Three Apples Fell From Heaven

by Micheline Aharonian Marcom

An elegant memorial to the victims of the Armenian genocide—from the award-winning author of The Brick House.
A New York Times Notable Book that imagines the lives of several sufferers of the twentieth century’s first genocide. Anaguil, an Armenian girl taken in by Turkish neighbors after the death of her parents who now views the remains of her world through a Muslim veil; Sargis, a poet hidden away in his mother’s attic, dressed in women’s clothing, and steadily going mad; Lucine, a servant and lover of the American consul; Maritsa, a rage-filled Muslim wife who becomes a whore; and Dickran, an infant left behind under a tree on the long exodus from an Armenian village, who reaches with tiny hands to touch the stars and dies with his name unrecorded.
 
Through the lives depicted in Three Apples Fell From Heaven , we witness the vanishing of a people. Together, the stories of these lives form a narrative mosaic — faceted, complex, richly textured, a devastating tableau.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, American, Historical, Novels

288 pages, Paperback

First published February 5, 2001

About the author

Micheline Aharonian Marcom has written seven novels, including a trilogy of books about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the 20th century. She has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the US Artists’ Foundation. She was a 2022 finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Marcom is the founder and Creative Director of The New American Story Project [NASP], a digital storytelling project exploring the forces of migration and the lives of new Americans newamericanstoryproject.org. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Reviews

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

And three apples fell from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for the listener, and one for the eavesdropper.

To write the history of those who have been lost, whose culture has been erased, and who are often, to this day, greeted by an emphatic rejection that such an erasure ever took place: this requires an immense skill, an ability to toe the fence deftly on the side of factual evidence in favor of more traditional, oral source material. But it also requires the ability to keep both the victims and the victimized in sight in equal measure, not losing sight of possibly historical misreadings, downright dismissals, and even personal—especially familial—sources that can sway the balance toward one side of the fence.

So what does it require, then, to write the history of your own people, those whom you never knew because they died before you were born? What does it take to reconstruct their narratives from oral sources when decanters might require more solid facts? Does one's heritage prevent one from accurately depicting both sides of a cultural conflict—a conflict that is the first genocide of the twentieth century? I would suggest that a certain audacity is required of a writer in this position: the foreknowledge that there will be decriers and nay-sayers; that there will be those who survived or who have heard stories from family members who have, and yet who are still unable to find themselves in the personal narratives the writer eventuality constructs. This means bravery, then, as it means taking risks in order to tell a story the very telling of which is riddled with anxiety, trauma, denial, betrayal; it means telling the story of one-and-a-half-million murdered Armenians by using only a half-dozen or so speakers to carry the weight of such a history.

And yet this is something that Marcom pulls off in a dazzling, heartbreaking, haunting, and frightening way in her debut novel, Three Apples Fell from Heaven. One would hardly know it was her first effort: there is a skill here that is as wise as a voice raised from 1915, telling the story of the massacres from beyond the grave; there is a wisdom here that is eons beyond other writers of Marcom's generation, and, indeed, it is an intermingling of generations itself that makes Three Apples such a phenomenal feat in and of itself. It also begins by addressing directly the problematical attempt to catalog such a history, due to an apostrophized Rumor who straddles either side of the above-mentioned fence:

She writes at night, while you are dozing.

Rumor says things like, And so, and so
There was and
There was not

Rumor tells stories. This is the story she writes.

Despite the fact that most of her readers are likely unfamiliar with many of the details about the Armenian genocide that took place between 1915 and 1917, Marcom goes lightly when it comes to concrete, solid facts. One might think that this would render a book like Three Apples—a history of the genocide, after all—flawed, but instead it works to Marcom's immense favor: using facts and intercalary sections that are more rooted in giving accounts of historical evidence (e.g., one way Marcom does this is through the use of the American missionary's letters back to his home office, some of which are in cypher to bypass Turkish censors), this is enough of a framework to build on individual stories. By focusing on several characters, Marcom risks losing sight of the one-and-a-half-million dead for whom she is speaking; however, her speakers are all marginalized figures, figures who are viewed by their own communities as outsiders already, and this adds a more humanitarian lens through which to view both the daily travails of living in fear of the invading Turks and also confronting the very real fact that one's culture might survive only with oneself—if one is even lucky to survive, that is.

