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The Levantine Cultural Center
A New Novel Captures Life in Los Angeles and Beirut
posted November 21, 2012 - 8:59am by Editor
Reviewed By Jordan Elgrably
[This Angelic Land, a novel by Aris Janigian, West of West Books, 2012]
Do you remember the early `90s in Los Angeles? Between the riots, the
Northridge earthquake, OJ Simpson and the Malibu mudslides, it became an
apocalyptic landscape, at once horrific, beautiful, and unforgettable
Not unlike Beirut during its civil war.
This Angelic Land is a novel set in Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney
King riots - the largest, most destructive civil uprising in American
history. Adam Derderian, the central protagonist, is a 27-year-old
Lebanese Armenian bar owner. The narrative shifts back and forth from
his perspective to that of his brother, a New York-based artist five
years his senior. The backdrop is their youth during the Lebanese civil
war in Beirut - the longest civil war in modern history.
The novel frames the riots "as a historically conditioned collision of
dispossessed tribes on a patch of contested ground," thus conjuring an
intriguing comparison between Los Angeles and Beirut, two cities not
often juxtaposed, though perhaps they should be in view of the fact that
Beirut for the longest time was a cosmopolitan, multicultural, Levantine
environment, home to seventeen different religious communities and
countless ethnic neighborhoods. (Thanks to the machinations of two L.A.
councilman, Dennis Zine and Eric Garcetti, today Los Angeles and Beirut
are sister cities.)
Rodney King died this year, drowning in his swimming pool under
circumstances that remain murky, yet the beginning of his story (and
ours) these twenty years later comes into stark relief: "In black and
white, the monochrome color of the plainest of dreams, several police,
batons cocked, surrounded a man prone on the ground with his head
vaguely raised. Then the man rose, and a policeman struck him, and the
man went down, and then rose again and the policeman struck him again,
and again...Suddenly, the man, like some cornered and wounded buffalo,
lunged, and at the vile sight of his unlikely power they lunged back,
his buffalo-sized body absorbing blow after baton blow."
Fortunately for the reader, Aris Janigian writes with the muscular prose
of an old-school fiction junkie, and so between the action and the
characters' reflections, this novel is a page-turner. Raised before the
advent of our screen culture (throughly dominated today by smart phones
and texting), Janigian is a longtime L.A. resident and former humanities
professor at SCI-Arc whose two previous novels areBloodvine and
Riverbig. He also co-authored Something for Nothing, a book on digital
design, with April Greiman.
Janigian packs the description of riots in L.A. and life in Beirut with
pithy observations and gritty realism. He also offers up two
particularly memorable characters in "the Kurd" and "the Wizard," the
latter a gay aging college professor and reclusive intellectual who
befriends Adam during one of the darkest periods of his young life. The
Kurd, meanwhile, is sui generis, offering some of the most curmudgeonly
moments in the story. Though he is a Muslim from northern Iraq, the Kurd
comes off as a wry critic of Islam:
"I tell you, this country and its hypocrisy is reminding me more and
more of Islam," said the Kurd." Where everything is paved over with
religion and morality you will find in the tiniest cracks the most
extreme hypocrisy and decadence. Look at these shahs and princes and
whatever, these wicked little Muslim god-trembling playboys from Dubai
and The Emirates and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, all these disgusting oil
slicks; they buy girls from around the world and do to them things the
American Cup of Joe can't even imagine. I tell you, America is turning
this way, too."
Lest one suspect the author of a little bit of Islamophobia, he has the
Kurd voice criticism of the other People of the Book as well:
"Look at the Jews, a people who never looked to anyone for a shekel, the
way they have become crybabies. Every third millionaire is a Jew and
half the nations on earth are shoving billions to cover their loss and
he acts like some poor orphan still stuck in the ghetto, whining and
pounding fists and jumping up and down, making the world believe that
behind every corner a giant waits to stomp him to death when in fact
there is nothing more than a neurotic little midget..."
If the Kurd appears now and then for some comic relief, the Wizard seems
to embody the author's attempt to engage in psychological introspection
about his characters, and perhaps himself.
