It’s taken me a few years to finally read the three books below, which struck me as related and worth sharing. Each is a powerful statement. Each represents a time and situation in human history. Even though they are based on events or situations that occurred (or were created) a century, half a century, and a decade ago, it seems to me they can all be tied to processes that began in the 18th and 19thcenturies.
Diana Apcar’s From the Book of One Thousand Tales deliciously conveys the flavor of her times. The 16 stories included in the book retain the style and language of her time, which is what makes it so interesting. We all grew up hearing about “Diana Apcar, the Republic of Armenia’s ambassador to Japan.” Of course, that was the first RoA, not the current third republic. But that was about it. It was a point of pride that we’d managed to have an ambassador in far-away Japan, and a woman at that, back in 1918. It turns out she did a lot more than act as a diplomat. She helped escaping Armenians find a new, post-genocide, life there. In the process, she became imbued with the sense of what was going on in the homeland (her family hailed from Iran’s Shah-Abbas-created-community of the diaspora). Through allegory and fictionalization, she conveys the tragedy that befell the nation back then and the character of the people, Armenians and Turks, who went through that hellish turbulence. We owe significant gratitude to her family, who dusted off Diana’s archival materials and discovered these stories.
Silent Spring is credited with starting the modern environmental movement in the U.S. Rachel Carson died shortly after she published this book, which describes the tragedy of lifelessness caused by the use of highly toxic herbicides and pesticides. Reading it after it was republished on its 40th anniversary, I was astonished by how much was known even before I was born, that I thought was “newer” knowledge, say 1980’s vintage. It was stunning and infuriating that we’ve known how destructive certain chemicals can be and their insidious, persistent effects on all life, not just the weeds and bugs they’re “intended” for. Who knows? The cancer that killed Carson may have been triggered by exposure to the very toxins she wrote about.
Perhaps the most unnerving of this triad of books is the novel, The Bastard of Istanbul. This book put its author, Elif Shafak, on the literary map in Turkey. It also put her in the government’s crosshairs. She was charged with violating the infamous Article 301 of Turkey’s Penal Code, for “denigrating Turkishness.” The whole book speaks to the point she made when I heard her speaking at UCLA—that Armenians are largely one with their history, while the Turks are cut off from their history, except that which has happened since 1923 and the founding of Ataturk’s republic. The book traces the stories of three families, one Armenian, one Turkish, and one odar/Armenian/Turkish. The three storylines (re)converge in Constantinople after two had diverged from there as a result of the genocide. In the process, Shafak presents an Armenian family, with all its foibles, eerily well. I was surprised (though I probably should not have been) to see how similar the Turkish family’s interactions were to ours. In reading this book, you’ll alternately chuckle, cry, sneer, gasp, and just be generally very impressed. It’s no wonder the original Turkish version was bestseller of the year in Turkey. And all this, the potential for bridging and progress among Armenians and Turks, is the outcome of another tragedy: the tragedy of a child (the author) growing up fearing that her diplomat parents’ lives would be taken by an Armenian, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, working to break the wall of silence surrounding the Armenian Question.
But where’s the connection among these three lives/tragedies/books? It strikes me that it all started with the industrial revolution of the 17th-18th centuries that swept Europe and North America. Naturally armaments were included, leading to economic and military superiority of the West over an already-weakening Ottoman Empire. This led to frantic efforts by sultan after sultan to modernize and catch up, all the while being unable to stanch the collapse. Ultimately, this desperation led to the racist Pan-Turanist ideology that bred the genocide. Meanwhile, industrialization spread to the world of agriculture and its “chemicalization,” leading to Carson’s inspiring treatise, hence the connection between the first two books. Obviously, the connection to the third book is through the genocide that created the life conditions that led to the author’s inspiration, plus, the coincidental place of the diplomatic life in Apcar’s and Shafak’s lives.
You won’t regret buying and reading any one, or all three, of these books.
Garen Yegparian
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I read all three of your recommendations when they first came out, Garen. Silent Spring was actually very well received at the time. I remember that many of us wanted to “go back to the land.“ It was considered really cool to buy a pick-up truck. This was in the 1960s. Betty Friedan`s Feminine Mystique came out about the same time. I did buy a yellow pick-up truck and I did buy a farm! I think I still have both those books somewhere in the house.
Here’s my recommendation for three can’t-put-it-down books: Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres, who also wrote, among many other books, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Birds takes place during the era of the crumbling Ottoman empire. It is a 625 page saga based on the lives of the Armenian, Kurdish, Turkish inhabitants of a small village in south west Turkey. Bernieres writes, “When the Christians left, the local economy collapsed. They lost everybody who knew how to make anything, and everybody who knew how to do anything. One reviewer called it a book “about the failure of nationalism and religious fanaticism.” The rise of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) is followed. It is an astonishingly accurate description of daily village life of Armenians. Bernieres has an unmatched gift for putting words together in order to create a visual that will linger in you long after you finish the book. It’s easy to find in any library.
Zaytag Paladian, who frequently comments on these pages, recommended Mamigon by Jack Hashian. It’s hard to track down because it’s out of print, but thank goodness I finally did. Here is what he writes in the opening of the foreword – read this and see if you don’t have to drop everything and find this book too.
“This is the story of Mamigon… soldier, sailor, blacksmith, truck driver. It is also a story about Armenians – not the gentle and sensitive Armenians of William Saroyan and Elia Kazan, – but the Armenians descended from those who first cast iron and rode their horses roughshod and bloodily through the Bronze Age; of Armenians descended from those who beat back the Persian hordes of Darius and Cyrus, the Greek phalanxes, the Roman Crescent, only to embrace Christianity and finally fall to the sword of Islam 900 years ago as they repeatedly and meekly turned the other cheek. This is the story of Mamigon, a modern-day Armenian at the start of World War 1 who did not know how to turn the other cheek. It is a story of vengeance and death as he tracks the killer of his family across the suddenly hostile homeland of his fathers to the bewildering shores of the New World.
Ànd this is just the forward! No, you can’t borrow my copy! Now that I have finished Sandcastle Girls, I think I will re-read both of these books this summer.
Just one more recommendation– do you know that the new revised edition of Forty Days of Musa Dagh is out – 893 pages to get lost in once again. There is new material in this book, and it is a new translation. When I read the original version, I was on a flight to Yerevan. I hardly noticed the time passing; I was simply lost in this book. I`m saving this new translation to read on the flight to Yerevan again. I am going this fall. I remember how wonderful it was to finish the book and find myself in Zvartnots airport, surrounded by Armenians.
Here`s just one more, Garen. Get the three volumes of The Heritage of Armenian Literature. They are out of print but still available on Amazon. Volume 2 and 3 are both over 1,000 pages each, so you will never run out of fascinating reading material. Published by Wayne State U.