Chris Bohjalian's Blog, page 31
May 31, 2012
A note to my pals on Goodreads who are coming to Book Expo America
If you happen to be at Book Expo America the week of June 4, I will be wandering about, too.
And, of course, I will be signing ARCs of "The Sandcastle Girls" -- and pretty much anything else you would like.
(And I do mean anything. I have signed a lot of odd items in my life. . .including some pretty awesome tattoos.)
Here is where and when I am signing:
June 5
New York, NY
Book Expo of America, Javits Center
2:00 p.m.: Signing
Random House Booth: #3940
3:00 p.m.: Signing
Library Journal Librarians' Lounge
If your schedule permits, please join me!
And, of course, I will be signing ARCs of "The Sandcastle Girls" -- and pretty much anything else you would like.
(And I do mean anything. I have signed a lot of odd items in my life. . .including some pretty awesome tattoos.)
Here is where and when I am signing:
June 5
New York, NY
Book Expo of America, Javits Center
2:00 p.m.: Signing
Random House Booth: #3940
3:00 p.m.: Signing
Library Journal Librarians' Lounge
If your schedule permits, please join me!
May 29, 2012
Publishers' Weekly weighs in on "The Sandcastle Girls"
Publishers' Weekly weighed in on "The Sandcastle Girls" this week and I couldn't be more grateful -- given how important this book is to me.
"Powerful. . .Bohjalian’s storytelling makes this a beautiful, frightening, and unforgettable read."
Here is the review in its entirety:
++++++++
The Sandcastle Girls
Chris Bohjalian. Doubleday, $25.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-385-53479-6
Bohjalian’s powerful newest (after The Night Strangers) depicts the Armenian genocide and one contemporary novelist’s quest to uncover her heritage. In 1915, Bostonian Elizabeth Endicott arrives at a compound in Aleppo, Syria, to provide humanitarian aid to Armenian refugees. A fresh-faced nurse just out of college, Elizabeth has learned only rudimentary Armenian, but soon befriends Armen Petrosian, an engineer who lost his wife and daughter during the chaos of the deportations and mass murders. Though Armen departs for Egypt to fight with the British Army in WWI, their relationship blossoms into an epistolary romance. The atrocities of the genocide and the First World War continue, and Bohjalian spares no detail in his gritty descriptions. Nearly a century later, Laura Petrosian is living in the suburbs of New York City when a friend alerts her to a possible photo of her grandmother being used to advertise an exhibit about “the Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About.” As she explores her past, Laura discovers that what she once considered to be her grandparents’ eccentricities—their living room was dubbed the “Ottoman Annex”—speak to a rich and tragic history. Though the action occasionally feels far-off, Bohjalian’s storytelling makes this a beautiful, frightening, and unforgettable read. Agent: Jane Gelfman, Gelfman Schneider. (July)
"Powerful. . .Bohjalian’s storytelling makes this a beautiful, frightening, and unforgettable read."
Here is the review in its entirety:
++++++++
The Sandcastle Girls
Chris Bohjalian. Doubleday, $25.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-385-53479-6
Bohjalian’s powerful newest (after The Night Strangers) depicts the Armenian genocide and one contemporary novelist’s quest to uncover her heritage. In 1915, Bostonian Elizabeth Endicott arrives at a compound in Aleppo, Syria, to provide humanitarian aid to Armenian refugees. A fresh-faced nurse just out of college, Elizabeth has learned only rudimentary Armenian, but soon befriends Armen Petrosian, an engineer who lost his wife and daughter during the chaos of the deportations and mass murders. Though Armen departs for Egypt to fight with the British Army in WWI, their relationship blossoms into an epistolary romance. The atrocities of the genocide and the First World War continue, and Bohjalian spares no detail in his gritty descriptions. Nearly a century later, Laura Petrosian is living in the suburbs of New York City when a friend alerts her to a possible photo of her grandmother being used to advertise an exhibit about “the Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About.” As she explores her past, Laura discovers that what she once considered to be her grandparents’ eccentricities—their living room was dubbed the “Ottoman Annex”—speak to a rich and tragic history. Though the action occasionally feels far-off, Bohjalian’s storytelling makes this a beautiful, frightening, and unforgettable read. Agent: Jane Gelfman, Gelfman Schneider. (July)
May 27, 2012
Night flight to Yerevan: You really can go home again
Last week I shared with you that earlier this month I was traveling in Lebanon. I was also in Armenia. I am half-Armenian, and after the death of my father last summer, I felt an inexorable tug to stand on Armenian soil and gaze at (among other landmarks) Mount Ararat.
Some of you have asked me who I knew in Armenia.
Answer? No one. And, just for the record, I don’t speak Armenian or understand the Armenian alphabet. But I wasn’t worried before I left because surely there was an app for that on my iPhone. After all, there are apps for everything, right?
Nope. The English-Armenian translation apps I downloaded translated English into the Armenian alphabet – which was beautiful to look at but not especially helpful. Even if I knew the alphabet, my pronunciation was going to be so bad that I was likely to be ordering snails in socks the first time I wandered into a restaurant in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital city.
Nevertheless, the experience there was among the easiest in my life and I have never traveled abroad and felt less like a stranger in a strange land – though, let’s face it, this is exactly what I was. Why? First of all, a lot of people speak English in Yerevan. Outside the city? It’s less common. Second, my friend Khatchig Mouradian, editor of the “Armenian Weekly” here in the U.S., had put me in the care of his friend there, Movses Babayan. Movses is a 29-year-old entrepreneur: He owns two stores that sell automotive replacement parts, and one of the shops is so futuristic it looks like a next generation Apple store.
I have a feeling that Khatchig had the wisdom to tell Movses that I am seriously common sense-challenged. The first two days I was in Armenia, Movses didn’t let me out of his sight. To wit: On our second day together we were visiting the heart of the Armenian Church, the beautiful cathedral in Ejmiatsin. Movses ran into a friend and while they were chattering away I wandered into the cathedral bookstore. My phone rang and it was Movses:
Movses: Where are you?
Me: The bookstore. All good.
Movses: Not good. I can’t see you.
I had cut myself shaving that morning and I think Movses considered taking me to the emergency room. He wouldn’t let me pay for a single meal or a single beer or a single cup of coffee.
And yet prior to the moment he picked me up at my hotel, we’d never even communicated via email.
Everyone I met in Armenia was like this. There was Giro Manoyan who took me to one of the best Italian dinners I’ve eaten anywhere (including, yes, Italy), and Movses’s father who sent me back to my hotel one afternoon with a bag of apples from the fruit trees in his backyard. There was the woman from the stationery shop who dropped off at my hotel the pen I had purchased which she had forgotten to put in my shopping bag. And then there were John and Hamo, older guys I met at the airport in Beirut a little before midnight and would become my traveling companions for the next seven hours as we waited for our 1:50 a.m. flight to Yerevan. Actual departure? 4:30 a.m. We had a lot of time to bond. Hamo made sure I tasted everything the in-flight food service offered that didn’t have meat – I’d told him I was a vegetarian – taking pride in even the apple juice.
