The White Hotel: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1981

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More importantly, he acquired a passionate enthusiasm for Russian life and literature, particularly for the poetry of Pushkin and Anna Akhmatova, both of whom he later translated, in versions whose technical limitations were more than made up for by his intuitive feel for the spirit of the poetry. After Redruth Grammar School, Thomas did his National Service, during which he was drafted into learning Russian. It remained an abiding passion and he went on to win great acclaim as a translator of work by Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Pushkin and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Thomas's first published work was a short story in The Isis Magazine in 1959. [1] He published poetry and some prose in the British science fiction magazine New Worlds (from 1968). Much of what he published until he was 40 years of age was poetry. [12] Two Voices, his first book, was published in 1968; it consisted of poetry. [1] Its title poem relates to science fiction/fantasy. [13] Structurally, "The White Hotel" resembles Nabokov's "Pale Fire", while stylistically it has more in common with Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain".

Thomas wrote some of it in Hereford, where he was living, and at New College, Oxford, where he was on a sabbatical, and used two typewriters, one in each city. [2] Summary [ edit ] His 1998 biography Alexander Solzhenitsyn: a Century in His Life was awarded an Orwell Prize in 1999. [37] Maybe he was so committed to his task that he was loath to let a conversation with the book's author get in the way of his vision for the screenplay. There was no doubting his commitment, to judge by reports of his first meeting with Lynch, in the fall of 1990. A day of Biblical rain in New York... a winey dinner... On parting, Potter's face streamed with tears as his crippled, arthritic hands grasped Lynch's lapels. If they didn't screw it up, he said, if they saw it through to the end, this would be the work they would both be remembered by. "This movie will be the Madame Bovary of our time." His other works include some two dozen collections of poetry and a play, Hell Fire Corner (2004), set in his native Cornwall. The Granite Kingdom (Bradford Barton Ltd, Truro, 1970), an anthology of poems about Cornwall, edited by D. M. Thomas [56]

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What was unceasingly impressive, though, was their energy and enthusiasm. Partners in life as well as work, they had a telepathic connectedness. I would listen entranced to their operatic duets - that seems the appropriate term - in which they constantly interrupted and completed what the other wished to say. And that was never anything bitchy about competitors, but expressions of admira tion for fellow professionals (cameramen, dancers, designers) who had agreed to be in their team for the great movie of - that stroking of a lover's skin by Bobby - The White Hotel. They were hot for it, the team was ready to go!

Born in Redruth, into a tight-knit, working-class community around the village of Carnkie, Donald was deeply attached to his Cornish roots, particularly his family, mythologising his close relationship with his parents, Amy (nee Moyle) and Harold Thomas. Thomas married on four occasions and fathered three children from the first two of those marriages. [1] He married his first wife, Maureen Skewes, in 1958. [1] He had a daughter (born 1960) and a son, author and journalist Sean Thomas (born 1963) with her. [1] He married Denise Aldred in 1976 and their son was born the following year; she would die (of cancer) [8] in 1998, with the three of them having moved to Truro in 1987. [1] He married Victoria Field in 1998 and Angela Embree in 2005. [1] At one point he approached the great screenwriter Dennis Potter to suggest a meeting to discuss a proposed adaptation. Potter demurred, saying he believed all meetings should take place only by chance. He did produce a script, and though no film was made, in 2018 The White Hotel made it to Radio 4 with an adaptation directed by Jon Amiel based on Potter’s script, advertised as “not for the sexually squeamish”. The White Hotel is a Chinese-box narrative whose successive sections present progressively more revealing perspectives upon its protagonist. There are two principles at work here that operate so as to attract and intensify the reader's attention. The first, familiar from tales of mystery and suspense, involves the gradual revelation of truth over the course of time: As each piece of the puzzle falls into place, readers may begin to anticipate the climax by speculating as to the most likely conclusion. The second, of which the opening passages of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury offer perhaps the best-known example, speaks to readers in the voice of an unreliable narrator, who is either incapable of or averse to being truthful. Although the first of these is to some extent a component of almost any compelling story — the question of "What truths lie beneath the surface of appearances?" keeps readers interested in hard-boiled thrillers as well as Hamlet — it is Thomas's brilliant handling of the second that makes The White Hotel such a powerful and affecting novel.Eventually, Lisa’s pains abate, and she continues with her life without Freud. She is not an outstanding singer, but she is good enough to be asked to stand in at La Scala for a major opera star, Serebryakova. She goes to Milan and is warmly received by Serebryakova and her husband, Victor. Vera (her real name) is not singing because she has broken her arm and plans to return to Kiev. A warm friendship develops among the three and when Vera leaves, she confides to Lisa that she is pregnant. Victor and Lisa work together and continue to develop their friendship. Tragedy strikes when Vera dies in childbirth. Four years later, Victor writes to Lisa and offers her a part in an opera he is directing as well as a proposal of marriage. His son Kolya needs a mother, and Victor’s mother, who has been caring for the child, wishes to return to her village as she is very old and ready to die. Thomas attended Trewirgie Primary School between 1940 and 1945, then Redruth Grammar School from 1946 until 1949. [1] [6] In 1949, he and his family moved to the Australian city of Melbourne. [1] Thomas spent the years between 1949 and 1951 at University High School there. [1] In 1951, he returned to Carnkie and to Redruth Grammar School. [1]

In 1980 he returned to his former university, Oxford, for postgraduate work arranged by his former tutor John Bayley. However, he preferred to use his freedom to write his own fiction, which, liberated by his analysis, spurted up from the wellsprings of his psyche in a seemingly unstoppable stream. He was not interested in the traditional formal structure of the novel, explaining that he was too impatient to get his characters from room to room, or continually intersperse “He said” or “She cried”. Instead of naturalism, he relied on streams of poetic prose, dream sequences and coincidences. The course of Thomas’s life and work was determined by his sometime tumultuous relations with women The penultimate section of the novel takes place ten years later. Lisa and Kolya are living in a slum. Victor has disappeared, after staging an opera which displeased the Soviet authorities. The German army arrives in the city, and signs appear instructing all Jews to assemble at the Jewish cemetery. As Lisa and Kolya follow the crowd from the cemetery, the neighbors speculate about where they are going: to a ghetto, perhaps, or to Palestine. When the Jews are herded into an enclosure, Lisa realizes that something more sinister is happening, but it is too late. The Jews are stripped and beaten. Lisa uses her identification card, which lists her as a Ukrainian rather than a Jew, to free herself and Kolya, but her freedom is short-lived. She and Kolya are taken to Babi Yar and executed by the SS, together with thousands of others.

The adapted version of The White Hotel centres on the sexual fantasies of Lisa and her premonitions of what it emerges are the horrors of the Holocaust and the Babi Yar massacre in 1941 in Nazi-controlled Ukraine. The judges had reportedly wanted to award the prize jointly, but were told that it should not be shared, although there was no formal rule to that effect – and it had happened once before, when Nadine Gordimer and Stanley Middleton were joint winners in 1974 with The Conversationist and Holiday respectively. In this way as well as others, Thomas leaves his legacy. Take The White Hotel venue in Salford. It too has its dealings with the weird and the futuristic, envisioning utopias and futures beyond the traumatic apocalypses that we are so often encouraged to accept as inevitable. The venue, too, creates space for perversion, or what once was considered perverse, or what one day will be. Like Thomas, it encourages us to consider why something is perverted in the first place, or why we insist on perceiving perversion as an inherently negative trait. Like in Thomas’ novels, perversion becomes poetic.