Word: ararat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...contrast to the warm afterglow of The White Hotel, some critics have said Ararat leaves them cold That's fair enough, there is no Whitmanesque rush of consciousness flowing through these pages. If The White Hotel was a wave of feeling. Ararat is that wave caught on a canvas and framed. Other critics have com- pared it to a web of interconnected symbols and mentioned for scientific study setting forth connections and order...
Returning to the three writers in the Armenian hotel room, the second writer also tells the tale of Surkov, this travelling to American woman, does not improvise a story at all but rather explains what it was that brought them all together in the first place--Ararat. The mountain Ararat, sacred to Armenians, is the symbol that connects the three writers, as indeed, it connects all the levels of the novel...
...subject of Ararat is art, for that peculiar pulse is nothing if not creativity, and creativity is nothing if not the urge to live. Thomas manipulates his art in this novel so as not to knock the reader over with emotion as in The White Hotel, but rather to show him the structure behind that impervious force. Thomas achieves this unveiling partly through his language, which, though elegant and fragile, is not as colorful or as powerful as that in The White Hotel. Equally important are the characterizations. In The White Hotel, Lisa Erdman and Freud were a haunting, even...
...White Hotel was seen as a breakthrough novel partly because of its portrait of one of the most honest and complicated female characters in recent fiction. In Ararat, by contrast, the reader has to contend with many different voices, a new one at each level of storytelling. Furthermore, these voices are generally those of unpleasant men or stereotypical, one-dimensional women Cleopatra, it turns out, is the most complicated female character in the entire work...
...this is intentional. For if Ararat is the grand story of art and consciousness and history, it is also the not-so-grand story of the artist. Thomas presents the irritating structure and forms of writing itself--bursts of creativity, exhaustion, editors, censorship; each of his storytellers reveals one side of the complete artist, and their greed and selfishness are an essential part of any artist or indeed any person. These poets grab at life, they are greedy to create, to live. They, like all people, deny death by creating--through sex, through writing, through life itself...