“I know the orchard where they get their apples,” he said. “Armenian apple juice is the best apple juice.”
Incidentally, remember the horrific bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983? Hamo said he had been there and survived the cataclysm. Based on the wrenching and riveting details he shared, I have no reason to doubt him.
In some cases, people in Armenia took me under their wing because of their connection to Khatchig; in others, they did it because I was an Armenian-American who had made this pilgrimage. Regardless, everyone I met taught me something important: On occasion, you really can go home again.
* * *
This column ran originally in the Burlington Free Press on May 27, 2012.
Chris's next novel, "The Sandcastle Girls," is a love story set in the midst of the Armenian Genocide in the First World War. It arrives July 17. To add it to your Goodreads To-Read cue, click here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
.
Some of you have asked me who I knew in Armenia.
Answer? No one. And, just for the record, I don’t speak Armenian or understand the Armenian alphabet. But I wasn’t worried before I left because surely there was an app for that on my iPhone. After all, there are apps for everything, right?
Nope. The English-Armenian translation apps I downloaded translated English into the Armenian alphabet – which was beautiful to look at but not especially helpful. Even if I knew the alphabet, my pronunciation was going to be so bad that I was likely to be ordering snails in socks the first time I wandered into a restaurant in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital city.
Nevertheless, the experience there was among the easiest in my life and I have never traveled abroad and felt less like a stranger in a strange land – though, let’s face it, this is exactly what I was. Why? First of all, a lot of people speak English in Yerevan. Outside the city? It’s less common. Second, my friend Khatchig Mouradian, editor of the “Armenian Weekly” here in the U.S., had put me in the care of his friend there, Movses Babayan. Movses is a 29-year-old entrepreneur: He owns two stores that sell automotive replacement parts, and one of the shops is so futuristic it looks like a next generation Apple store.
I have a feeling that Khatchig had the wisdom to tell Movses that I am seriously common sense-challenged. The first two days I was in Armenia, Movses didn’t let me out of his sight. To wit: On our second day together we were visiting the heart of the Armenian Church, the beautiful cathedral in Ejmiatsin. Movses ran into a friend and while they were chattering away I wandered into the cathedral bookstore. My phone rang and it was Movses:
Movses: Where are you?
Me: The bookstore. All good.
Movses: Not good. I can’t see you.
I had cut myself shaving that morning and I think Movses considered taking me to the emergency room. He wouldn’t let me pay for a single meal or a single beer or a single cup of coffee.
And yet prior to the moment he picked me up at my hotel, we’d never even communicated via email.
Everyone I met in Armenia was like this. There was Giro Manoyan who took me to one of the best Italian dinners I’ve eaten anywhere (including, yes, Italy), and Movses’s father who sent me back to my hotel one afternoon with a bag of apples from the fruit trees in his backyard. There was the woman from the stationery shop who dropped off at my hotel the pen I had purchased which she had forgotten to put in my shopping bag. And then there were John and Hamo, older guys I met at the airport in Beirut a little before midnight and would become my traveling companions for the next seven hours as we waited for our 1:50 a.m. flight to Yerevan. Actual departure? 4:30 a.m. We had a lot of time to bond. Hamo made sure I tasted everything the in-flight food service offered that didn’t have meat – I’d told him I was a vegetarian – taking pride in even the apple juice.
“I know the orchard where they get their apples,” he said. “Armenian apple juice is the best apple juice.”
Incidentally, remember the horrific bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983? Hamo said he had been there and survived the cataclysm. Based on the wrenching and riveting details he shared, I have no reason to doubt him.
In some cases, people in Armenia took me under their wing because of their connection to Khatchig; in others, they did it because I was an Armenian-American who had made this pilgrimage. Regardless, everyone I met taught me something important: On occasion, you really can go home again.
* * *
This column ran originally in the Burlington Free Press on May 27, 2012.
Chris's next novel, "The Sandcastle Girls," is a love story set in the midst of the Armenian Genocide in the First World War. It arrives July 17. To add it to your Goodreads To-Read cue, click here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
.
May 24, 2012
"Sifting the Grain" and "The Sandcastle Girls"
"War and genocide are things of men, not women. Dehumanizing another, a requisite of such acts, is diametrically opposed to their nature as those who bring life and who nurture it. Instead women are the victims who are raped and tortured, taken and killed, stripped of their spouses and children and their dignity, of all that is dear to them, and required to continue on if only to sustain those who survive."
The above is from the review of "The Sandcastle Girls" on "Sifting the Grain."
I was deeply moved by the examination of gender and genocide in the post.
Thank you.
To read the full review, click here:
http://siftingthegrain.wordpress.com/...
The above is from the review of "The Sandcastle Girls" on "Sifting the Grain."
I was deeply moved by the examination of gender and genocide in the post.
Thank you.
To read the full review, click here:
http://siftingthegrain.wordpress.com/...
May 22, 2012
‘The Coldest Night,’ by Robert Olmstead, takes readers back to the Korean War
How is it that Americans tuned into “M*A*S*H” for 11 years — savoring a mighty impressive 250-plus episodes — and yet the Korean War remains “The Forgotten War”? The answer may be that while “M*A*S*H” reminded us that war is hell, anything that comes with a laugh track is likely to dial down the violence, evisceration and sheer terror that accompany battle. Moreover, “M*A*S*H” was a general anti-war statement, not an attempt to illuminate the specific “police action” that was sandwiched between World War II and the Vietnam War.
Over the past few years, however, it has seemed to me that Korea is finally being remembered for the three-year nightmare it was. Recently, I’ve read histories of the conflict by David Halberstam (“The Coldest Winter”) and Bruce Cumings (“The Korean War: A History”), as well as Jayne Anne Phillips’s novel “Lark & Termite” — a National Book Award finalist in 2009. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison has just published “Home,” a novel about a Korean War veteran.
And this month Robert Olmstead turns his prose — gritty one moment, lyrical the next — on the conflict in his book, “The Coldest Night.” Fans of Olmstead’s Civil War novel, “Coal Black Horse,” of which I am one, will not be disappointed. “The Coldest Night” is riveting, thoughtful and — in the large section set in Korea — harrowing.
The novel is the story of young Henry Childs, a high school junior happily playing baseball and working at a stable in West Virginia in 1950. There he and a high school senior named Mercy, a gifted rider and the daughter of a local judge, begin a doomed romance. Mercy comes from money and power, while Henry is a child of the hill country who hasn’t even a clue who his father is. The first third of the novel chronicles their decision to run away together to New Orleans and hope that true love — and staggering amounts of sex — can bridge the social chasm that separates them.
When Mercy’s family intervenes, Henry, though underage, joins the Marines and sets off for Korea, where the second third of the novel is set. Here, in the brutal cold and relentless carnage of the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, the young man fights off an endless stream of North Korean charges before finally beginning the long retreat to the sea with his mentor, a hardened veteran.
