bought a copy in paperback to read on the journey and take my mind off my grief.

Well, it's quite surprising. It opens immediately with sexual pornography at the White Hotel which becomes progressively more extreme and unbelievable, related by Jewish Anna 25? to Sigmund Freud in about 1920's Vienna. It is unclear if this is fantasy or real. She has consulted him about an agonising pain in her shoulder which her doctors can find no organic cause for. Freud of course, after a long analysis, interprets it as hysterical, caused by a trauma in her childhood. Then the rest of her wealthy middle class life is narrated as it deteriorates under Nazi anti-sematism; though she still has the shoulder pain.

At age 70? she finds herself husband less  in the Kyiv getto under German occupation, and ordered with all the other Jews to assemble at Babi Yar, a park in a Kyiv suburb. Now I, and probably the majority of readers, did not know the significance of this. They are lined up above a ravine and machine gunned in pornographic detail – you think up to the very last moment that she will survive (she jumps before the bullets reach her); but the Germans finish off the survivors and she takes the bullets in her shoulder.

So her hysterical shoulder pain was a FUTURE trauma, not a past one – not many reviewers have commented on the significance of this, concentrating on the Holocaust aspect when the book actually turns out the be a Fortean novel of precognition; and of course he uses the device of beginning with unexpected extreme sexual pornography and ending with unexpected extreme violence pornography.

So I probably could have had a reasonably intelligent conversation with her about it, and my life might have been different. A node in one's time line. Dammn.

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