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St. Petersburg Times, FL
May 3 2004
Book review
The resurgence of things repressed
By ELLEN EMRY HELTZEL
The Daydreaming Boy
By Micheline Aharonian Marcom
"In Paradise there is no past," observes the young Catholic, Rachel, in
Micheline Aharonian Marcom's highly acclaimed first novel, Three Apples
Fell From Heaven. She is speaking from the grave after drowning herself
to avoid being raped by Turkish soldiers. For her, hell is the pain of
memory.
In her new novel, The Daydreaming Boy, Marcom reprises this theme, her
subject once again the Ottoman Empire's 1915 genocide against the
Armenians. This time, the story remains in the land of the living, told
by a fictional narrator who's looking back a half century after the
killings.
Vahe Tcheubjian - curiously, he bears the same name as the person to
whom the book is dedicated - lives in Beirut, Lebanon. He is both an
unexceptional figure and a tragic one, describing himself as "a
smallish man, a man whose middle has begun to soften and protrude, his
long toes hidden in scuffed dress shoes." Beneath this bland exterior,
however, lies a person "undone by history."
Vahe has lived a life of suppressing the events that scarred him and
destroyed his family. At the age of 7, his father was bludgeoned to
death and his mother delivered to an unknown fate, while he was sent by
boxcar to Lebanon and the Bird's Nest Orphanage. There, he grew up
among what he calls the "Adams in the wasteland" - child refugees
pulled from their homes and herded together in a
survival-of-the-fittest environment.
Vahe remembers how he ached with loneliness. He wrote letters to the
mother who never replied. He cherished the weekly assembly-line baths,
a brisk scrubdown by a dour-looking matron, because it gave him the
chance to recall maternal touch.
After leaving the orphanage, he worked as a carpenter, got married. And
then, as a middle-aged man, Vahe can't stop thinking about Vostanig,
the outcast who was sexually and physically abused by the other boys,
including himself, at the Bird's Nest. "The stranger: He was all of us,
the damned exiled race in its puny and starved and pathetic scabbed
body," he recalls. "How we longed to kill him."
For years, Vahe made a habit of visiting the Beirut zoo on Sundays,
where he shared a smoke with the tobacco-loving chimp Jumba. But before
handing over the cigarette, he would poke its burning end into the
chimp's flesh, exacting his price. If there's any doubt that Vahe is a
deeply damaged man, this gratuitous cruelty dispels it.
Jumba and his fellow primates are an on-going motif in the book, their
captivity and behavior reflecting how Vahe perceives a hostile world. A
newspaper article datelined South Africa announces the discovery that
man and gorilla share the same brain size and capacity, underscoring
the primal connection. The metaphor threatens to overpower the story,
but Vahe is too compelling to ignore.
Vahe has learned to translate his grief and emptiness into lust,
braiding sex and violence together, as he was taught. Having been
victimized himself, he becomes victimizer, as indicated by this simple
exchange with the servant girl, Beatrice:
"Would you like a chocolate?"
"No, merci."
"No, merci? Here, take it. I've bought these chocolates and I would
like for you to take it." She is still looking at the floor and I've
grabbed her hand and push the gold truffles into her small hand. . . ."
But dialogue is the exception in a story built mostly on interior
monologue, using poetic, even mnemonic, devices that reflect how memory
works. For Vahe, the past returns in intermittent blasts, like power
surges traveling down the neural pathways. Through his eyes we see the
lies and obfuscations gradually fall away.
The Daydreaming Boy probes Vahe's interior life, displaying his cruel,
hungry sensibility, and eventually locates the sources of his pain.
What remains is a man who sees himself for what he is, "the ragged
round left by absence of affection and knowing."
- Reviewer Ellen Emry Heltzel is a book critic and writer who lives in
Portland, Ore. With Margo Hammond she writes the weekly column Book
Babes, which can be found at www.poynter.org
"The Daydreaming Boy," by Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Riverhead Books,
$23.95, 224 pages.
