a journal supposedly written by Lisa about her stay in the spa Bad Gastein ("If I'm not thinking about sex, I'm thinking about death. Sometimes both at the same time.");

There's a moment in Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not which I thought was a real zinger at the time - we have been following Harry and his wife and their relationship intimately - they have some big financial problems but he loves her, and that's always good when a middle aged guy loves his wife don't you think, so you see her from his point of view. Then later you have a different narrator, some other guy, and he's driving along, maybe on his way to see Harry, and he sees this random woman crossing the road and thinks what an ugly old bag she is, you know, in that gracious way that men think at times, and then suddenly we see that the old broke down woman is Harry's wife, who we had, through Harry's eyes, been thinking of as a beautiful, warm, loving irreplaceable human being - which she was. I think he's crude, I think he's medieval, and I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don't have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don't see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons. 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 rights duly reverted to me on July 10. The new option agreement with Night Hawk took effect. 9/11 happened in their sight, and I expressed my sympathy. They sent me videos of Almodóvar's films. I watched them, then stuffed them in the overflowing cupboard of directors' films they had sent me over the past 15 years.It is not altogether true, I think; but success must depend on a fair harbour opening in the cliffs… 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. The novel’s next section is Freud’s analysis of Lisa, modeled on his published case studies. Anonymizing Lisa as “Anna G,” he recounts the facts of her life, starting with her birth in Odessa, Ukraine, as the child of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. When she is still a child, her mother dies in a fire at a hotel, in the company of her uncle, leaving the child with a repressed suspicion that her mother was having an affair. “Anna” becomes increasingly estranged from her father and moves to St. Petersburg, where she attends ballet school and falls in love with a young anarchist named Alexei. He abandons her while she is pregnant with his child, and she miscarries. After a brief spell living with her mentor, Madame Kedrova, “Anna” moves to Vienna to live with her mother’s twin sister, Aunt Magda (whose husband died in the fire with “Anna’s” mother). In Vienna, “Anna” flourishes, becoming an up-and-coming opera singer and marrying a successful lawyer, until her career and her marriage are afflicted by a mysterious illness. “Anna” suffers from psychosomatic pains in her left breast and ovary. She also has dreams about fires and floods, and visions of similar catastrophes while she is having sex. There were too many changes going on in my life for this to seem any more than a disappointment on the edge of things. My first wife, Maureen, left me, for a much more attentive second husband; I suffered illness and depression. For a year I couldn't read, let alone write; almost my sole, pallid enjoyment each day was playing the musical highlights of South Pacific. Now with my second wife, Denise, and our son Ross, I was hell to live with. Imagine having to listen to South Pacific every day for a year... But we moved to my childhood land, Cornwall, in 1987 and I gradually cheered up. And wrote a novel about another obsession of mine, JFK's assassination ( Flying in to Love ). I heard nothing from "the boys" for a few years, but it didn't seem to matter much.

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] When The White Hotel was published, Alan Hollinghurst, writing in the London Review of Books, felt that readers familiar with Thomas’s second novel Birthstone (1980), with its “obsessive fantasy, the fetishism, the group-sex, the masturbation (mutual and solo – or sola), the self-mutilation, the incessant oozings and ejaculations and enemas and even, occasionally, some relatively straightforward coitus”, would have “a distinct feeling of ‘Here we go again’. ” Wining and dining me in 1998, while I was in New York for the launch of my biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, they were in exuberant mood. It had been a long hard road but... we were close to our goal at last! Emir was on the verge of signing. They were trying to persuade him to have Juliette Binoche as the lead. He was a little doubtful, wondering if she was too sexually frigid, but they were working on him. Though Nicole Kidman was also keen to play the role. And for Freud, well, maybe Anthony Hopkins... We have the opening poem and then a journal that the poem is based on. Both written by Anna G (a pseudonym given his patient by Freud) they tell of a woman nearing 30 who meets a young man on a train has sex with him and then find a hotel (the titular White Hotel) together where they spend several days having sex in all permutations often in public. Despite it being labelled a journal one can tell it is purely the stuff of dreams and fantasy as it recounts numerous incidents that are beyond the realms of possibility; the frequent and varied disasters that kill of the guests and the mass breast-feeding event that happens in the dining room.As they were getting ready to pop the champagne cork at the Ritz, a maitre d' handed Bobby Geisler a phone. It was Lynch, still in LA. He and Isabella had parted, and he could not make the film without her. Sorry. Happy New Year. Set in 1919, the book's first three movements consist of the erotic fantasies and case history of a patient of Sigmund Freud, “Anna G”, an opera singer referred to him for analysis [3] and treatment of chronic psychosomatic pains in her left breast and ovary. Freud attempts to identify some incident in her past that would explain these pains, and elicits from her a long erotic narrative – called "Don Giovanni", because she had written it on this musical score – in verse and then prose. Freud draws inferences from the incidents described and discusses these with his patient, with Anna notably deducing that her father may have been unfaithful to her mother with her mother's twin sister (Anna G's aunt). Anna is an unreliable narrator, changing key details in the account of her life she offers Freud. Only late in the treatment does she reveal that she considers herself to have second sight. Freud does not, however, consider the possibility that either her erotic journal or her pains might arise from an incident not in her past, but in her future. Many observers of the central European scene during these years have commented upon the conditions which offered fertile soil for the growth of psychoanalysis, but it is Thomas's singular achievement to have turned them into the components of an accomplished novel. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, is one of the major characters in The White Hotel, where he and the other members of his profession who appear are represented as explorers of the mind who sometimes discover valuable truths about human nature. Their social role is in many respects akin to that of the priests in an established religion: They interpret the secrets at the core of existence to their followers, and try to help the distressed apply such knowledge to their specific problems. Although Thomas takes pains to demonstrate the flaws of this new brand of belief — a particularly effective passage shows a Freudian analysis being undermined by the patient's untruths — he also presents it as one of the few beacons of hope in an otherwise uncaring universe.