Olmstead is an immensely gifted stylist, his prose capable of conveying the magic and passion of first love as well as the ferocity of battle. He also has a knack for imagery as memorable as it is unexpected, such as what might have been a moment of calm between enemy attacks:
“A marine with a flamethrower walked the ridge methodically dispatching the enemy wounded. He lashed out with roaring flames thirty feet long, burning to death anyone of them that still moved and each time was the splattering noise of napalm liquid from the nozzle fire and a cloud of black smoke. He did not stop until his tanks were empty.”
I cared deeply about Mercy and Henry and his fellow soldiers, and the book moves at a spectacularly rapid clip — especially that middle third. But “The Coldest Night” is not subtle. Exhibit A: It is a coming-of-age novel about a young man named “Childs.” Exhibit B: It is a picaresque with epigraphs for the three parts from, respectively, the Book of Job, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.”
Moreover, as much as I appreciated Mercy as a character, sometimes she seems more adolescent male fantasy than flesh-and-blood teenage girl. “You opened my body and took out all my bones starting with the small ones,” she whispers to Henry in one moment of post-coital tenderness.
Finally, the novel occasionally felt to me a bit too close to “Coal Black Horse.” Instead of a young man losing his innocence amidst the summer maelstrom of Gettysburg, he loses it in the frigid killing fields of Korea.
But maybe that’s a ridiculous objection. After all, novelists play to their strengths. And few write as powerfully or as realistically as Olmstead about the way war makes a boy grow up far too fast.
(Bohjalian is the author of 15 books. His next novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” will be published on July 17. This review originally ran in the Washington Post on May 22, 2012.)
Over the past few years, however, it has seemed to me that Korea is finally being remembered for the three-year nightmare it was. Recently, I’ve read histories of the conflict by David Halberstam (“The Coldest Winter”) and Bruce Cumings (“The Korean War: A History”), as well as Jayne Anne Phillips’s novel “Lark & Termite” — a National Book Award finalist in 2009. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison has just published “Home,” a novel about a Korean War veteran.
And this month Robert Olmstead turns his prose — gritty one moment, lyrical the next — on the conflict in his book, “The Coldest Night.” Fans of Olmstead’s Civil War novel, “Coal Black Horse,” of which I am one, will not be disappointed. “The Coldest Night” is riveting, thoughtful and — in the large section set in Korea — harrowing.
The novel is the story of young Henry Childs, a high school junior happily playing baseball and working at a stable in West Virginia in 1950. There he and a high school senior named Mercy, a gifted rider and the daughter of a local judge, begin a doomed romance. Mercy comes from money and power, while Henry is a child of the hill country who hasn’t even a clue who his father is. The first third of the novel chronicles their decision to run away together to New Orleans and hope that true love — and staggering amounts of sex — can bridge the social chasm that separates them.
When Mercy’s family intervenes, Henry, though underage, joins the Marines and sets off for Korea, where the second third of the novel is set. Here, in the brutal cold and relentless carnage of the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, the young man fights off an endless stream of North Korean charges before finally beginning the long retreat to the sea with his mentor, a hardened veteran.
Olmstead is an immensely gifted stylist, his prose capable of conveying the magic and passion of first love as well as the ferocity of battle. He also has a knack for imagery as memorable as it is unexpected, such as what might have been a moment of calm between enemy attacks:
“A marine with a flamethrower walked the ridge methodically dispatching the enemy wounded. He lashed out with roaring flames thirty feet long, burning to death anyone of them that still moved and each time was the splattering noise of napalm liquid from the nozzle fire and a cloud of black smoke. He did not stop until his tanks were empty.”
I cared deeply about Mercy and Henry and his fellow soldiers, and the book moves at a spectacularly rapid clip — especially that middle third. But “The Coldest Night” is not subtle. Exhibit A: It is a coming-of-age novel about a young man named “Childs.” Exhibit B: It is a picaresque with epigraphs for the three parts from, respectively, the Book of Job, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.”
Moreover, as much as I appreciated Mercy as a character, sometimes she seems more adolescent male fantasy than flesh-and-blood teenage girl. “You opened my body and took out all my bones starting with the small ones,” she whispers to Henry in one moment of post-coital tenderness.
Finally, the novel occasionally felt to me a bit too close to “Coal Black Horse.” Instead of a young man losing his innocence amidst the summer maelstrom of Gettysburg, he loses it in the frigid killing fields of Korea.
But maybe that’s a ridiculous objection. After all, novelists play to their strengths. And few write as powerfully or as realistically as Olmstead about the way war makes a boy grow up far too fast.
(Bohjalian is the author of 15 books. His next novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” will be published on July 17. This review originally ran in the Washington Post on May 22, 2012.)
May 20, 2012
The U.S. is More than Guns and Butter
At one point earlier this month when I was in the backseat of a car working its way through Beirut traffic, the driver told me, “This is a Hezbollah neighborhood. I don’t think they’ll be burning tires to block traffic tonight, but you never know.”
Indeed, there was a tent at the corner with hundreds of tires for sale. I imagined them fuel for a very smoky, very toxic, very black bonfire. Beside those tires, however, was a McDonald’s. Down the block was a KFC. And near that KFC was a Dunkin’ Donuts. Along the highway that runs through the city and skirts the Mediterranean Sea, I counted half a dozen billboards for lingerie, including one for Victoria’s Secret.
I was traveling with my good friend, Khatchig Mouradian, a Lebanese-Armenian who grew up in Beirut. He is the editor of the “Armenian Weekly” here in the United States and a genocide scholar. I was visiting Lebanon and Armenia to ground myself emotionally as the publication neared for my next novel, a love story set in the midst of the Armenian Genocide in the First World War.
Khatchig had told me that I would find Beirut a very Western city, but still I was unprepared for the prevalence of Western brands. And while I saw plenty of cultural icons that made me proud as an American, I saw many that left me wondering about the priorities of what we export.
Exhibit A? Breakfast. I ate unbelievably well in Lebanon: In some ways, it’s a cuisine designed for a vegetarian. Among my favorite meals was a simple manqoushe (pronounced man-a-eshe) Khatchig bought me one morning: A piece of flatbread baked in a wood-fired oven and filled with vegetables and cheese. I understand that exoticism was a part of its appeal, just as an Egg McMuffin is attractively alien to someone who didn’t grow up underneath those golden arches. But speaking objectively, that basic manqoushe was healthier than the breakfast fare at the American fast food franchises that now litter the Lebanese landscape.
This is, however, merely the most obvious, blinking neon sign of Western influence. On my second day in Beirut, Khatchig took me to his alma mater, Haigazian University. The day before, “New York Times” columnist Thomas Friedman had cited Haigazian as the sort of place in the Middle East where the United States should be investing. The U.S., he wrote, had just given $1.3 billion in military hardware to Egypt and $13.5 million in college scholarship programs to Lebanon – including some to Haigazian. “I can safely report,” Friedman wrote, “the $13.5 million in full scholarships has already bought America so much more friendship and stability than the $1.3 billion in tanks and fighter jets ever will.”