May 3 2004
Book review
The resurgence of things repressed
By ELLEN EMRY HELTZEL
The Daydreaming Boy
By Micheline Aharonian Marcom
"In Paradise there is no past," observes the young Catholic, Rachel, in
Micheline Aharonian Marcom's highly acclaimed first novel, Three Apples
Fell From Heaven. She is speaking from the grave after drowning herself
to avoid being raped by Turkish soldiers. For her, hell is the pain of
memory.
In her new novel, The Daydreaming Boy, Marcom reprises this theme, her
subject once again the Ottoman Empire's 1915 genocide against the
Armenians. This time, the story remains in the land of the living, told
by a fictional narrator who's looking back a half century after the
killings.
Vahe Tcheubjian - curiously, he bears the same name as the person to
whom the book is dedicated - lives in Beirut, Lebanon. He is both an
unexceptional figure and a tragic one, describing himself as "a
smallish man, a man whose middle has begun to soften and protrude, his
long toes hidden in scuffed dress shoes." Beneath this bland exterior,
however, lies a person "undone by history."
Vahe has lived a life of suppressing the events that scarred him and
destroyed his family. At the age of 7, his father was bludgeoned to
death and his mother delivered to an unknown fate, while he was sent by
boxcar to Lebanon and the Bird's Nest Orphanage. There, he grew up
among what he calls the "Adams in the wasteland" - child refugees
pulled from their homes and herded together in a
survival-of-the-fittest environment.
Vahe remembers how he ached with loneliness. He wrote letters to the
mother who never replied. He cherished the weekly assembly-line baths,
a brisk scrubdown by a dour-looking matron, because it gave him the
chance to recall maternal touch.
After leaving the orphanage, he worked as a carpenter, got married. And
then, as a middle-aged man, Vahe can't stop thinking about Vostanig,
the outcast who was sexually and physically abused by the other boys,
including himself, at the Bird's Nest. "The stranger: He was all of us,
the damned exiled race in its puny and starved and pathetic scabbed
body," he recalls. "How we longed to kill him."
For years, Vahe made a habit of visiting the Beirut zoo on Sundays,
where he shared a smoke with the tobacco-loving chimp Jumba. But before
handing over the cigarette, he would poke its burning end into the
chimp's flesh, exacting his price. If there's any doubt that Vahe is a
deeply damaged man, this gratuitous cruelty dispels it.
Jumba and his fellow primates are an on-going motif in the book, their
captivity and behavior reflecting how Vahe perceives a hostile world. A
newspaper article datelined South Africa announces the discovery that
man and gorilla share the same brain size and capacity, underscoring
the primal connection. The metaphor threatens to overpower the story,
but Vahe is too compelling to ignore.
Vahe has learned to translate his grief and emptiness into lust,
braiding sex and violence together, as he was taught. Having been
victimized himself, he becomes victimizer, as indicated by this simple
exchange with the servant girl, Beatrice:
"Would you like a chocolate?"
"No, merci."
"No, merci? Here, take it. I've bought these chocolates and I would
like for you to take it." She is still looking at the floor and I've
grabbed her hand and push the gold truffles into her small hand. . . ."
But dialogue is the exception in a story built mostly on interior
monologue, using poetic, even mnemonic, devices that reflect how memory
works. For Vahe, the past returns in intermittent blasts, like power
surges traveling down the neural pathways. Through his eyes we see the
lies and obfuscations gradually fall away.
The Daydreaming Boy probes Vahe's interior life, displaying his cruel,
hungry sensibility, and eventually locates the sources of his pain.
What remains is a man who sees himself for what he is, "the ragged
round left by absence of affection and knowing."
- Reviewer Ellen Emry Heltzel is a book critic and writer who lives in
Portland, Ore. With Margo Hammond she writes the weekly column Book
Babes, which can be found at www.poynter.org
"The Daydreaming Boy," by Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Riverhead Books,
$23.95, 224 pages.