Book Review | A Book, Untitled

A Book, Untitled
By Shushan Avagyan
Translated by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz
AWST Press, 2023
208 pp.
Paperback, $24

When one opens A Book, Untitled—Deanna Cachoian-Schanz’s English-language translation of «Գիրք-անվերնագիր» (Keerk-ahnvehrnahkeer), Shushan Avagyan’s 2006 experimental novel written in Eastern Armenian—one enters a wonderfully disorienting world populated by various fictional, literary, historical and contemporary figures who speak through postcards, poems, letters, conversations, drafts, redactions and dreams. Akin to what one character calls the “familiar, strange” experience of a diasporan hearing and seeing Yerevan and its residents, A Book, Untitled challenges us to revisit and reinvigorate the suppressed, forgotten or sanitized past. In Avagyan’s novel, lovingly rendered into English by Cachoian-Schanz, there are many benefits to uncomfortably encountering the past anew: figures from history are revived, multiple genres are reinterpreted, and language itself is re-formed.