Khatchig and I visited Rev. Paul Haidostian, President of Haigazian, and he told us precisely that.
Right now, many Lebanese worry that Syrian unrest will jeopardize their tenuous calm. Just this week three people were killed in Tripoli when fighting broke out between supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and those who oppose him. Moreover, this remains a nation where Khatchig’s car was routinely checked for explosives when he brought me back to my hotel. I passed a vigilant tank near the Syrian border. When I was trying to find the Armavia Airlines gate at Beirut airport one evening near midnight, it was a group of traveling U.N. peacekeepers in camouflage fatigues who knew the secret. (“See that gate for Middle East Airlines? It’s Armavia in the middle of the night.”) And Khatchig’s sister works in a beautiful, modern building beside one that is still cratered and empty from the nation’s civil war.
Lebanon doesn’t need bread. That manqoushe was delectable. Nor do the Lebanese need more donuts, fried food, or lingerie. When we export Western culture, we need to share more than our obsessions with empty calories and the push-up bra. We’re better than that; we’re more than that.
Likewise, the last thing the Middle East needs is more guns. Friedman was astute, his analysis spot-on. Lebanon is a learned country and education is respected there: A little schooling will build a lot of goodwill.
* * *
This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on May 20, 2012. Chris’s new novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” arrives on July 17. You can add it to your Goodreads "To Read" cue by clicking here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
.
Indeed, there was a tent at the corner with hundreds of tires for sale. I imagined them fuel for a very smoky, very toxic, very black bonfire. Beside those tires, however, was a McDonald’s. Down the block was a KFC. And near that KFC was a Dunkin’ Donuts. Along the highway that runs through the city and skirts the Mediterranean Sea, I counted half a dozen billboards for lingerie, including one for Victoria’s Secret.
I was traveling with my good friend, Khatchig Mouradian, a Lebanese-Armenian who grew up in Beirut. He is the editor of the “Armenian Weekly” here in the United States and a genocide scholar. I was visiting Lebanon and Armenia to ground myself emotionally as the publication neared for my next novel, a love story set in the midst of the Armenian Genocide in the First World War.
Khatchig had told me that I would find Beirut a very Western city, but still I was unprepared for the prevalence of Western brands. And while I saw plenty of cultural icons that made me proud as an American, I saw many that left me wondering about the priorities of what we export.
Exhibit A? Breakfast. I ate unbelievably well in Lebanon: In some ways, it’s a cuisine designed for a vegetarian. Among my favorite meals was a simple manqoushe (pronounced man-a-eshe) Khatchig bought me one morning: A piece of flatbread baked in a wood-fired oven and filled with vegetables and cheese. I understand that exoticism was a part of its appeal, just as an Egg McMuffin is attractively alien to someone who didn’t grow up underneath those golden arches. But speaking objectively, that basic manqoushe was healthier than the breakfast fare at the American fast food franchises that now litter the Lebanese landscape.
This is, however, merely the most obvious, blinking neon sign of Western influence. On my second day in Beirut, Khatchig took me to his alma mater, Haigazian University. The day before, “New York Times” columnist Thomas Friedman had cited Haigazian as the sort of place in the Middle East where the United States should be investing. The U.S., he wrote, had just given $1.3 billion in military hardware to Egypt and $13.5 million in college scholarship programs to Lebanon – including some to Haigazian. “I can safely report,” Friedman wrote, “the $13.5 million in full scholarships has already bought America so much more friendship and stability than the $1.3 billion in tanks and fighter jets ever will.”
Khatchig and I visited Rev. Paul Haidostian, President of Haigazian, and he told us precisely that.
Right now, many Lebanese worry that Syrian unrest will jeopardize their tenuous calm. Just this week three people were killed in Tripoli when fighting broke out between supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and those who oppose him. Moreover, this remains a nation where Khatchig’s car was routinely checked for explosives when he brought me back to my hotel. I passed a vigilant tank near the Syrian border. When I was trying to find the Armavia Airlines gate at Beirut airport one evening near midnight, it was a group of traveling U.N. peacekeepers in camouflage fatigues who knew the secret. (“See that gate for Middle East Airlines? It’s Armavia in the middle of the night.”) And Khatchig’s sister works in a beautiful, modern building beside one that is still cratered and empty from the nation’s civil war.
Lebanon doesn’t need bread. That manqoushe was delectable. Nor do the Lebanese need more donuts, fried food, or lingerie. When we export Western culture, we need to share more than our obsessions with empty calories and the push-up bra. We’re better than that; we’re more than that.
Likewise, the last thing the Middle East needs is more guns. Friedman was astute, his analysis spot-on. Lebanon is a learned country and education is respected there: A little schooling will build a lot of goodwill.
* * *
This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on May 20, 2012. Chris’s new novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” arrives on July 17. You can add it to your Goodreads "To Read" cue by clicking here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
.
May 13, 2012
Bear naked? A bold fashion statement.
Thanks to a couple of bears and a bird feeder, last month we learned two important things about our Governor: He does not sleep in pajamas. And he really cares about his bird feeders.
For those of you who were so focused on serious news – i.e., Krispy Kreme’s expansion into Russia and a people’s hope for the first ever vodka-glazed doughnut – on the night of April 11, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin saw four bears besieging the four birdfeeders just outside his Montpelier home. He had already gotten ready for bed, and apparently the Governor sleeps in. . .not pajamas. “Real Vermont boys don’t wear pajamas,” he told this newspaper, while hinting to WDEV radio personality Mark Johnson that he was about as well dressed as the bears. The Governor rushed outside and was able to retrieve the bird feeders, while keeping his masculinity – literally as well as metaphorically – intact.
So, why am I rehashing this month-old story now, since it was (forgive me) barely news four weeks ago? The other night, at 2:42 in the morning, I was awakened from a sound sleep in my hotel room in Saginaw, Michigan by the air raid siren that passed for a fire alarm. We’re talking a deafening, mind-addling beeping. I went straight to the door and opened it.
Just for the record, I did not touch the door first to see if it was warm. This was a mistake. Always touch the door first to be sure it’s cool. If it is hot, it might be a really bad idea to open it. (There are books and websites that offer practical advice on what to do if you are ever in a hotel fire. I have read some, found them interesting and wise, and clearly forgot everything I had learned when actually confronted by a possible hotel fire. I was this way with high school chemistry, too.)
In any case, I was one of four guests who opened our corridor doors almost simultaneously. We were all male. Two were super hairy and might actually have been bears. One guy was wearing tighty whities and a t-shirt.
And me? I was wearing pajamas, thank you very much.
Now would I have been wearing pajamas if my wife had been traveling with me? Possibly. Thanks to my wife and my daughter, I have a couple of pairs of very hip pajama pants.
