Ararat/Pilgermann:
Bell-Villada, Gene H
A narrative still-life ARARAT D.M.Thomas Viking Press, $13.50,191 pp. PILGERMANN Russell Hoban Summit books, $13.95, 240 pp. Gene H. Bell-Villada THAT historical fantasy has become a favored...
...Thomas is a translator of Russian literature, and he puts this knowledge to good use in Ararat...
...And yet Pilgermann is less than earthbound...
...A few further parallels, and that's about all...
...Pilgermann falls to the sword of one Bohemond - who in fact seized Antioch in 1098...
...Their loosely-linked narratives follow, the most substantial being by "Victor Surkov," a poet and womanizer on shipboard to New York in 1980...
...Ararat...
...It is performance art, a verbal juggling act for the high-tech age...
...In Ararat D.M...
...Fully interpolated via Thomas's own translation, this unfinished novella tells of a poet who happens upon an Italian improvisatore, who in turn extemporizes a rhymed tale - its theme: Cleopatra and three nameless lovers, each doomed to die after his night of pleasure...
...There Pilgermann designs geometric tiles to pave the open-air plaza, soon the site of Platonic dialogues, then bloody deeds - for the Crusaders are coming...
...Part 3, the sketchiest, shifts to Soviet Armenia, where an Armenian-American lady on a Roots -type pilgrimage experiences a sordid one-night stand with a local academic and next morning glimpses Ararat from her window...
...Placed several centuries, hence in Cornwall, where dim memories linger of civilizations leveled by nuclear war, the book imagined a neo-primitive hunting society complete with its rituals and traditions plus their native tongue, an eroded colloquial Cockney specially fashioned by the author...
...Thomas seems content as a clever textual trickster...
...The old set phrase "Russian dolls" is apt here, given the book's Soviet characters, frames-within-frames, and fanciful spoofery...
...These literary/ erotic escapades are darkened by Sur-kov's encounters with an aging, mysterious Nord who grimly reminisces about his active role in every modern massacre from Armenia to Vietnam ("I've never retired...
...Thomas's The White Hotel...
...Hoban's religious intel-lectualism becomes most evident in the four-page appendix wherein he identifies his scriptural quotes and other sources...
...Gene H. Bell-Villada THAT historical fantasy has become a favored literary genre was confirmed by the recent best-sellerdom of D.M...
...His dalliances en route with divers passengers recede as he metamorphoses into Pushkin composing Egyptian Nights...
...Part 2 catches Surkov in New York - a slippery interview, more females, a poem on Armenia, drinks with an Armenian-American sculptress and her Armenian lover...
...until Riddley Walker earned him critical acclaim...
...Combining verse, dreams, letters, case studies and straight narrative, it told of Lisa Erdmann, a sexually troubled East European Jewess who, following painful but successful analysis under Dr...
...Hoban wants more from his words and overreaches with them...
...Adventures both of mind and body build up...
...The narrator is a pilgrim (German Pilger) and also a Jew who has survived anti-Semitic slaughters in a German town...
...The narrator himself, no longer flesh-and-blood, is but a "conscience," a bundle of "waves and particles" that occasionally turns up as an owl and views things from the vantage of eternity...
...Through mimicry of Freud's style and its climactic scene built on Kuznetsov's documentary novel Babi Yar, the book skillfully juxtaposed the two large modern subjects of psychoanalysis and the Holocaust...
...Like Borges or Pynchon he strikes me as more metaphysical than novelistic, and I gather he is searching for a medium to convey his manifold skills and thoughts...
...I can't vouch for his fictive Russians, but his portraits of American women - earnest, wholesome, slighty naive - ring with a James-ian trueness...
...Russell Hoban, an American illustrator and writer living in London, was known for his fanciful children's books (fifty so far...
...For metaphysical reasons he flees toward Jerusalem, and in the forests he encounters and chats with a series of fantastical figures, including a makeshift monk, a hanged tax collector, a wandering murderess, a talking bear...
...So he fills up the sleepless night with an ad lib yarn about three writers who agree to a drunken poet's request that they each improvise something (their theme: Mt...
...The hero first asks why God "keeps writing slaughter scenes...
...Musically" adroit in its repetitions of Armeniana, the book is also chillingly eroticized...
...Pilgermann differs in every way - formally picaresque, its poetical prose hushed and spacious, its time the First Crusade...
...The sultry Surkov/Pushkin/improvisatore fragment, alas, is "interrupted" halfway by further womanizing, but Thomas/ Surkov soon completes the Cleopatra story and also caps the novella twofold, first with Pushkin's own early death in a duel (which was sexually motivated), then by killing off his improvisatore in the Decembrist revolt...
...But as I decoded Pilgermann's high allegory, I started hankering for Flaubert's Salammbo, a flawed historical fantasy that errs on the side of pointillist detail, heaping on the ancient bric-a-brac and fashions and foods...
...How long these virtuoso routines can move us is of course an open question...
...Purely as composition, as narrative still-life, Ararat approaches White Hotel in complexity, but readers shouldn't expect the same wide range...
...Still, the utter legerdemain of Ararat, coupled with Thomas's sprightly prose, will dazzle anyone familiar with Borges or Nabokov...
...Indeed many of the people, places, battles, and dates here are factually true to the First Crusade (which began with a massacre of 10,000 Jews) and are made to shape the broad course of events...
...Whatever denies, diminishes, or distorts the full humanity of women is, therefore, appraised as not redemptive...
...The rest is anti-climactic...
...Some of the deftest moments in this book are from Hoban the illustrator - a Bosch triptych described, the author's own sample of those geometric tiles...
...One becomes indispensable...
...Otherwise he seems less drawn to fiction than to philosophy and eschatology, of which there is plenty here, notably on the problematics of evil...
...by the end we've seen so many murders of Jews, Christians, Muslims, children and beasts (all via the author's oblique prose) that the question surpasses understanding...
...At sea he links up with a friendly Turk and they head for Antioch...
...Even his Jewishhess recedes after he is discomforted by the parochialism of Antioch Jewry...
...Theologically speaking, what ever diminishes or denies the full humanity of women must be presumed not to reflect the divine or an authentic nature of things, or to he the message or work of an authentic redeemer or a community of redemption...
...from Rozanov's on through Surkov's, Cleopatra's and other bedroom scenes, sex figures solely as a means of predatory power - one of Ararat's shifting voices can be as suspenseful as a McBain car chase, though there are few stylistic traits to set off each narrator...
...I hope he hits upon the formula...
...Freud, emThe critical principle of feminist theology is the promotion of the full humanity of women...
...The setting and style, however, were better than the actual narrative, which tended toward set pieces in discontinuous mosaic...
...Rosemary Radford Ruether Sexism and God-Talk barks on an operatic career, only to find her delicate balance destroyed by the Nazis at Kiev, where she and her son are murdered...
...the crusaders invade...
...The outer frames concern Sergei Rozanov, a poet and womanizer who, disconsolate in his so-so tryst with a blind and servile graduate student, finds welcome relief in her request that he improvise something (her theme: Improvisation...
...The atmosphere is thus one of timelessness rather than eleventh century, particularly when the hero drops casual allusions to Vermeer, Kant, Schubert, and electronics...
Vol. 110 • October 1983 • No. 17
