Critical Essay | Critical Review by Juliet Fleming

Critical Review by Juliet Fleming

SOURCE: “Living with Evil,” in Washington Post Book World, October 3, 1993, p. 5.

In the following review, Fleming offers favorable assessment of Pictures at an Exhibition.

Pictures at an Exhibition is a fiercely intelligent book, and a shattering experience to read. It opens with a brilliantly bizarre therapeutic relationship. Dr. Lorenz, surgeon, administrator and expert on gassing at Auschwitz, is troubled by headaches and nightmares. Choosing a couch from the prison “stores,” he instructs Chaim Galewski, a Czech prisoner, communist and Jew, with one year's psychoanalytic training, to attempt a cure.

In the novel's first instance of collusion, we find ourselves gripped by interest in the details of Lorenz's past even as, outside his comfortable room, smoke rises and trains can be heard arriving from all over Europe. Although circumstances would seem to preclude the possibility of transference between patient and therapist (when asked about his mother, Lorenz returns...
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