Ararat

“Sergei Rozanov had made an unnecessary journey from Moscow to Gorky, simply in order to sleep with a young blind woman."" So begins D. M. Thomas's new novel (his first since the publication of The White Hotel), a complex, brilliant fantasia that, in the telling, is a like a series of Russian dolls that open one by one to reveal yet another doll inside. Rozanov is an acclaimed poet with political connections, and he knows, on this night in the fall of 1981, that the infant Polish Solidarity movement is soon to be crushed—ironically, on the anniversary of the failure of the Decembrist uprising in 182 5 in St. Petersburg. Troubled by the compromises he must make and the disguises he must assume in order to survive, Rozanov cannot sleep; but he has the disguiser's gift of improvisation, and so to entertain his companion as they lie awake, he spins a tale. In it, Victor Surkov, a poet not unlike himself, takes a sea journey during which he improvises an ending for Pushkin's uncompleted fragment Egyptian Nights—the story of a nineteenth-century poet and man of fashion who befriends a penniless Italian improvisationist. But this journey begets yet another improvisation, for it is really just a fantastic dream that troubles the sleep of the real Victor Surkov. Or is it? There are further improvisations—literary, sexual, moral, political—in the pages of this brief, brilliant, and brutally funny book. But at their center is the image of the serene twinpeaked mountain, Ararat, lying on the border between West and East—the final resting-place of the Ark after the devastation of the Flood, the holy mountain of the disposessed Armenians, fought over, longed for, dreamed of. Of Ararat the Armenians say, ""When you see it, you will know it""—but isn't it better to travel than to arrive?... The play of each story against each in this richly textured narrative, and the resolution of all, results in the kind of completely original work we expect from a writer who not only never repeats himself, but constantly discovers new forms for a protean talent.