Memories and Hallucinations - Hardcover

Thomas, D. M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670823570 ISBN 13: 9780670823574

Publisher: Viking, 1988

Synopsis

The author presents memories, poems, reflections, and dreams within a framework of psychoanalytic sessions in which he explores his past, erotic imagination, and inspiration

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Thomas adapted the style of Freudian case history to the Holocaust in his searing novel The White Hotel. Now he turns a psychoanalytic technique on himself in this unsparing autobiographical memoira patchwork of memories, dreamlike passages, reflections, poems and sessions with his therapist. He seems to be marking time here as he analyzes his Oedipal fixation, relives the trauma of a friend's suicide at Oxford and works out his guilt over living with one ex-wife while involved with his other ex-wife. His analyst annoyingly interjects predictable comments like "You were never really a part of the family." The most rewarding sections are meditations on the writer's lonely craft. Skipping around chronologically, Thomas writes of his Cornish working-class roots, his secret puberty rites, the brouhaha over allegations that he plagiarized his Pushkin translations and the contradictory responses that The White Hotel evoked in readers.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Award-winning novelist Thomas ( The White Hotel , LJ 2/1/81) employs the rhetorical device of recollected therapy sessions to unleash a torrent of memories, fantasies, and reflections. At times searingly honest, at others fearfully reticent, he slowly turns an autobiographical kaleidoscope on his parents, childhood, marriage, and years of literary success. Fiction, poetry, and confession alternate to form a collage of solipsistic vignettes exploring the power of lust, cruelty, death, and art over Thomas's psyche. A powerful book that exposes the psychological wellsprings beneath one writer's attempts to create something lasting and beautiful in our slaughterhouse of a century. Michael Edmonds, State Historical Soc. of Wisconsin, Madison
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0670823570
• ISBN 13: 9780670823574
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208