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  • Books: Where memory becomes legend

    Arts & Book Review
    January 18, 2008
    First Edition



    Where memory becomes legend;

    Alev Adil
    Skylark Farm By Antonia Arslan, trans. Geoffrey Brock Atlantic £12.99
    (275pp) £11.69 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897

    BOOKS; Pg. 26

    It is 1915, and Sempad the prosperous pharmacist and his family are
    excitedly making preparations for his brother Yerwant's visit after
    decades abroad. The Pharmacie Hayastane, named after the lost
    homeland of the Armenians, is a "beacon of prog-ress and
    civilisation" in their little Anatolian town. The Arslanian family
    are busy putting the finishing touches to Skylark Farm, their new
    country house, with tennis and croquet lawns and rose-covered
    pergolas, while in Italy Yerwant dreams of building a villa nearby
    where he can retire.

    This is a bucolic paradise, yet from the first we know that disaster
    looms; most of the family will perish. The reader has already met
    little Henriette, three in 1915, as an old lady accompanying the
    author to her first name-day church service in Italy. Arslan's first
    novel is also a family memoir, and bears witness to the Armenian
    massacre that wiped out so many of her forebears in Turkey.

    Her imagined history is frequently mystical. Some have had
    premonitions, "smelled blood in the air, caught the scent of evil" or
    had visions of the archangel surrounded by evil fire. The
    paterfamilias, Hamparzum, sees the horsemen of the Apocalypse as his
    toddler grandson feeds him grapes on his deathbed. He entrusts the
    child to the Virgin as he dies.

    The atrocities they suffer are hard to read, both because of the
    horrific events and Arslan's purple prose. Leslie is "flung against
    the wall, where his small round head smashes like a ripe coconut,
    spraying blood and brain across the delicate floral designs." Carnage
    becomes religious kitsch, as when Hripsime sees her baby skewered on
    a bayonet, "the joyous soul of her little Vartan hesitantly trying
    out his new wings".

    Leaving aside literary quality, Arslan's novel raises compelling
    questions about the traumatic historical events that shaped our
    inherited identity - here, where memory becomes third-generation
    legend. The Armenian massacres are said to have served as a model for
    Hitler's subjugation of Poland. Here the collective memory of the
    Holocaust serves as the model for imagining the Armenian genocide.
    Arslan inappropriately attributes Nazi ideologies to the Ottomans.
    Setrak the baker becomes a sub-human collaborator with the Kurdish
    guards. Arslan calls him "a capo": I read this to mean kapo, a term
    borrowed from Nazi concentration camps. This was the only moment
    Geoffrey Brock's translation offered anything less than lucid
    clarity.

    The narrative has echoes of Schindler's Ark. Ismene, a wily Greek and
    Nazim, a Turkish beggar, save the survivors. Nazim is no Schindler,
    though, compelled by greed as much as remorse. There's little hope
    for redemption or reconciliation here, in the face of an inherited,
    implacable grief.
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