Here, however, is my point: There are at least two times in this world when, if you’re a man, you don’t want to be naked. The first is when you are confronting large wild animals with claws or any bad-tempered dragon, giant, hellion, or demon. Seriously, are male superheroes ever naked when they’re taking on Cloverfield monsters or the Wolfman? Of course not.
The second time is when you’re evacuating a hotel because the fire alarm is causing a permanent, noise-induced hearing loss. There have not been many moments in my life when I was the best-dressed dude in the room, but between 2:42 and 2:51 a.m. in Saginaw, Michigan, I was. I rocked that hotel corridor confab. I was the most charming guy in the hall. We’re talking Jon Stewart charisma. After all, I wasn’t standing around awkwardly in tighty whities. . .or less. I was dressed in stylish pjs my NYU fashionista daughter had picked out for me.
Fortunately, there wasn’t a fire. Nor, just for the record, were there bears. According to the gentleman behind the front desk, another guest had left the shower running to try and unclog his sinuses and fallen asleep. And the steam, I was told, had triggered the alarm.
Now, is there a moral to this story? There is. Real Vermont boys can wear pajamas.
* * *
This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on May 13, 2012. Chris’s new novel, The Sandcastle Girls, arrives on July 17. You can add it to your Goodreads by clicking here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
For those of you who were so focused on serious news – i.e., Krispy Kreme’s expansion into Russia and a people’s hope for the first ever vodka-glazed doughnut – on the night of April 11, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin saw four bears besieging the four birdfeeders just outside his Montpelier home. He had already gotten ready for bed, and apparently the Governor sleeps in. . .not pajamas. “Real Vermont boys don’t wear pajamas,” he told this newspaper, while hinting to WDEV radio personality Mark Johnson that he was about as well dressed as the bears. The Governor rushed outside and was able to retrieve the bird feeders, while keeping his masculinity – literally as well as metaphorically – intact.
So, why am I rehashing this month-old story now, since it was (forgive me) barely news four weeks ago? The other night, at 2:42 in the morning, I was awakened from a sound sleep in my hotel room in Saginaw, Michigan by the air raid siren that passed for a fire alarm. We’re talking a deafening, mind-addling beeping. I went straight to the door and opened it.
Just for the record, I did not touch the door first to see if it was warm. This was a mistake. Always touch the door first to be sure it’s cool. If it is hot, it might be a really bad idea to open it. (There are books and websites that offer practical advice on what to do if you are ever in a hotel fire. I have read some, found them interesting and wise, and clearly forgot everything I had learned when actually confronted by a possible hotel fire. I was this way with high school chemistry, too.)
In any case, I was one of four guests who opened our corridor doors almost simultaneously. We were all male. Two were super hairy and might actually have been bears. One guy was wearing tighty whities and a t-shirt.
And me? I was wearing pajamas, thank you very much.
Now would I have been wearing pajamas if my wife had been traveling with me? Possibly. Thanks to my wife and my daughter, I have a couple of pairs of very hip pajama pants.
Here, however, is my point: There are at least two times in this world when, if you’re a man, you don’t want to be naked. The first is when you are confronting large wild animals with claws or any bad-tempered dragon, giant, hellion, or demon. Seriously, are male superheroes ever naked when they’re taking on Cloverfield monsters or the Wolfman? Of course not.
The second time is when you’re evacuating a hotel because the fire alarm is causing a permanent, noise-induced hearing loss. There have not been many moments in my life when I was the best-dressed dude in the room, but between 2:42 and 2:51 a.m. in Saginaw, Michigan, I was. I rocked that hotel corridor confab. I was the most charming guy in the hall. We’re talking Jon Stewart charisma. After all, I wasn’t standing around awkwardly in tighty whities. . .or less. I was dressed in stylish pjs my NYU fashionista daughter had picked out for me.
Fortunately, there wasn’t a fire. Nor, just for the record, were there bears. According to the gentleman behind the front desk, another guest had left the shower running to try and unclog his sinuses and fallen asleep. And the steam, I was told, had triggered the alarm.
Now, is there a moral to this story? There is. Real Vermont boys can wear pajamas.
* * *
This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on May 13, 2012. Chris’s new novel, The Sandcastle Girls, arrives on July 17. You can add it to your Goodreads by clicking here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
May 6, 2012
Can you top the "Bristol Stomp" -- without risking amputation or encountering "promiscuous rocks?"
The town of Bristol, Vermont is about to turn 250, and as part of its celebration next month, it is looking for a song: A song that celebrates the town’s history and what the village has meant to its residents since June 26, 1762, when the hamlet was first chartered.
Its original name? Pocock, after the British admiral, George Pocock. And it might have remained Pocock to this very day, except for the tiny detail that the colonials had a dust-up with the Brits between 1775 and 1783, and the name was changed to Bristol in 1789.
I am telling you this because Bristol is looking for an original song as part of its quarter-millennium festivities, and while you can use the name Pocock in your lyrics, you don’t have to. My sense is that “Pocock” would have given even Paul McCartney and Carole King fits. Very likely, someone is going to parody the 1961 Dovells hit, the “Bristol Stomp.” Just for the record, that tune probably would not have reached the number two spot on the Billboard chart if the refrain had begun, “The kids in Pocock are sharp as a pistol.”
Bristol resident Carol Wells is a part of the village’s 250th Anniversary Committee, and I asked her why a town of roughly 3,800 people needed an official song.
“A song is something you don’t realize you don’t have until you need one,” she told me, and then added she could envision it being sung before such important Bristol town rituals as the annual Fourth of July Outhouse Races down Main Street. Appropriately, the winning song will be performed live for the first time on June 16 at “Pocock Rocks,” Bristol’s annual music festival and street fair.
The judges include, among others, the Mount Abraham Union High School vocal director, Megan LaRose. She told me that songwriters are asked to have a connection to Bristol, and she hopes that some of the entrants explore either the town’s physical setting or its history. “We used to have a bowling alley and a movie theater. We used to have a coffin factory,” she said. “I hope people pull those sorts of things in.”
Me, too. And the word “Pocock.”
If you want a refresher on Bristol’s history – and why geography matters to the Addison County village – consider John Elder’s beautiful exploration of the area (and Robert Frost), “Reading the Mountains of Home.”
If you want a peek at pre-Civil War Bristol, consider “The Early History of Bristol, Vermont – Formerly Known as Pocock,” by Harvey Munsill. Among the tidbits in Munsill’s book from the mid-nineteenth century? John F. Blass and William Haskins nearly blew themselves up while “engaged in loading a Cannon” in an artillery exercise in 1858. (Haskins had both arms amputated below the elbow.) Dan Turrell had a tree fall on him while chopping it down in 1806. (Turrell had his leg amputated.) Henry Sumner was bitten by a rattlesnake – date unspecified. (Sumner had nothing amputated.) In hindsight, one has to wonder why in the world the coffin factory closed.
Munsill’s book also has nine pages of different properties being “burnt.” And the topography? According to Munsill, there are “smooth naked rocks . . . piled promiscuously.”
