Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Micheline Marcom Reads @ Elliott Bay Books Tonight

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Micheline Marcom Reads @ Elliott Bay Books Tonight

    Seattlest, Seattle
    March 14 2008


    Micheline Marcom Reads @ Elliott Bay Books Tonight

    Micheline Aharonian Marcom reads from her new novel tonight at
    Elliott Bay Books at 7:30 pm, at 101 South Main Street.

    When we first wandered over to the Seattlest Arts Desk to pick up our
    review copy of Draining the Sea, we'd never heard of Micheline
    Aharonian Marcom. Turns out this Saudi-born, LA-raised child of an
    American and a Lebanese-Armenian is the author of two critically
    acclaimed earlier novels: Three Apples Fell From Heaven and The
    Daydreaming Boy. Who knew? Back in 2001, reviewing Three Apples in
    the New York Times, Margot Livesey wrote that, "The fierce beauty of
    her prose both confronts readers with many breathtaking cruelties and
    carries us past them." Such a description recalls the Cormac McCarthy
    of Blood Meridian, in which endless passages describe the
    breathtaking natural beauty of the Southwest with such vivid
    intensity that the reader is easily dragged into the booby-trap of
    McCarthy's brutally twisted violence (baby tree, anyone?).
    Unfortunately, to judge Marcom by Draining the Sea, it would seem
    that Livesey's observation is as much a prescription for long slog of
    a read as for a literary masterpiece.

    One need only crack a copy of Draining the Sea to discover that
    Marcom's style is dense and darkly lyrical. The narrator inhabits a
    phantasmagorical Los Angeles, where he spends his days collecting the
    carcasses of dead dogs off the roads and grappling with his memories
    of the Guatemalan civil war and Marta, a woman he both loved and
    likely killed, as well as his family's experience of the Armenian
    genocide (this is Marcom's central theme through all her books,
    apparently). Written in a hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness,
    Marcom's prose twists and turns poetically. Take, for instance, this
    single sentence:

    This is my inquiry, an inquisition of the air: you say that you
    cannot be undone, and you say (with your looking) that I am a beast
    of clean proportions; you say nothing with your words, in fact you
    have no words in my language (and I none in yours) and you insist in
    your dark cold chambers, in the capital of darkness, you bring me
    there, into the pit with you, with the other handless corpses, the
    half-deads, the unclosed eyes of the dying: you, the rats and diptera
    girls, and faceless cockless boys, and black bowed beetles, and
    intrepid moths on your skin eyelids - that I stay with you in that
    place, that I take up your hands (beautiful veins of indifference)
    and bundle that unringed, unpainted fingers fingernails to your
    mother in the Highlands: to your dead mother, the dead brothers and
    father, the crucified brother, who beat each other in the winters and
    for whom hunger is like an iron fist: send them these artifacts of
    the body, you say; rescue me from this hole, this hollow they've made
    for the half-deads, and I am crying uncontrollably now at the side of
    the freeway, and I can't see you amidst the piles and it is you and
    then it is my mother giving me her five phrases about the Armenian
    grandmother when I am a boy, and the long distances between home and
    here, and then it is me, alone in my car, driving along the 405.
    On the one hand, this is an act of literary bravura, a sentence
    constructed with a poet's sense of flow and a technician's precision,
    that unfolds and blossoms like a flower bud, as layer upon layer of
    language opens up. There's three parenthetical phrases, three colons,
    and two semi-colons in one sentence. An impressive feat all around.
    On the other hand, it's nearly meaningless. What are "beautiful veins
    of indifference" or "skin eyelids" besides pretty phrases? And
    perhaps most problematically for a first-person narrative, who on
    earth would talk like that, let alone think like that?

    Still, accusing a book of obscurantism and aloofness is an easy bomb
    to lob, and we found ourselves reconsidering leaving our review at
    that, once we read Irene Wanner's piece this morning in The Seattle
    Times. "Day by day, as I slogged through my appointed pages," writes
    Wanner, "I became increasingly frustrated. How could Marcom indulge
    herself with such language? She had received several of the writing
    world's juiciest plums - a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a PEN USA
    Literary Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writers' Award - yet this book
    circled on and on and on ... to what purpose?"

    That's not just unfair, it's lacking in subtlety. Yes, the prose is
    obscure and dense, but it's not a simple stylistic choice as Wanner
    seems to imply. In fact, for the genre, this is par for the course;
    there are rules to writing witness literature, and Marcom - to her
    detriment, in fact - is playing by the rules.

    As the above passage makes patently clear, the purpose for this
    seemingly impenetrable stream-of-consciousness is its ability to
    collapse time and space. In one single, strung-out sentence, we flow
    from LA's super-highways through a Guatemalan Indian's homeland, all
    the way back to the inherited memory of the genocide. The effect is
    to make the historically and geographically distant immediate and
    personal. As a device, its purpose is just the same (and just as
    central to the author's project) as Jonathan Safran Foer's use of
    multiple layers of narrative in Everything is Illuminated (about the
    Holocaust) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (about Sept. 11).
    But Foer's internal narratives, through which we in the present
    experience the past, leave these psychically traumatic events safely
    contextualized, first by the nature of being in the past, and then,
    as the narrative takes on its surreal qualities and the boundaries
    between past and present blur, by the awareness of the fictive nature
    of the device.

    We doubt that Marcom's book is going to stand the test of time to
    become a classic, or even, for that matter, garnish much attention
    from the media. But while she may have weaknesses and pretensions,
    the project of Draining the Sea is ambitious, and she deserves at
    least credit for that. This being the third novel in a projected
    trilogy about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath, perhaps she
    can now move on to new subjects for which her considerable gifts are
    suited, and manage to write a truly great novel.

    http://seattlest.com/2008/03/14/micheline_ marco.php
Working...
X