Word: freude
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...translation if you like . . . plagiarism is a different matter," declares a character in Ararat. D.M. Thomas has set out to prove that dictum. In The White Hotel, his collaborative efforts were a critical and popular success. That novel began as an ingenious imitation of a case history by Freud, then moved to an account of the Nazi massacre of Jews at Babi Yar, originally written by a Russian novelist, Anatoli Kuznetsov. But what was an effective device in The White Hotel has become a conceit in Ararat. The density of literary allusion in Thomas' latest novel has rendered...
...Freud implied that a man putting on a hat was performing a phallic gesture. One historian of costume, James Laver, remarked that "epochs of extreme male domination have coincided with high hats for men." What does that tell us about Abraham Lincoln? Well, Freud is also said to have conceded that a cigar is sometimes merely a cigar...
Christopher Durang's comedies have the flavor of Freud filtered through Groucho. In Beyond Therapy and Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, Durang, like so many writers of the TV generation, found it easier to crack neurotic one-liners than to tell a story. But in Baby with the Bath Water, at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, he wobbles toward a narrative. The play follows Daisy (impersonated first by a girl doll, then by a hairy young man) from terrifying infancy, mute childhood and promiscuous adolescence to touchingly optimistic parenthood...
...portion as well as the deafening violence of the Babi Yar testimony, collaborated to overwhelm the reader. This sensory overload created a flow or wave of feeling, which after it had receded, left the reader feeling a part of the world which he had just experienced--the world of Freud and the Holocaust...
...rather to show him the structure behind that impervious force. Thomas achieves this unveiling partly through his language, which, though elegant and fragile, is not as colorful or as powerful as that in The White Hotel. Equally important are the characterizations. In The White Hotel, Lisa Erdman and Freud were a haunting, even inspiring pair, but Surkov, Rozanov and Finn run the gamut from merely distasteful to completely horrifying...