The truth is, I love Bristol, even if its rocks are naked and promiscuous. (Maybe, in fact, that’s precisely why I love it.) It has a lot my village, Lincoln, lacks. Exhibit A? A gym. Exhibit B? A creemee stand. Exhibit C? A grocery store and a pharmacy. And thats just the town. The surrounding countryside does Vermont proud, and Bristol has certainly earned the right to boast, “Gateway to the Green Mountains.”
And so I can’t wait to hear the winning song. I just hope it has the word “Pocock” in it.
* * *
The deadline for entering is June 1. The winner will be decided that night and announced the next day. To enter, visit http://bit.ly/wXDGMq .
This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on May 6, 2012. Chris’s new novel, The Sandcastle Girls, arrives on July 17. You can add it to your Goodreads by clicking here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
Its original name? Pocock, after the British admiral, George Pocock. And it might have remained Pocock to this very day, except for the tiny detail that the colonials had a dust-up with the Brits between 1775 and 1783, and the name was changed to Bristol in 1789.
I am telling you this because Bristol is looking for an original song as part of its quarter-millennium festivities, and while you can use the name Pocock in your lyrics, you don’t have to. My sense is that “Pocock” would have given even Paul McCartney and Carole King fits. Very likely, someone is going to parody the 1961 Dovells hit, the “Bristol Stomp.” Just for the record, that tune probably would not have reached the number two spot on the Billboard chart if the refrain had begun, “The kids in Pocock are sharp as a pistol.”
Bristol resident Carol Wells is a part of the village’s 250th Anniversary Committee, and I asked her why a town of roughly 3,800 people needed an official song.
“A song is something you don’t realize you don’t have until you need one,” she told me, and then added she could envision it being sung before such important Bristol town rituals as the annual Fourth of July Outhouse Races down Main Street. Appropriately, the winning song will be performed live for the first time on June 16 at “Pocock Rocks,” Bristol’s annual music festival and street fair.
The judges include, among others, the Mount Abraham Union High School vocal director, Megan LaRose. She told me that songwriters are asked to have a connection to Bristol, and she hopes that some of the entrants explore either the town’s physical setting or its history. “We used to have a bowling alley and a movie theater. We used to have a coffin factory,” she said. “I hope people pull those sorts of things in.”
Me, too. And the word “Pocock.”
If you want a refresher on Bristol’s history – and why geography matters to the Addison County village – consider John Elder’s beautiful exploration of the area (and Robert Frost), “Reading the Mountains of Home.”
If you want a peek at pre-Civil War Bristol, consider “The Early History of Bristol, Vermont – Formerly Known as Pocock,” by Harvey Munsill. Among the tidbits in Munsill’s book from the mid-nineteenth century? John F. Blass and William Haskins nearly blew themselves up while “engaged in loading a Cannon” in an artillery exercise in 1858. (Haskins had both arms amputated below the elbow.) Dan Turrell had a tree fall on him while chopping it down in 1806. (Turrell had his leg amputated.) Henry Sumner was bitten by a rattlesnake – date unspecified. (Sumner had nothing amputated.) In hindsight, one has to wonder why in the world the coffin factory closed.
Munsill’s book also has nine pages of different properties being “burnt.” And the topography? According to Munsill, there are “smooth naked rocks . . . piled promiscuously.”
The truth is, I love Bristol, even if its rocks are naked and promiscuous. (Maybe, in fact, that’s precisely why I love it.) It has a lot my village, Lincoln, lacks. Exhibit A? A gym. Exhibit B? A creemee stand. Exhibit C? A grocery store and a pharmacy. And thats just the town. The surrounding countryside does Vermont proud, and Bristol has certainly earned the right to boast, “Gateway to the Green Mountains.”
And so I can’t wait to hear the winning song. I just hope it has the word “Pocock” in it.
* * *
The deadline for entering is June 1. The winner will be decided that night and announced the next day. To enter, visit http://bit.ly/wXDGMq .
This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on May 6, 2012. Chris’s new novel, The Sandcastle Girls, arrives on July 17. You can add it to your Goodreads by clicking here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
May 3, 2012
The story behind the story: The kernel that led to the novel, "The Sandcastle Girls"
Sometimes my novels have positively elephantine gestation periods—and even that, in some cases, is an underestimate. A mother elephant carries her young for not quite two years; I have spent, in some cases, not quite two decades contemplating the tiniest seed of a story and wondering how it might grow into a novel.
Moreover, in the quarter-century I’ve been writing books, I’ve realized two things about a lengthy gestation period. First, the longer I spend allowing an idea to take root inside me, the better the finished book; second, the more time I spend thinking about a book, the less time I spend actually writing it. Here’s a confession: The first draft of the novel for which I may always be known best, Midwives, took a mere (and eerily appropriate) nine months to write. Skeletons at the Feast, another book I will always be proud of, took only 10. But I spent a long time pondering both of these novels before ever setting a single word down on paper.
Perhaps in no case has the relationship between reflection and construction—between the ethereal wisps of imagination and the concrete words of creation—been more evident than in the novel I have arriving this summer, The Sandcastle Girls. The novel has been gestating at the very least since 1992, when I first tried to make sense of the Armenian Genocide: a slaughter that most of the world knows next to nothing about.
My first attempt to write about the genocide, penned 20 years ago now, exists only as a rough draft in the underground archives of my alma mater. It will never be published, neither in my lifetime nor after I’m dead. I spent over two years struggling mightily to complete a draft, and I never shared it with my editor. My wife, who has always been an objective reader of my work, and I agreed: The manuscript should either be buried or burned. I couldn’t bring myself to do either, but neither did I ever want the pages to see the light of the day. Hence, the exile to the underground archives.
Moreover, just about this time, Carol Edgarian published her poignant drama of the Armenian Genocide and the diaspora, Rise the Euphrates. It’s a deeply moving novel and, it seemed to me, a further indication that the world didn’t need my book.
And so instead I embarked upon a novel that had been in the back of my mind for some time: A tale of a New England midwife and a home birth that has gone tragically wrong.
Over the next 15 years, all but one of my novels would be set largely in New England. Sometimes they would be about women and men at the social margins: homeopaths, transsexuals, and dowsers. Other times they would plumb social issues that matter to me: homelessness, domestic violence, and animal rights.
The one exception, the one book not set in New England? Skeletons at the Feast, a story set in Poland and Germany in the last six months of the Second World War. That novel is, in part, about a fictional family’s complicity in the Holocaust. Often as I toured on behalf of the book in 2008 and 2009, readers would ask me the following: When was I going to write about the Armenian Genocide? After all, from my last name it’s clear that I am at least part Armenian. (I am, in fact, half-Armenian; my mother was Swedish.)