This emphasis on the importance of stories and storytelling is Marcom's strength, and each of her narrators speak in ways unique to them but also with a poetically charged rhythm that is found throughout the entire text, uniting them despite their differences, making a cohesive patchwork of voices that insist on the importance of Armenian identity, culture, and its resistance to erasure, silence, and complete annihilation I think it worth looking in brief detail at three of Marcom's main narrators in Three Apples for the perspectives each affords her history, and their own stories' potentiality for stressing the importance of storytelling in order to survive.

Anaguil, a young woman who witnesses the murder of her Armenian father, loses her mother, and is forced to raise her younger brothers and sisters in a Turkish home that has been kind enough to give them shelter. Anaguil's constant conflict between keeping her old language, religion, and culture alive in her mind—and also feeding pieces of this in small doses to her younger sister, Nevart, in particular, so that it may pass on to the next generation—and, alternatively, trying to pass as Muslim in a world that would otherwise see her bought, sold, raped, or killed is a conflict Marcom handles very plausibly and in achingly humane terms: "She is writing a book of memory on her body and destroying it as she writes."

Maritsa, a woman who grows up thinking she is male, introducing a potential transgender theme to Three Apples which joins a text that already has its store of sexual "perversions" aplenty. Marcom's use of sexuality is very interesting throughout: instead of asking us to judge characters in scenes where they are fingering themselves, being rimmed, masturbating, and so on, it is sexuality that somehow joins all of us together. We all know how closely linked pain is to pleasure; we all know that each side informs the other, in the same way that Marcom insists on her stories informing other stories. Sexuality is relational, then, in Marcom's world, and its often crude and disgusting ends are a means by which we somehow go on, join the ranks, and see ourselves—in all of our nakedness, with all of our perversions and fetishes laid bare to the searchlight—somehow linked to others in our individual shame and in our collective guilt. Another use of Maritsa's character is to demonstrate how many women internalize patriarchal ideologies about their own inferiority, thus unwittingly assisting operations like a genocide whose logic is obviously rooted in phallocentrism: "I always wished to have been born a man. To slap the woman. To beat them. And yet, every man I have known has left me with only one desire: to lift my hand and bring it swiftly down on his face."

Sargis, a young man with a gift for words—especially poetry—and whose mother dresses him as a woman and locks him in the attic to escape Turkish detection. Exploring through Sargis the age-old links between poetic inspiration and madness, Marcom is able to introduce a homosexual character who stands at the outskirts of his own culture: a better vantage point from which to offer judgment and a more objective view. Through Sargis, Marcom's brief examination of the ways in which male relations were allowed in the hamam ritual but frowned upon openly in public (and were punishable by death as far as the law went), a rift that allows her overall lamentation about the genocide to also point to flaws within the very systemic structure under fire:

You said, Make plans. You said, Here is History, and handed me a leather-bound tome. You said, spreading your arms open and smiling with a sly grin, This is the way the world is. I never questioned the verb. I never peeked behind it.
Is shit.
Only the viscera of my body comfort me.

Marcom's Three Apples is both effective and affecting; her talent with the written word, especially her use of poetic conventions, make it nearly impossible to quote from the text in order to place them on display. These poetic refrains and structures are ones that run the gamut of each section, logically beginning and ending each voice, and then spiraling into the next section's disparate logic: Marcom is creating a music of sorts. This is how memory would sound. This is how my ancestors, she seems to be saying, may have lived—and most likely did—and this is how I will remember them: in all of their bravery, in all of their fear, in all of their excrement. It is the tale of their darkest days, told with respect for the sheer dark as well as the possibility of light as the stories heal, as generations reflect, as history is acknowledged and learned from so that "[t]he dark root night" need never replicate itself again:

This is the inside-out world. The black side. The devil's world. I cannot recall if there has ever been a place different from this one; a time of a different velocity. Here the days have no beginning, there is no rising sun to mark them. Each day is endless, each day is the night. The dark root night. Devouring us.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

The maggots lifted their heads for the sermon.

