Freud's Alphabet - Softcover

A short but useful reaction from Dr Anthony Clare to FREUD'S ALPHABET by Jonathan Tel, out now - 'Extraordinary'. 'Clearly well-researched, the background of pre-war London adds colour and humour to the portrait of the father of psychoanalysis...Tel has a strong sense of the absurd, and...the mysteries of British behaviour provide a foil for Freud's dry Teutonic rationalism' TLS 'Often enlightening and always entertaining...borne along by Tel's beguiling turn of phrase and gently jocular passions for both Freud and London town' OBSERVIER (REVIEW) 'Elegant and original...idiosyncratic and charming' INDEPENDENT

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.