Word: pyatnitski
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...which science and technology are subordinated to narrative techniques not usually found in popular fiction. The style is better appreciated when the novel is considered as a continuation of Moorcock's Byzantium Endures (1982), a work of similar grand design that introduced the author's crank hero, Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski. His opening line of the sequel: "I am one of the great inventors of my age. Rejected by its birthplace, my genius would otherwise be universally acknowledged...
Both books are cast as Pyatnitski's memoirs of a life uprooted by the Russian Revolution. He brags of his exploits as a Don Cossack; he claims pure Russian ; blood and a batch of patents for airplanes and automobiles. But one can never be sure that anything Pyatnitski says is true. He is certainly an egomaniac and very likely mad; he is also a reactionary Tom Swift, an anti-Semite, a sybarite and a paranoiac with a gargantuan appetite for cocaine...
...laundress and a "radical" father who stayed around just long enough to have his son circumcised. The mark of Abraham is Pyat's secret shame and key to a mordant joke underlying The Laughter of Carthage. There is enough internal evidence (allusions and outbursts of Yiddish) to conclude that Pyatnitski's gene pool is thoroughly integrated. Rabid anti-Semitism is his way of denying the past and advancing his career as scientist and gentleman. There is also ample indication of a thin line between deceit and self-delusion...
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