Մեծ Եղեռն

This is the world they lied about.

Civilization. Think about it.

'the stage of human social development and organization that is considered most advanced'

Social development: knowing the Self from the Other. Organization: connecting the Self to the Other, or the Self to the Self, or the Other to the Other, or the Self around the Other. Advanced: has history produced an advancement that was not built upon rape and slavery? Any rape and slavery, mind you, regardless of how far away the home country may lie in time and space. It seems our definitions of Filth and Disgust and Civilization do not interact somewhat differently than presumed with the contingencies of genocide and the masses of Human Social Development and Organization required by such an endeavor. It's social cleansing, not social filthing.

There are days I cannot speak. Each word is a weight, and there are pounds of flesh, the heft of diction.

It's better than dead, it's history.

People who take inordinate pride in having gotten past The Kindly Ones would be better off here, on the other side of barter and trade of human flesh. Call it a Holocaust only if you're aware of how the Greek etymology is a topic of contention in the Jewish community. Call it a genocide without assurance that your country officially subscribes to the definition; mine sure doesn't. Call it and think about it and recognize how a lack of Armenian heritage on your part means you lift so that the rightful may speak, not the other way around. Do not: use it as a rhetorical device. Do not: use it as a reason for Islamophobia. Do not: use it.

And to die is different from what anyone supposed, in this sacrifice I do not know what is made holy.

Narratologically speaking, this should make you sick. Pretty prose, sure. Maybe. I was paying more attention to guilt. There's alternating points of view, and then there's the instant when a few of them have their hands cut off. There's experimental juxtaposition of nonfictional records and fictional elegies, and then there's denial of the experiences of a people on a global scale. Those in luck and those in power and every one of those in a bit of both can afford to forget that succinct summation of reality in a landscape of civilization: body of evidence. Those who can afford to amputate such concerns, do so. Watch their hackles raise when confronted.

Hopeful hands. They removed them in front of my mother.

It's a mark of the utmost concern of authorship that racism and misogyny and heteronormativity are not one or the other when handled in terms of genocide, but all. All. All of it plays a part, and the parts it plays are many.

You didn't know it was the last time, how could it have been in your mind?

The first time I encountered the word Armenia, it was in an elementary school classroom, and the teacher told me I must be mistaking it for America.

If God has no pity on them, why must you have pity?

[Lisa (NY) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marcom approaches her novel about the Armenian genocide, set in 1915-1917, through short glimpses of several characters - victims, witnesses, collaborators. These sharp, poetic bursts underscore the nightmarish, confused terror of the Armenians in a Turkish village. The imagery is so shocking that the reader is forced to confront the horror. This is a difficult and rewarding novel to read - both for its subject matter and the style, which left me feeling unmoored at times.

Three apples fell from heaven, one for the storyteller, one for the listener and one for the eavesdropper.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was really hard to read, for a lot of reasons. It is about the Armenian genocide, and there are a lot of parts that are really graphic and I had to put down the book sometimes because I just couldn't handle it. There are a lot of bitter truths that come out in the book.

The style in which the book is written also made it difficult to read, but it is also the reason I loved it. Every chapter is told from a different perspective, and sometimes it takes a while to figure out whose perspective it is being told from because of pronoun usage. Some of the characters appear in only one chapter, and that is the last you hear from them. The chapters aren't in chronological order, so that got a little confusing at times. I kept having to flip back to previous chapters to figure out what was going on. But this writing style is one of the main reasons I really liked this book. It was really beautiful the way that it all came together and gradually I got a sense of what the novel was about. I just kept reading and it all fell into place.

The writing style is very poetic, which sometimes I find annoying in books, but in this case even though I often missed the deeper meaning behind the words, I still found them beautiful and engaging.


Part of me wants to pick up the book and start reading it again, because I think it would all come together a lot more in a second reading.