Make no mistake, This Angelic Land (the title taken from a poem by
William Blake) is an all-American novel, yet it bares its Middle Eastern
soul. Its characters may have left Beirut during the civil war to
emigrate to America, but their roots are firmly planted in the Levant.
"Back in New York," the brother of his protagonist (Janigian's alter
ego?), reflects, "the friends I'd collected, a kind of second family,
understood what I was feeling all too well: a Palestinian poet, a
Persian museum curator, an Iraqi composer, a Syrian stand-up comedian,
and others, all of us exiles from historically rich cultures that were
in tatters. We would meet three nights a week for kebobs, and hummus,
and taboule, pounding our fists in outrage at the latest caricature of
the Middle East. Every week we watched the cradle of civilization
wheeled into the psych-ward. They showed our wars, internal strife,
corrupt leaders and terrorists and jihadists and self-immolating
pilgrims, but they never once let it be known that our birthplace was
also the birthplace of agriculture, writing, and the fucking wheel!"
What makes this novel unique, finally, is the way in which it almost
organically spins east and west together, interweaving Middle Eastern
and American characters and identities as if they are inextricably part
of one another's past, present, future. Says the Kurd:
"I loved to watch this Star Trek when I first came to America: Kirk and
Scotty and Zulu and Chkov and Orooroo and McCoy, zipping to galaxies in
the blink of an eye, light speed warp speed, I don't know what speed,
reading minds and healing with a wand, but with their simple humanity
shining bright.
"For me, the starship Enterprise was like a giant lantern these brave
men and women carried through the darkest of dark ignorance galaxies.
The essence of America, what the future was supposed to bring, but with
each step forward in technology our simply humanity has taken ten steps
back..."
Ultimately This Angelic Land is about the tragedies of the macrocosm
contrasted with a personal tragedy in the microcosm that was at least as
likely to have occurred in Beirut as in Los Angeles. Readers are left
wishing they could encounter Janigian's cast of characters in his
protagonist's bar and continue the conversation.
From: Baghdasarian
The Levantine Cultural Center
A New Novel Captures Life in Los Angeles and Beirut
posted November 21, 2012 - 8:59am by Editor
Reviewed By Jordan Elgrably
[This Angelic Land, a novel by Aris Janigian, West of West Books, 2012]
Do you remember the early `90s in Los Angeles? Between the riots, the
Northridge earthquake, OJ Simpson and the Malibu mudslides, it became an
apocalyptic landscape, at once horrific, beautiful, and unforgettable
Not unlike Beirut during its civil war.
This Angelic Land is a novel set in Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney
King riots - the largest, most destructive civil uprising in American
history. Adam Derderian, the central protagonist, is a 27-year-old
Lebanese Armenian bar owner. The narrative shifts back and forth from
his perspective to that of his brother, a New York-based artist five
years his senior. The backdrop is their youth during the Lebanese civil
war in Beirut - the longest civil war in modern history.
The novel frames the riots "as a historically conditioned collision of
dispossessed tribes on a patch of contested ground," thus conjuring an
intriguing comparison between Los Angeles and Beirut, two cities not
often juxtaposed, though perhaps they should be in view of the fact that
Beirut for the longest time was a cosmopolitan, multicultural, Levantine
environment, home to seventeen different religious communities and
countless ethnic neighborhoods. (Thanks to the machinations of two L.A.
councilman, Dennis Zine and Eric Garcetti, today Los Angeles and Beirut
are sister cities.)
Rodney King died this year, drowning in his swimming pool under
circumstances that remain murky, yet the beginning of his story (and
ours) these twenty years later comes into stark relief: "In black and
white, the monochrome color of the plainest of dreams, several police,
batons cocked, surrounded a man prone on the ground with his head
vaguely raised. Then the man rose, and a policeman struck him, and the
man went down, and then rose again and the policeman struck him again,
and again...Suddenly, the man, like some cornered and wounded buffalo,
lunged, and at the vile sight of his unlikely power they lunged back,
his buffalo-sized body absorbing blow after baton blow."
