Word: reader
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...double life for 41 years but just got to the point where he needed a change. But some details don't fit; for instance, that "Dick" seems to have able to repress his feminine side enough to have a relationship with a woman during middle age. The reader suspects that Raskind, dissatisfied with his previous relationship thought Richards might have better luck
...pulse all its own, Ararat, like the Armenian landscape from which it is drawn, is a much drier work. The tremendous stream of poetry in The White Hotel, the sexually surreal "Don Giovanni" portion as well as the deafening violence of the Babi Yar testimony, collaborated to overwhelm the reader. This sensory overload created a flow or wave of feeling, which after it had receded, left the reader feeling a part of the world which he had just experienced--the world of Freud and the Holocaust...
...subject of Ararat is art, for that peculiar pulse is nothing if not creativity, and creativity is nothing if not the urge to live. Thomas manipulates his art in this novel so as not to knock the reader over with emotion as in The White Hotel, but rather to show him the structure behind that impervious force. Thomas achieves this unveiling partly through his language, which, though elegant and fragile, is not as colorful or as powerful as that in The White Hotel. Equally important are the characterizations. In The White Hotel, Lisa Erdman and Freud were a haunting, even...
...White Hotel was seen as a breakthrough novel partly because of its portrait of one of the most honest and complicated female characters in recent fiction. In Ararat, by contrast, the reader has to contend with many different voices, a new one at each level of storytelling. Furthermore, these voices are generally those of unpleasant men or stereotypical, one-dimensional women Cleopatra, it turns out, is the most complicated female character in the entire work...
Bigger does not always mean better, and parts of the new version are unnecessarily long-winded and could be chopped. In particular, descriptions of some of the fighting, though gripping, are hard to follow: the reader is sucked into a vortex of almost incomprehensible battlefield jargon...