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having just finished Exodus, I thought my stomach was pretty steeled against further nausea brought on by the injustices of the world. Why I chose next to read a book about the Armenian Holocaust of the early 1900s I can not say. This first novel based on the experiences of the author's maternal grandmother is a beautifully written horrific story of the first modern genocide in the Ottoman Empire. The various characters each experience different lives in the roughly the same environment, and their stories are told by Marcom in a truly poetic manner - giving the reader a sense of discomfort: "Wait, this isn't supposed to be a pretty story!"

A great surprise, and unfortunately one I would not have found or likely picked up on my own.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have rarely read anything that I found as difficult or upsetting as this book. With that said, it's magnificently written. Marcom deals with the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians with descriptions of almost unspeakable atrocity, madness and despair that read like poetry. Her imagry still resides in my mind, despite the fact that I finished, and then promptly abondoned, the book in a German hotel room nearly 8 years ago. Read it, then burn it.

[Kinga · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult read in more than one way. The book's structure can be confusing with relatively short chapters, jumping from character to character and through time. The narrative is, therefore, disjointed and it can take some time before I realised who was speaking in that chapter. We see some characters weave their story throughout the book. Some characters appear only once.

The book deals with the Armenian genocide, an act of violence and hate which is relatively unknown in most of the world. The dehumanising process which took place during the early part of the 20th Century, but this is not something we learn about or hear about. The way the Armenians were treated by the Turkish and Kurdish population is shocking and what the people experienced can be horrifying to the reader.

This is a very good book, but it is not an easy book.

[Leslie Womack · Rating 5 out of 5]

My friend, an Armenian, asked me if I had read The Rape of Nanking before letting me borrow this book. While Three Apples Fell from Heaven is a work of fiction based on the historically documented genocide of Armenians, and Rape of Nanking is strictly non-fiction, the question was considerate. Considerate, because if a reader was able to manage the contents of Rape to the end, a telling of the hundreds of thousands of horrible, torturous murders committed by Japanese in a few short months while they occupied the city in China, they might also be up to the task of getting through Three Apples Fell. Even though I completed reading Three Apples Fell from Heaven over two weeks prior to writing this, my stomach still has a visceral reaction to remembering the contents. A visceral reaction much like I still have two years after reading Rape and now several years after reading Clockwork Orange (I have never seen the film.)

The experience of ingesting Three Apples Fell from Heaven lies somewhere between Clockwork Orange and Rape of Nanking for me. While reading Clockwork, the reader, if he or she can (it took me three tries over four years to finally be able to read Clockwork to the end), enters into a perspective of seeing the world and time through the character's unique life filters; through the use of ingenious language. Author Micheline Aharonian Marcom also deftly uses language that moves the (English language) reader into seeing the progression of the Ottoman Turkish government's campaign of genocide through the perspectives of several characters experiencing the event.

It is difficult material written in beautiful and intimate prose that will surely make the tragedy of lost Armenian lives and culture seem as important as your own.

[Madison Y. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is extremely difficult. It should likely not be someone’s first encounter with literature surrounding the Armenian Genocide, but it’s an excellent read after you’ve situated yourself in the historical context. It’s told through a mosaic of different characters and experiences. In its structure there is an innate sense of fracture, demonstrating the way a society or group of people has been almost completely destroyed by another. I think it’s the perfect structure to tell this kind of story, one which mandates innovation. The structure does, however, mean that the story is told loosely, in waves, rather than through a traditional narrative arc. I didn’t particularly mind this—especially given the thread with Anaguil and Nevart runs throughout and provides this sense of structure. Honestly, I could have read a book just about them. Nevertheless, I appreciate how sprawling this book is.

This book also attempts to look, unflinchingly at something impossible not to flinch at. The book is grotesque, not just at times, but more often than not. Again, this is something necessitated by the world that it is inhabiting. This text does not put a gloss on its historical context, it works to reveal experiences or circumstances most of us could never imagine. It’s horrifying—and it should be horrifying.