Fortunately for the reader, Aris Janigian writes with the muscular prose
of an old-school fiction junkie, and so between the action and the
characters' reflections, this novel is a page-turner. Raised before the
advent of our screen culture (throughly dominated today by smart phones
and texting), Janigian is a longtime L.A. resident and former humanities
professor at SCI-Arc whose two previous novels areBloodvine and
Riverbig. He also co-authored Something for Nothing, a book on digital
design, with April Greiman.
Janigian packs the description of riots in L.A. and life in Beirut with
pithy observations and gritty realism. He also offers up two
particularly memorable characters in "the Kurd" and "the Wizard," the
latter a gay aging college professor and reclusive intellectual who
befriends Adam during one of the darkest periods of his young life. The
Kurd, meanwhile, is sui generis, offering some of the most curmudgeonly
moments in the story. Though he is a Muslim from northern Iraq, the Kurd
comes off as a wry critic of Islam:
"I tell you, this country and its hypocrisy is reminding me more and
more of Islam," said the Kurd." Where everything is paved over with
religion and morality you will find in the tiniest cracks the most
extreme hypocrisy and decadence. Look at these shahs and princes and
whatever, these wicked little Muslim god-trembling playboys from Dubai
and The Emirates and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, all these disgusting oil
slicks; they buy girls from around the world and do to them things the
American Cup of Joe can't even imagine. I tell you, America is turning
this way, too."
Lest one suspect the author of a little bit of Islamophobia, he has the
Kurd voice criticism of the other People of the Book as well:
"Look at the Jews, a people who never looked to anyone for a shekel, the
way they have become crybabies. Every third millionaire is a Jew and
half the nations on earth are shoving billions to cover their loss and
he acts like some poor orphan still stuck in the ghetto, whining and
pounding fists and jumping up and down, making the world believe that
behind every corner a giant waits to stomp him to death when in fact
there is nothing more than a neurotic little midget..."
If the Kurd appears now and then for some comic relief, the Wizard seems
to embody the author's attempt to engage in psychological introspection
about his characters, and perhaps himself.
Make no mistake, This Angelic Land (the title taken from a poem by
William Blake) is an all-American novel, yet it bares its Middle Eastern
soul. Its characters may have left Beirut during the civil war to
emigrate to America, but their roots are firmly planted in the Levant.
"Back in New York," the brother of his protagonist (Janigian's alter
ego?), reflects, "the friends I'd collected, a kind of second family,
understood what I was feeling all too well: a Palestinian poet, a
Persian museum curator, an Iraqi composer, a Syrian stand-up comedian,
and others, all of us exiles from historically rich cultures that were
in tatters. We would meet three nights a week for kebobs, and hummus,
and taboule, pounding our fists in outrage at the latest caricature of
the Middle East. Every week we watched the cradle of civilization
wheeled into the psych-ward. They showed our wars, internal strife,
corrupt leaders and terrorists and jihadists and self-immolating
pilgrims, but they never once let it be known that our birthplace was
also the birthplace of agriculture, writing, and the fucking wheel!"
What makes this novel unique, finally, is the way in which it almost
organically spins east and west together, interweaving Middle Eastern
and American characters and identities as if they are inextricably part
of one another's past, present, future. Says the Kurd:
"I loved to watch this Star Trek when I first came to America: Kirk and
Scotty and Zulu and Chkov and Orooroo and McCoy, zipping to galaxies in
the blink of an eye, light speed warp speed, I don't know what speed,
reading minds and healing with a wand, but with their simple humanity
shining bright.
"For me, the starship Enterprise was like a giant lantern these brave
men and women carried through the darkest of dark ignorance galaxies.
The essence of America, what the future was supposed to bring, but with
each step forward in technology our simply humanity has taken ten steps
back..."
Ultimately This Angelic Land is about the tragedies of the macrocosm
contrasted with a personal tragedy in the microcosm that was at least as
likely to have occurred in Beirut as in Los Angeles. Readers are left
wishing they could encounter Janigian's cast of characters in his
protagonist's bar and continue the conversation.
From: Baghdasarian