Freud's Alphabet

By Jason Bishop and Rose Bishop

At once a delightfully inventive chronicle of Freud's last days and an insightful reflection on Freudian existence. A brilliantly inventive and intelligent first novel about Freud's last years in London, psychoanalysing the nation as it slips into the collective madness of World War Two. Freud-- dying of cancer--has come to London to escape persecution in Austria, bringing with him his famous couch, his collection of tribal totems and his insights into the English. Cared for by his biographer and doctor, Jones, Freud explores the city of Woolf and Eliot, of bankers, fishwives and travelling tradesmen, considering everything in the light of his own desire to find an underlying, rational explanation for irrational behaviour. The city, in turn, asserts its own surrealism, defying explanation, happy to prove one thing and also its opposite. In the background, the nation prepares for its greatest act of rational madness--war. Jonathan Tel's first novel is a small masterpiece: a brilliant and playful insight into Freud and the English; and a beautiful evocation of the period, with its buses and fogs and housewives and men in suits. It is a surrealist Wasteland, a post-modern Mrs. Dalloway .

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582432198
• ISBN13: 9781582432199
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

P is for Pretty Good

Sigmund Freud never wanted to leave his homeland of Austria. Finally, surrounded by Nazis, he was left with no choice and allowed himself to taken to London to die. This book in a way chronicles his last days in a foreign land he couldn't stand (or understand), tormented by cancer and a painful prosthetic palate.But this isn't your Irving Stone historical fiction. The book is a collection of 26 short stories or episodes,...

A Thought Provoking Fable

Be aware that this is not a novel in the strict sense. It is a series of short vignettes, not unlike Hemingway's story frgaments in "in our time". (This is not to compare Tel's & Hemingway's styles in any way.) Though "Freud's Alphabet" does chronicle Freud's last days in London somewhat, it is more a collection of meditations on life in England circa 1939 as seen through a very perceptive foreigner who is slowly dying,...