Swallow picks up where Ararat left off. Once again [Thomas] confronts his readers with the indefatigable Russian poet Rozanov, a womanizer with an extraordinary talent for literary improvisation. And once again Thomas's ability to weave a number of disparate stories into an uncannily unified whole has yielded a highly entertaining piece of fiction.

In Swallow Rozanov has not quite extracted himself from the dilemma into which he blundered in Ararat, a commitment to spending a night with Olga, a blind, unattractive scholar. Instead of sleeping with her, he held her spellbound with stories filled with enthralling characters who told even more stories. That technique, repeated in Swallow, has produced a literary hall of mirrors in which fact and fantasy become indistinguishable.

One of the most pervasive themes of the various tales is the mystery of literary creation. Rozanov tells Olga the story of an imaginary international Olympiad in...