SPHINX

by D.M. Thomas ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1986

The book is called Sphinx; ask what it really is, though, and you'll get essentially the same answer (Pastiche!) that Thomas has been providing in the previous two installments, Ararat and Swallow, of tins on-going ""improvisational"" novel. Narrated loosely by a Welsh journalist in Russia on assignment--a sad-sack, Laborite failure who is the book's only true-feeling character--reprised here are the stories of Soviet poets and KGB informant/whores (""swallows"") along with gobbets of Thomas' special semi-academic effluvia thrown in: Pushkin-ian poetry; a play script about the great Revolution-era director Meyerhold and Isadora Duncan; an elaborate hall-of-mirrors in which the poor Welshman, Lloyd George, is continuously fed information about his acquaintances (especially about one seeming-dissident, Nadia, with whom George is smitten and who is the Sphinx of the title). But the it-all-goes-into-the-blender-ness of it is almost shameless. Thomas seems to have given up on doing any but the most obvious inventing and, instead, stretches a very thin premise out over the already well-worn frame of his professional activities in the field of Russian literature. A goppy mixture of pedantry and schlock--thoroughly unappealing.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1986

Categories: FICTION