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| D.M. Thomas | |
British author, poet and scholar of Russian literature D.M. Thomas, "whose greatest success came with his controversial 1981 novel The White Hotel," died March 26, the Guardian reported. He was 88. Inspired by his readings of Sigmund Freud and by Anatoly Kuznetsov's Holocaust novel Babi Yar, The White Hotel "combined these two influences in a driving, non-naturalistic plot centered on Lisa Erdman, a fictional patient of Freud's, who progresses through sexual obsession to being shot down by Nazis in a ravine outside Kyiv."
Although the novel garnered praise "as a powerful new departure in fiction, and an insight into the dark heart of the 20th century," the Guardian noted that it was also attacked as pornographic and misogynistic. "In addition, Thomas was accused (a charge also leveled at his later novel Ararat) of plagiarizing his factual material from Kuznetsov: he defended himself by counter-charging the authors whose works he had plundered of wanting to 'copyright genocide.' "
A runaway international bestseller, The White Hotel would lose the 1981 Booker Prize to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Thomas's other books include The Flute Player (1979), which won a Gollancz fantasy award; Ararat (1983); Eating Pavlova (1994); Flying in to Love (1992); and Memories and Hallucinations (1989). His biography Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life (1998) won the Orwell prize.
A respected poet, Thomas published eight collections before turning to fiction. "Much influenced by the Cornish landscape, his poetry had a mystic, Celtic tinge," the Guardian noted. He continued to publish poetry--including a verse memoir, A Child of Love and War (2021)--and prose, and ran a group of Cornish writers called the Stray Dogs, after a famous early 20th-century Russian literary cafe in St. Petersburg.
"Always readable and often compelling, none of the later novels quite achieved the white-hot shock of The White Hotel," the Guardian wrote. "Bolstered financially by selling the film rights--though frustratingly for Thomas the movie was never made--he returned to his native Cornwall, settling in a large house in Truro. Long after it was written, a screenplay by Dennis Potter was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2018."
Thomas "had huge vitality, a charismatic presence and considerable charm and humour. Into the often stifling and prissy world of English literature, he introduced a welcome raw honesty, an imaginative widening of limiting horizons, and a distinct whiff of sulphur," the Guardian noted.