The White Hotel Critical Essay | Critical Review by Thomas Flanagan

Critical Review by Thomas Flanagan

SOURCE: “To Babi Yar and Beyond,” in Nation, May 2, 1981, pp. 537-39.

In the following review, Flanagan offers positive evaluation of The White Hotel.

This novel by the English poet D. M. Thomas is a book of extraordinary beauty, power and audacity—powerful and beautiful in its conception, audacious in its manner of execution. It is as stunning a work of fiction as has appeared in a long while. If it falls short of its ambitions, as I believe it does, this is because those ambitions are so large.

Its most obvious, although not its deepest, originality is one of form. The novel is an account of the life and death and the state of being after death of an opera singer named Lisa Erdman, but the account is not given in straightforward narrative. Thomas, however, is not one of those writers who, having been informed by the hum of...
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