I had contemplated the subject often, even after failing in my first attempt to build a novel around the Meds Yeghern. The Great Calamity. Three of my four Armenian great-grandparents died in the poisonous miasma of the genocide and the First World War. Moreover, some of my best—and from a novelist’s perspective most interesting—childhood memories occurred while I was visiting my Armenian grandparents at their massive brick monolith of a home in a suburb of New York City. Occasionally, my Mid-Western, Swedish mother would refer to their house as the “Ottoman annex of the Metropolitan,” because it was—at least by the standards of Westchester County in the middle third of the twentieth century—so exotic.
In 2010, my father’s health began to deteriorate badly. He lived in Florida at the time, while I lived in Vermont. I remember how on one of my visits, when he was newly home after yet another long stay in the hospital, together we looked at old family photographs. I was trying to take his mind off his pain, but I also found the exercise incredibly interesting. In some cases, these were images I had seen on the walls of my grandparents’ or my parents’ house since I was a child, but they had become little more than white noise: I knew them so well that I barely noticed them and they had grown as invisible to me as old wallpaper.
Now, however, they took on a new life. I recall one in particular that fascinated me: a formal portrait of my father when he was five years old, his parents behind him. All of them are impeccably coiffed. My grandfather is seated in an elegant wooden chair in the sort of suit and tie and vest that he seemed always to be wearing when I was a boy, and my grandmother is standing beside him in a beautiful black dress with a white collar and a corsage. I can see bits of my daughter—their great-granddaughter—in my grandmother’s beautiful, almond-shaped eyes. My father, a kindergartener at the time, is wearing shorts, a white shirt, and a rather badly knotted necktie with a cross on it.
I knew almost nothing about my grandparents’ story. But that picture reminded me of those moments when, as a child myself, I would sit on my grandfather’s lap or listen to him, enrapt, as he played his beloved oud. I recalled the wondrous aroma of lamb and mint that always wafted from their front door when I would arrive, and my grandmother’s magnificent cheese boregs. I thought of their library filled with books in a language—an alphabet—I could not begin to decipher, even as I was learning to read English.
And at some point, the seeds of my family’s own personal diaspora began to take root. I had no interest in revisiting the disastrous manuscript that was gathering dust in my college archives. But I knew that I wanted to try once again to write about the Armenian Genocide. A good friend of mine, a journalist and genocide scholar, urged me on.
Ironically, I was about 90 pages into my new book when Mark Mustian published his beautifully written and deeply thought-provoking novel, The Gendarme. I felt a bit as I had in 1994 when I read Carol Edgarian’s Rise the Euphrates. Did the world really need my book when it had Mark’s—or, for that matter, the stories and memoirs that Peter Balakian, Nancy Kricorian, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, and Franz Werfel had given us? It might have been my father’s failing health, or it might have been the fact that I was older now; it might have been the reality that already I cared deeply for the fictional women and men in my new novel. But this time I soldiered on.
I think The Sandcastle Girls may be the most important book I’ve written. It is certainly the most personal. It’s a big, broad, sweeping historical love story. The novel moves back and forth in time between the present and 1915; between the narrative of an Armenian-American novelist at mid-life and her grandparents’ nightmarish stories of survival in Aleppo, Van, and Gallipoli in 1915. Those fictional grandparents are not by any stretch my grandparents, but the novel would not exist without their courage and charisma.
Is the novel among my best work? The book opens with memories from my childhood in my grandparents’ home, what my mother referred to as the Ottoman Annex. In other words, it has been gestating almost my entire life.
* * *
You can learn more about "The Sandcastle Girls" here on Goodreads -- and, if you would like, add it to your Goodreads "To Read" cue.
This essay appeared originally in "The Armenian Weekly."
Moreover, in the quarter-century I’ve been writing books, I’ve realized two things about a lengthy gestation period. First, the longer I spend allowing an idea to take root inside me, the better the finished book; second, the more time I spend thinking about a book, the less time I spend actually writing it. Here’s a confession: The first draft of the novel for which I may always be known best, Midwives, took a mere (and eerily appropriate) nine months to write. Skeletons at the Feast, another book I will always be proud of, took only 10. But I spent a long time pondering both of these novels before ever setting a single word down on paper.
Perhaps in no case has the relationship between reflection and construction—between the ethereal wisps of imagination and the concrete words of creation—been more evident than in the novel I have arriving this summer, The Sandcastle Girls. The novel has been gestating at the very least since 1992, when I first tried to make sense of the Armenian Genocide: a slaughter that most of the world knows next to nothing about.
My first attempt to write about the genocide, penned 20 years ago now, exists only as a rough draft in the underground archives of my alma mater. It will never be published, neither in my lifetime nor after I’m dead. I spent over two years struggling mightily to complete a draft, and I never shared it with my editor. My wife, who has always been an objective reader of my work, and I agreed: The manuscript should either be buried or burned. I couldn’t bring myself to do either, but neither did I ever want the pages to see the light of the day. Hence, the exile to the underground archives.
Moreover, just about this time, Carol Edgarian published her poignant drama of the Armenian Genocide and the diaspora, Rise the Euphrates. It’s a deeply moving novel and, it seemed to me, a further indication that the world didn’t need my book.
And so instead I embarked upon a novel that had been in the back of my mind for some time: A tale of a New England midwife and a home birth that has gone tragically wrong.
Over the next 15 years, all but one of my novels would be set largely in New England. Sometimes they would be about women and men at the social margins: homeopaths, transsexuals, and dowsers. Other times they would plumb social issues that matter to me: homelessness, domestic violence, and animal rights.
The one exception, the one book not set in New England? Skeletons at the Feast, a story set in Poland and Germany in the last six months of the Second World War. That novel is, in part, about a fictional family’s complicity in the Holocaust. Often as I toured on behalf of the book in 2008 and 2009, readers would ask me the following: When was I going to write about the Armenian Genocide? After all, from my last name it’s clear that I am at least part Armenian. (I am, in fact, half-Armenian; my mother was Swedish.)
I had contemplated the subject often, even after failing in my first attempt to build a novel around the Meds Yeghern. The Great Calamity. Three of my four Armenian great-grandparents died in the poisonous miasma of the genocide and the First World War. Moreover, some of my best—and from a novelist’s perspective most interesting—childhood memories occurred while I was visiting my Armenian grandparents at their massive brick monolith of a home in a suburb of New York City. Occasionally, my Mid-Western, Swedish mother would refer to their house as the “Ottoman annex of the Metropolitan,” because it was—at least by the standards of Westchester County in the middle third of the twentieth century—so exotic.
In 2010, my father’s health began to deteriorate badly. He lived in Florida at the time, while I lived in Vermont. I remember how on one of my visits, when he was newly home after yet another long stay in the hospital, together we looked at old family photographs. I was trying to take his mind off his pain, but I also found the exercise incredibly interesting. In some cases, these were images I had seen on the walls of my grandparents’ or my parents’ house since I was a child, but they had become little more than white noise: I knew them so well that I barely noticed them and they had grown as invisible to me as old wallpaper.
