Ararat

An intricate literary construct - stories within stories within stories - from the author of The White Hotel, who uses this rather precious format to touch on the weightiest themes (Eros vs. Death, Art vs. Reality, etc.) and to tinker about with references to Russian literary history (from Pushkin to Meyerhold, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn). Russian writer Sergei Rozanov, 50, has a one-night assignation with a blind woman in Gorky; in bed she begs him to demonstrate his renowned talent for improvising tales - by making up a story on the subject of improvising; he obliges - with a story about three writers (a Russian, an Armenian, an American) engaged in an improvisation contest (with Mount Ararat, it seems, as their common theme) And then there follow, apparently, the improvisations themselves, two of which concern a Russian poet named Victor Surkov, also age 50. In the first, longest piece, Surkov, en route by ship to lecture in America, has an affair with young gymnast Anna (who reminds him of poet Anna Akhmatova), hears tales of 20th-century atrocities from a veteran of Holocausts (Armenia to Auschwitz), weds a dungaree'd Turkish feminist (for visa reasons). . . and himself improvises two different endings to Pushkin's unfinished narrative fragment Egyptian Nights (which itself is about an Italian improviser who is befriended by a Russian gentleman!). And, after both improvised endings to the Pushkin involve sexual triangles and end with violent death, the sequence concludes with Surkov bedding the Turkish woman - violently: "l climbed on top of her and penetrated. . . . A stab for every victim of Stalin, I thought. . . . Stretching my mouth as wide as it could go, I plastered it against her sopping cunt, my teeth biting her." Then, the second improvisation: Surkov in N.Y., staying with an Armenian-American admirer, caught in yet another quasi-sexual triangle, tangled in politics and the history of the Armenian massacres. And the final, brief improvisation focuses more directly on Ararat - with its mingling associations, from Noah's two-by-two to atrocities to the mountain's immortality. Lots of opportunity for those who enjoy puzzling out narrative layers, networks of theme, and webs of reference - but far too self-conscious and academic (without the grab of The White Hotel) to reach or hold most readers. (Kirkus Reviews)