D. M. Thomas: ARARAT. Nidottu kirja 1984 Abacus, London

D. M. Thomas: ARARAT. 1984 Abacus, London. 192-sivuinen nidottu kirja, ehjä ja siisti, ei merkintöjä. Teos on ilmestynyt suomeksi nimellä Ararat (1983).
 
In Ararat (1983), the author of The White Hotel (1981), D. M. Thomas, takes on himself the task of ‘finishing’ a poem by Pushkin, writing a graphic description of a forgotten holocaust – or at least a rarely mentioned one when an estimated one million people were slaughtered during the Armenian Genocide of 1915 – and sets up one of his narrators as a leading writers of the Soviet Union in the 1970s.  Its theme is the creative process of writing, particularly improvisation, and I suppose as a writer that is what attracts me to it. Not so much the improvisation element but the reflections of real-life scenarios, incidents and characters and how they become distorted and transformed to create fiction and poetry. Leaping from 19th century Russia to the Cold War world of today, and from the comic to the nightmarish to the sublime, Ararat is brilliant fantasia on the theme of poetic improvisation – and of the soul’ s tormented quest for pastoral, symbolized by the twin peaks of Ararat, the magic mountain of Armenia…
 
Donald Michael Thomas, known as D. M. Thomas (born 1935 Redruth, Cornwall, UK), is a Cornish novelist, poet, and translator. After graduating in English from New College, Oxford, in 1959, he lived and worked in Australia and the United States before returning to his native Cornwall. He published poetry and some prose in the British Science fiction magazine New Worlds (from 1968). The work that made him famous is his erotic and somewhat fantastical novel The White Hotel (1981; Valkoinen hotelli 1982).