PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION by D.M. Thomas - FIRST EDITION UK BOOK

Pictures at an Exhibition opens in Auschwitz. An S.S. officer, Dr. Lorenz, suffers from severe headaches and calls upon a young Jewish Czech inmate, Galewski, whom he knows to have some understanding of Freudian theory to cure him. Starving and dressed in prison rags, Galewski soon grows accustomed to these civilized" interludes, during which he is treated to cakes, Mozart, and the Nazi's grotesque dreams. Lorenz, his pain now in periodic abatement, is sufficiently appeased to continue the sessions. More add more dependent on each other, they are soon locked in a danse macabre. The scene then shifts to London, fifty years, later. A charismatic, aging psychoanalyst and his wife hold court over a sophisticated group of very close friends. They change partners - and identities - living out a baroque Freudian masquerade against a backdrop by Edvard Munch, to music by Gustav Mahler. As they descend, together, into a recurrent nightmare, the legacy of the Holocaust, is revealed as an explosive force in all their lives. Masterfully suspenseful and powerfully haunting, Pictures at an Exhibition is a return for D. M. Thomas to the dark, provocative themes of The White Hotel.