Now, however, they took on a new life. I recall one in particular that fascinated me: a formal portrait of my father when he was five years old, his parents behind him. All of them are impeccably coiffed. My grandfather is seated in an elegant wooden chair in the sort of suit and tie and vest that he seemed always to be wearing when I was a boy, and my grandmother is standing beside him in a beautiful black dress with a white collar and a corsage. I can see bits of my daughter—their great-granddaughter—in my grandmother’s beautiful, almond-shaped eyes. My father, a kindergartener at the time, is wearing shorts, a white shirt, and a rather badly knotted necktie with a cross on it.
I knew almost nothing about my grandparents’ story. But that picture reminded me of those moments when, as a child myself, I would sit on my grandfather’s lap or listen to him, enrapt, as he played his beloved oud. I recalled the wondrous aroma of lamb and mint that always wafted from their front door when I would arrive, and my grandmother’s magnificent cheese boregs. I thought of their library filled with books in a language—an alphabet—I could not begin to decipher, even as I was learning to read English.
And at some point, the seeds of my family’s own personal diaspora began to take root. I had no interest in revisiting the disastrous manuscript that was gathering dust in my college archives. But I knew that I wanted to try once again to write about the Armenian Genocide. A good friend of mine, a journalist and genocide scholar, urged me on.
Ironically, I was about 90 pages into my new book when Mark Mustian published his beautifully written and deeply thought-provoking novel, The Gendarme. I felt a bit as I had in 1994 when I read Carol Edgarian’s Rise the Euphrates. Did the world really need my book when it had Mark’s—or, for that matter, the stories and memoirs that Peter Balakian, Nancy Kricorian, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, and Franz Werfel had given us? It might have been my father’s failing health, or it might have been the fact that I was older now; it might have been the reality that already I cared deeply for the fictional women and men in my new novel. But this time I soldiered on.
I think The Sandcastle Girls may be the most important book I’ve written. It is certainly the most personal. It’s a big, broad, sweeping historical love story. The novel moves back and forth in time between the present and 1915; between the narrative of an Armenian-American novelist at mid-life and her grandparents’ nightmarish stories of survival in Aleppo, Van, and Gallipoli in 1915. Those fictional grandparents are not by any stretch my grandparents, but the novel would not exist without their courage and charisma.
Is the novel among my best work? The book opens with memories from my childhood in my grandparents’ home, what my mother referred to as the Ottoman Annex. In other words, it has been gestating almost my entire life.
* * *
You can learn more about "The Sandcastle Girls" here on Goodreads -- and, if you would like, add it to your Goodreads "To Read" cue.
This essay appeared originally in "The Armenian Weekly."
May 1, 2012
"The Sandcastle Girls" gets a starred review in Kirkus
Below is the review in its entirety. Big, big thanks to Kirkus.
* * *
THE SANDCASTLE GIRLS [STARRED REVIEW!]
Author: Bohjalian, Chris
Review Issue Date: May 15, 2012
Online Publish Date: May 6, 2012
Publisher:Doubleday
Pages: 320
Price ( Hardcover ): $25.95
Publication Date: July 17, 2012
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-0-385-53479-6
Category: Fiction
The granddaughter of an Armenian and a Bostonian investigates the Armenian genocide, discovering that her grandmother took a guilty secret to her grave.
Laura, the narrator of Bohjalian’s latest, is doing genealogical research, attempting to learn more about a fact that has always intrigued her: Her Boston Brahmin grandmother, Elizabeth, and her grandfather, Armen, were brought together by the Armenian genocide. Flash back to 1915. Elizabeth has journeyed to the Syrian city of Aleppo, along with her father, on a mission sponsored by an American relief group, the Friends of Armenia. They have come in an attempt to deliver food and supplies to the survivors of the Armenian massacre. The Turks are using Aleppo as a depot for the straggling remnants of thousands of Armenian women, who have been force-marched through the desert after their men were slaughtered. Elizabeth finds the starved women, naked and emaciated, huddled in a public square, awaiting transports to Der-el-Zor, the desert “relocation camp” where, in reality, their final extermination will take place. Elizabeth takes in two of these refugees, Nevart and an orphan Nevart adopted on the trail, Hatoun, who has been virtually mute since she witnessed the beheading (for sport) of her mother and sisters by Turkish guards. By chance, Elizabeth encounters Armen, an Armenian engineer who has come to Aleppo to search for his wife, Karine. Armen has eluded capture since murdering his former friend, a Turkish official who had reneged on his promise to protect Armen’s family. Despairing of Karine’s survival—and falling in love with Elizabeth—Armen joins the British Army to fight the Turks. Among archival photos viewed by Laura decades later is one of Karine, who did reach the square mere days after Armen left Aleppo. How narrowly did Karine miss reuniting with Armen, Laura wonders, acknowledging that, but for tragic vagaries of fate, the family that produced her might never have come to be.
A gruesome, unforgettable exposition of the still too-little-known facts of the Armenian genocide and its multigenerational consequences.
* * *
THE SANDCASTLE GIRLS [STARRED REVIEW!]
Author: Bohjalian, Chris
Review Issue Date: May 15, 2012
Online Publish Date: May 6, 2012
Publisher:Doubleday
Pages: 320
Price ( Hardcover ): $25.95
Publication Date: July 17, 2012
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-0-385-53479-6
Category: Fiction
The granddaughter of an Armenian and a Bostonian investigates the Armenian genocide, discovering that her grandmother took a guilty secret to her grave.
Laura, the narrator of Bohjalian’s latest, is doing genealogical research, attempting to learn more about a fact that has always intrigued her: Her Boston Brahmin grandmother, Elizabeth, and her grandfather, Armen, were brought together by the Armenian genocide. Flash back to 1915. Elizabeth has journeyed to the Syrian city of Aleppo, along with her father, on a mission sponsored by an American relief group, the Friends of Armenia. They have come in an attempt to deliver food and supplies to the survivors of the Armenian massacre. The Turks are using Aleppo as a depot for the straggling remnants of thousands of Armenian women, who have been force-marched through the desert after their men were slaughtered. Elizabeth finds the starved women, naked and emaciated, huddled in a public square, awaiting transports to Der-el-Zor, the desert “relocation camp” where, in reality, their final extermination will take place. Elizabeth takes in two of these refugees, Nevart and an orphan Nevart adopted on the trail, Hatoun, who has been virtually mute since she witnessed the beheading (for sport) of her mother and sisters by Turkish guards. By chance, Elizabeth encounters Armen, an Armenian engineer who has come to Aleppo to search for his wife, Karine. Armen has eluded capture since murdering his former friend, a Turkish official who had reneged on his promise to protect Armen’s family. Despairing of Karine’s survival—and falling in love with Elizabeth—Armen joins the British Army to fight the Turks. Among archival photos viewed by Laura decades later is one of Karine, who did reach the square mere days after Armen left Aleppo. How narrowly did Karine miss reuniting with Armen, Laura wonders, acknowledging that, but for tragic vagaries of fate, the family that produced her might never have come to be.
A gruesome, unforgettable exposition of the still too-little-known facts of the Armenian genocide and its multigenerational consequences.