I wouldn’t say this is a pleasant read. But it is a deftly crafted work of literature which puts words to horrors which defy language. The language is simple yet carefully curated, and the metaphors are packed with beauty, despair, and meaning. I am very glad to have read it and look forward to picking up the next in the trilogy!

[Alyssa Long · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now that I'm finished, I'm not sure what I know. The story was too fragmented for me, but maybe it's symbolic of the lack of a clear historical narrative surrounding this event. I get a sense for what happened, but the holes prevent me from feeling and understanding the extent to which the violence and confusion happened. I didn't get to connect to any characters because they were just brushstrokes. Interesting style, but difficult for me to read and connect with.

[Allie Gustafson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dutiful collection of prose and poems depicting the strife and ever lasting impact of the stories of brutalized Armenians during a time of genocide. As old Armenian legend says "and three apples fell from heaven, one for the storyteller, one for the listener, and one for the eavesdropper," (97).

“Their birth was in the time of fire, when God’s wrath was immutable and adamantine, in the summer moths of that year when all the stories were destroyed and converted and the new story was preconceived—they were not themselves until then,” (2).

“You whispered, The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower’d gates, ever provoking questions. These yearnings why are they? These thoughts in the darkness why are they? And I understood you completely, my friend. I plucked a still green apricot from the tree and I offered it to you. I read to you in Armenian: I come from very far and bring With me dizzy riches, I load the casket with priceless rubies. You heard the cadence and dip of my language. There was no need to translate. I haven’t seen you since fall of last year, Hakan. I hope your uniform fits you well. I am sure you have boots, unlike so many of the soldiers who come through Kharphert. Yes, I have been moved to pity by the sight of Turkish Kurdish bands, these rugged bone men who march along silently and leave their blood in cups. I hope you are eating. Do you stand on the prow of the ship in the straits? Can you see Europe from where to stand? Can you still taste freedom in your mouth as you strong English words together in your mind? The words of the American poet [Whitman] placed carefully on your lips. This hour I tell things in confidence, I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you. The foreign tongue made everything seem possible, no?” (52).

“She is writing a book of memory on her body and destroying it as she writes,” (54).

“If aeroplanes had flown above us they would have marveled at the human sculpture we made with our thousands of bones and bodies becoming bones, with our skin and the fat underneath that melted the midday sun like soft clay. The vultures swooping in among us and the wolves feeding themselves and their sucklings from us, added their hungry delight to the tableau,” (65).

"This is the inside-out world. The black side. The devil's world. I cannot recall if there has ever been a place different from this one; a time of a different velocity. Here the days have no beginning, there is no rising sun to mark them. Each day is endless, each day its the night. The dark root night. Devouring us," (92).

"If he listens closely in the night he believes he can hear the whisperings of men, not of the bound men who stand at his side, but of the Armenian men who have haunted these valleys and plateaus and plains for centuries. He thinks he can hear their handless sprits saying to him in the spring night, brother, do you believe a few thousand years of history to make any difference to armed men?" (103).

“I have given rein to passion and I have been estranged from the sovereignty of reason. Words fill my mind. I am too unrepentant,” (170).

“I believe it is not within the Armenian consciousness to consider annihilation because despite everything, all the long years of the cruel Turkish yoke, we have always survived. And what you cannot imagine you cannot fathom. And so, and thus, we are all after all, their easy slaughter; their quiet and unassuming and mostly docile slaughter house. We are their meeting lambs. Is that so? What is this world for the human animal except a vast array of reasons?” (174)

“This is not me, I am a girl from Erzincan. I no longer have a body or swath of blue cotton for my hair. I cannot quote verse, I have not been schooled. I try to say this thing. But it is for bidden already. I will tell you, I will tell you: I spit invisible hate at the wind. I am nothing but a girl. She spits hate. She doesn’t wait for Christ. God never whisperer in her heart. He never said: I am here to save you,” (190).

