Pictures at an Exhibition [Paperback]

After reading this book, I was curious as to how other people received it. I remember the problems many people had with the White Hotel and I wondered if similar issues or concerns would be repeated again. The first reveiw I read was from Kirkus Reviews. They hacked the book into pieces and, unfortunately, didn't understand it. The sole review of this book for Amazon was also hasty and spiteful. I suggest that the reviewers re-read the book and take into considration how D.M. Thomas juxaposes art, psychoanalyisis, and the empty dramas of everyday life to history. These juxtapositons have the affect of emptying out the over importance we give to our daily troubles, accidents, and deaths, as well as the art that we exalt to represnt them. This indeed is the pastiche that Kirkus Reviews points out. However, this pastiche is not a matter of circumastance or evidence that this is a "trashy novel" (as Kirkus reviews argues) it is the pastiche that emerges against the unthinkable historical "event' called the Holocaust. (I suggest they read Fredric Jameson's reading of "pastiche" vs- "parody" in his book Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism p. 16-18). Furthermore, Thomas brings out, through his brilliant juxtapositons, the failure and perhaps death of psychoanalysis, a death that people have yet to mourn with the other inventions of humanism and modernity, inventions that are obsessed with totality, with explaining, humanising, and "demysitfying" everything including death (but not including senseless mass murder). J.F. Lyotard likens the Holocaust to an earthquake that shatters all instruments that try to measure it (psychoanalysis and humanism included). Of all the books I have read on the Holocaust, I have to say that this is one of the best. It stands amongst books like See: Under Love. The Painted Bird, Survival in Auscwitz, The Messiah of Stockholm and Maus I and II. I have taught these books in the universtiy and if I were to teach a class on the Holocasut again, I would include this title as well. D.M. thomas asks us, as the above authors do, to take seriously the fact that any writing that approaches the holocaust must articulate the tension between history and art and the limits of representation. In the PostModern world, Pastiche is one way of marking these limits. To miss this, as these reveiwers have, shows a lack of understanding the challenges that art and fiction face after the Holocaust.

I hated this book almost as much as I disliked The White Hotel. The holocaust is used as a thematic device for Thomas to twist; there is no empathy here for concentration camp victims. Indeed, his main character -- in the guise of a jewish camp doctor (psychiatrist) in the first part of the book -- hates his jewish peers. By the tilt of Thomas's pen, this doctor comes to "treat" the bad dreams and visceral discomforts of the camp commander; he cures him so that the camp commander can continue the killing mission of the camp without discomfort.

There is an abrupt transition after about a third of the book; no longer in Nazi Germany, the scene changes to England after the war. The cast of characters however, does not really change. Instead, Thomas cleverly disguises their identities. Now, the concentration camp commandant is a prominent, ailing psychoanalyst. The trick of the book is to figure out/pair the war-time identities with the postwar characters that flitter in and out of scenes with the ailing shrink. But the characters are despicable; so really, who cares.