Word: ararat
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...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...
This is the connection, the pulse that Thomas sees in Ararat. Art is the medium through which the order and connections in the universe may be revealed. As Surkov says to Finn...
Thomas has done more even than that. He has man aged to translate the chaotic and powerful world of the subconscious to the more accessible arena of art. With Ararat, he brings creativity, death, the horror of history and the flow of psychology together under the microscope. And for one brief moment he brings the pulse, the tie that binds, into focus...