Ararat

For some strange reason, when I bought this book and the whole time I was reading it, I thought is was written by D.H. Lawrence (despite the prominent placement of the actual author--DM Thomas--on the book cover and my ability to read...). I think that somehow the conflation of Dylan Thomas and D.H. Lawrence and DM Thomas was just too much for me. Anyway, thinking that D.H. Lawrence was the author really threw me because I was pretty convinced that Ararat is a post-modern novel (it is!), and the timing just doesn't work out with Lawrence as the author. Anyway, enough embarrassing admissions.

I'm fascinated with Armenia, which is why I picked this book up. Plus, the book, as the back cover tells us, deals with the theme of improvisation. And deal with that theme it does! Holy goodness--there are stories within stories within stories (at least three layers, possibly more). But combined with these intricate layerings (Inception, anyone?) is post-modern re-writings of the story in the middle of the novel--which is to say, at times, one of the narrators will say, "Oh no, I don't like that ending, I'll re-write it this way..." The book was incredibly difficult to follow--almost certainly this was intentional: many of the characters were similar to characters at other levels of the story, only slantedly similar. In addition, Thomas seemed to not want to identify too clearly the characters, leaving the reader to guess at their identity.

In addition to exploring the nature of inspiration (which is often sex with a woman, or many of them--most of the characters have a wife and a mistress), Thomas also explores the dark side of this treatment of women. The women are muses--they draw the stories out of the male poets and writers and improvisers. The women are very different from each other, but are all important in the story according to how they attract the men (fat, thin, blind; occasionally smart or artistic themselves, although these things seem to be an impediment to their attractiveness rather than an increase in it).

At many of its different levels, the novel, as the title indicates, deals with Ararat, the mountain that is so important to the Armenian people. One wonderful epigraph says, "And you, my mountain, / Will you never walk toward me?"


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