Ararat is a shorter book than [The White Hotel], but it picks its way through similar no man's lands between fact and fiction, life and literature, erotic fantasy and historic massacre. The poetic or cinematic structure challenges the reader to absorption, as into a hall of mirrors, without any tiresome demand to follow the sequence of thought and event: it is fides quaerens intellectum. The listener to Rozanov's story is blind, and the listener-by-extension to the story-within-the-story sometimes feels like a blindfold hostage, permitted glimpses of half-recognised street furniture that leave him well short of secure orientation. Unless, perhaps, he is as familiar as Thomas is with the life and work of Pushkin, whose 'Egyptian Nights' is translated and reinterpreted as the structural core of the book. The lambent presence of Pushkin, the author's guru or second skin, saves Ararat from being written off as a relatively lightweight...