[Wayne Jordaan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gut-wrenching, well-written retelling of the Turkish massacre of Armenians during the period 1915 - 1917. I was not aware of this particular slice of man's brutal history against fellow human beings until I read Philip Marsden's The Crossing Place: A Journey Among the Armenians, but a backward glance over the last century will quickly disabuse one of the notion that such atrocities are peculiar to one geographic region or a single group. We do not seem to learn from history, or maybe we are just slow to change our ways, as Steven Pinker will have it that the globe is becoming a more peaceful place (The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity. That is why I find the title so appropriate, because one way of accelerating the change would definitely be through telling the stories of our intolerant, discriminatory pasts.

[Marilyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know if I can finish this book. It is a very difficult book to read. Important. Poetic. But difficult. For one thing, there's the style and structure. The language is beautiful (except when it's not). The poetry is exquisite. But it's bits and pieces of lives, scattered all over the place. No unifying narrative. Messy -- intentionally. So it's hard to follow, hard to keep everything straight. The biggest difficulty, however, is not in the style, but in the substance. The Armenian genocide (still denied by the Turks) was unrelenting, unimaginably brutal. It demands ugly pictures and ugly language. And that's hard. I'll update if/when I finish.

[Darla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shimmering language at times; atrocities of genocide and other small shards of stories half told, lives interrupted. Incredible writing gives a small measure of insight into what unfolded in those dark days.

[Ann Odonnell]

Poetic yet forceful....read it 10 years ago. The images, the historic atmosphere she painted, the dialogue is important and unforgettable

[Autumn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m sure all readers will remain haunted, touched, and changed by these short stories about evils committed by The Ottoman Empire against Armenians during and after World War I. I think anyone with a soul or shred of empathy will feel a deep sense of sadness having read about the Armenian holocaust. There is no greater evil than genocide and I feel compelled to give this book the respect of the highest of ratings just because of the topic. I’m sure I’m not alone.
However, I rate “Three Apples Fell From Heaven” 5 stars for more reason than my own sense of empathy. The author made me feel through her writing like I had experienced a similar suffering the author's characters did. Marcom had a writing style that evoked emotion by the development of how the characters felt. There are many characters and all of their emotions are conveyed perfectly, but no characters touched me more than the mothers and their children. The author touched on every fear a mother such as myself would have if they experienced this type of evil. Marcom described the emotions and frantic questions I would ask myself if I were in an Armenian woman’s shoes. Questions like: How do I bear watching my children suffer the worst type of atrocities? How do I protect them? Are my children better off dead than suffer so much? How can I keep my children alive?
This is a book I will never forget the name of. The characters felt so personal to me that I take them with me on life‘s journey. If you are an avid reader,you know that these two elements are no small feats for an author. Be warned that this book will hit you like a ton of bricks. However, I think it is important that it does.

