The Tooth Merchant

Outstanding political satires are rare in literature, especially if they are eminently readable, but this artfully camouflaged lampoon on war may prove to be the Candide of our era. Indeed, both Arthur Koestler and James Jones have compared it with Voltaire's famous work. Yet THE TOOTH MERCHANT has qualities of its own, combining the picaresque and the improbably to produce a work praised by Lawrence Durrell and termed 'a marvelous experience' by Irwin Shaw.

The hero of Sulzberger's novel is an Armenian petty crook of limitless talent and few discernible morals who is blackmailed into Turkish espionage work but escapes to adventure on his own account. In the course of his travels he discovers a secret as astonishing as the creation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and attempts to sell it to world leaders as far apart in doctrine and geography as Stalin and Eisenhower or Ben Gurion and Nasser. This career as a traveling merchant of death is embellished by the company of a series of lubricious women -- Armenian, Druse, Georgian, Turkish, Coptic and, above all, a golden-haired Soviet Greek girl married to an Abkhazian fish farmer.

Initially the reader may be under the impression that he is engrossed only in a beautifully written thriller. However, it will dawn upon him slowly that there is deep significance to the irony that accompanies Kevork Sasounian, the eminently corruptible linguist-poet, as he strides with gusto across these pages from a whorehouse in Istanbul to the White House in Washington, leaving behind a litter of broken hearts and broken heads. Only at the very end does it become apparent how profound is the philosophy that lies beneath the gaudy Levantine carousals which cloak but do not obscure THE TOOTH MERCHANT's purpose.