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Book and wrapper in great condition - Small previous ownership inside. >>> VLADIMIR NABOKOV would probably not have appreciated D.M. Thomas's ''Ararat,'' the fourth and latest novel by the English poet who wrote ''The White Hotel.'' Nabokov would have objected to all the Freud in ''Ararat'' - the proximity of Eros and Thanatos and artistic creativity, and the horn removed from the unicorn and placed in the lap of a female statue. - All the same, ''Ararat'' is a homage to Nabokov, along with many other figures in Russian literature. By enfolding tale within tale within tale -each containing details of the one that frames it - Mr. Thomas has created a construction of mirrors that reflects a light captured only in the human imagination. Of this, Nabokov would have greatly approved. - Actually, a more immediate literary presence in ''Ararat'' is Alexander Pushkin. The novel's most captivating sections involve a retelling and completion of the Russian master's story-fragment, ''Egyptian Nights,'' written and left uncompleted in 1835, two years before Pushkin was killed in a duel. The story concerns the sudden appearance in St. Petersburg of a Neapolitan ''improvisatore,'' whose genius it is to be able to recite instantaneously epic poetry on any subject that his audience requests. - In the Pushkin original, the improviser recites a charming verse about three men who accept the challenge to make love to Cleopatra at the price of their lives. As the game begins, the original story breaks off, but Mr. Thomas's narrator, a contemporary Russian poet named Victor Surkov, continues to create what reads for all the world like a slightly awkward translation of a masterpiece. In the poem within the story, the first two lovers are executed, but the third, who turns out to be Cleopatra's son by an incestuous coupling with her brother Ptolemy, executes the executioner. (New York Times ??)