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave this book 5 stars for the writing ability of the author, which is off-the-scale brilliant. Then I took off 3 stars for trying to be too clever. It didn't work as a novel. The random nature of the chapters is fine - for an anthology of poems, not for a novel. As a reader, you have no idea who is speaking or what the chronological sequence is as you start each chapter. Some readers might think this is all very modern (and I don't mind that style as rule), but in this book it came across as deliberately random ('look how clever I am') and I found it simply annoying. Also, there are characters who appear out of the blue and then simply disappear, never to be seen or heard of again. And the violence - yes, I know this is a book about genocide; there will be violence - but it's handled in such a way that it's almost black comedy. Monty Python style. I got to the point where I was rolling my eyes at the violence, it was that stupid. Then there is the author's obsession with orifices and shit. I mean, really ... yes, I know she wants to be provocative and to demonstrate how clever her writing is, but please, do this with another plot, not one about a real historical event in which real people died. It was so sad to see the suffering of the Armenian people overshadowed, almost used as a toy to be played with, as the author paraded her provocative off-beat writing style. If she had reined in that temptation, this book would have been truly exceptional.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is both captivating and alluring as well as strangely seductive in the darkest way you can imagine. The prose is elegant and conjures a world of honey and spices. But, just as you're caught up in the language and imagery, along comes the description of something horrific and unthinkable.
Most, but not all of the story is how an Armenian girl who has been raised by Turks sees the world. The time is 1915-1917. This is the story, told from differing voices of the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Turks. Some scenes are difficult to read but it's worth the effort to keep all the strands of the narrative flowing...that way the reader gets the full impact of the conflicts that may have set the stage for the Holocaust of the Jews starting in the late 1930's in Germany.
Parts of this story reads like a slasher movie...but the real horror is knowing that these things took place in history...and to this day, Turkey continues to deny that it was a true holocaust.
Read this important book and decide.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book garnered rave reviews, and so I expected something more, or at least different, from what I encountered. True, Marcom can write some lovely prose, but I wonder if the self-conscious prettiness of it really enhances a novel about the Armenian genocide. That and the tinge of magical realism, coupled with the short chapters that shift quickly between characters, seemed to me to take the edge of this massive, incomprehensible tragedy. Then there's Marcom's obsession with the scatological. There are an awful lot of rectums, feces, and fingers in orifices in this book. To what end? When the sense of a distinct, and largely lost, culture seeps through, I find the book moving. One of the final chapters lists the names of (real or fictive?) Armenian dead, and the sheer musicality of those syllables and the thought of the people who had once inhabited them was the most powerful moment of the book.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I found the prose and the imagery to be amazing, this is not an easy book to read and I would not recommend it to everyone. The subject matter, of the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, is horrific and here it is given a sparse emotional telling that almost made it more difficult to read about. Additionally, the author has a huge cast of characters and many sequences that are dream-like and keeping track of all of that would take some concentration. Or you could just forget trying to grasp one narrative thread and instead soak it in like poetry, but such sad painful poetry is hard to sustain for this length. Heartbreaking, beautiful, but almost sickening, even.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Historical Fiction. 1915-1917 when the Ottoman Turkish Empire caused the deaths of over one million Armenians. Tough book to read, tough book to rate. The writing deserves four stars....but, much was difficult for me to understand. It was a depressing read about this time in history. It was written through the eyes of the peasant townspeople. Very sad. Why does this happen? Is the same thing happening in Syria, today? Does the rest of the world watch and make daily updates on 6pm news? In the case of the Armenians...US representatives in Turkey...were mainly concerned for the US citizens working there.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do want to say something about this book. I think its beautifully written and covers an important subject area. But it was so difficult to read because it is just so sad and depressing. It was the only reason why I did not give it more stars. There were times when I just could not go on and then felt guilty that I wasn't continuing to read it because it is such an important book. We live in a society where we are encouraged, coerced, and downright manipulated into thinking about the up-side of life so much that even so much as reading this book seems like an exercise in toying with depression.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, actually I don't know that "really liked it" is the right description-- but it's so powerful I have to give it 4 stars. This book made me cry. It was graphic, it was powerful, it was something that I will probably not do again. But it is something I recommend to anyone who really wants to know what the experience of the Armenian Genocide was about. Not for the faint of heart (or stomach.)

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of what I would say would duplicate Katie's review of this book. The only thing I'd like to add is that this author's writing style has put her on my short list of poetic authors (Toni Morrison, Robert Antoni, Jonathan Safran Foer). Reading books by these authors, I feel like the actual characters and plot take a back seat to the structure of the chapters, the narrative style, and the language. They are definitely more work to read, but absolutely worth it.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story was told beautifully and it honestly made me tear up a lot. The book is fiction, the characters are fictitious, but they feel so real. The story is set during the Armenian Genocide, and I find it hard to find books on such a horrible period in time, but this book, though fictitious, is a great read on the Armenian Genocide

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found it hard to read/follow but a good book. It would have been nice if the glossary translating Armenian and Turkish words was up front so I would have found it before I was nearly done with the book. A very sad subject to read about.

[Taralyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm torn on the rating for this one. On one hand, it is horrific and nauseatingly raw in its graphic description of the horrors of the Armenian genocide. However, it is also breathtakingly beautiful and it's beauty gives a depth to the real horrors that happen in this world. I Painfully loved it.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Relentless.

[Seta Mergeanian · Rating 4 out of 5]

an obsession of mine: genocide themed.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book I've read about the Armenian genocide and probably Marcum's most accessible book. Lyrical and searing prose.