Reading The White Hotel is like reading a Bergman film. You are battered with symbolism, in perpetual pursuit of images, of references, of bizarre surrealist objects—a flying breast, a petrified embryo, a gliding womb. I'm not sure that I enjoyed it, but I am certainly respectful; this is a powerful piece of writing, highly complex, carefully structured. Its meanings and intention fall gradually into place; I suspect that it would improve still further on subsequent readings….

Sex and death pervade the book. Lisa herself says, in the fantasy in the white hotel: "'If I'm not thinking about sex, I'm thinking about death…. Sometimes both at the same time'"; and the remark is bitterly apt, given what will come….

[Symbols] flow through the first half of the book in such profusion that the reader does at times feel snowed under by them, desperately flipping backwards through the pages...