Powerful and sensitive, this tragic novel helps illuminate a historical episode still too little known or acknowledged.
On the eve of war and destruction, an Armenian family tries to maintain its traditional way of life in this historical novel.
As this luminous, doom-tinged tale begins, it’s 1913 in eastern Turkey, and in the little Armenian village of Salor, the headman’s teenage daughter Anno is hiding in an abandoned well, not only to escape from war or soldiers, but to evade prying eyes on this busy day when her sister is getting married and to steal a moment with Daron, the young man she loves. Their Romeo-and-Juliet story occupies much of the novel. Anno’s father objects to the marriage; he wrongly believes that Daron’s father has been sexually immoral. As this knot gets unraveled, the villagers go about their daily, age-old agrarian routines. And some men quietly make dangerous trips to gather arms and ammo, especially after 1915, when the Ottoman government begins rounding up and murdering Armenian intellectuals and political leaders. Armenians remember the massacres of 1894 and wish to be prepared this time. “But,” as one fedayee, or freedom fighter, observes, “how will a tiny band of men such as ourselves, with nothing but the guns we can smuggle, protect our people from the whole of the Turkish army?” They can’t, and this knowledge hangs over the reader like the clouds veiling Salor’s nearby Mount Maratuk. In her debut novel, Boyadjian vividly conjures the specific sensory details of the Armenians’ lost world—food, drink, nature, daily tasks, and handmade objects, such as a rug given for a wedding “with such a joyous blend of deep reds, oranges, and yellows that everyone gasped.” The story is fiction but is based on memories from the author’s four grandparents—all survivors of the 1915 Armenian genocide. Their survival adds a note of hope.
Powerful and sensitive, this tragic novel helps illuminate a historical episode still too little known or acknowledged.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9911241-0-7
Page Count: 281
Publisher: Salor Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Ernest Hemingway, who met Markham on safari two years before her Atlantic crossing, tagged her as “a high-grade bitch” but...
A full-throttle dive into the psyche and romantic attachments of Beryl Markham—whose 1936 solo flight across the Atlantic in a two-seater prop plane (carrying emergency fuel in the extra seat) transfixed the world.
As conceived in this second historical by novelist McLain (The Paris Wife, 2011, etc.), Markham—nee Beryl Clutterbuck—is the neglected daughter of an impecunious racehorse trainer who fails to make a go at farming in British East Africa and a feckless, squeamish mother who bolts back to England with their older son. Set on her own two feet early, she is barely schooled but precociously brave and wired for physical challenges—a trait honed by her childhood companion Kibii (a lifelong friend and son of a local chief). In the Mau forest—“before Kenya was Kenya”—she finds a “heaven fitted exactly to me.” Keeping poised around large mammals (a leopard and a lion also figure significantly) is in her blood and later gains her credibility at the racecourse in Nairobi, where she becomes the youngest trainer ever licensed. Statuesque, blonde, and carrying an air of self-sufficiency—she marries, disastrously, at 16 but is granted a separation to train Lord Delamere’s bloodstock—Beryl turns heads among the cheerfully doped and dissolute Muthaiga Club set (“I don’t know what it is about Africa, but champagne is absolutely compulsory here”), charms not one but two heirs to the British crown at Baroness Karen Blixen’s soiree, and sets her cap on Blixen’s lover, Denys Fitch Hatton. She’ll have him, too, and much enjoyment derives from guessing how that script, and other intrigues, will play out in McLain’s retelling. Fittingly, McLain has Markham tell her story from an altitude of 1,800 feet: “I’m meant to do this,” she begins, “stitch my name on the sky.” Popularly regarded as “a kind of Circe” (to quote Isak Dinesen biographer Judith Thurman), the young woman McLain explores owns her mistakes (at least privately) and is more boxed in by class, gender assumptions, and self-doubt than her reputation as aviatrix, big game hunter, and femme fatale suggests.
Ernest Hemingway, who met Markham on safari two years before her Atlantic crossing, tagged her as “a high-grade bitch” but proclaimed her 1942 memoir West with the Night “bloody wonderful.” Readers might even say the same of McLain’s sparkling prose and sympathetic reimagining.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53418-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PROFILES
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.
The husband-and-wife team who have given us refreshing English versions of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov now present their lucid translation of Tolstoy's panoramic tale of adultery and society: a masterwork that may well be the greatest realistic novel ever written. It's a beautifully structured fiction, which contrasts the aristocratic world of two prominent families with the ideal utopian one dreamed by earnest Konstantin Levin (a virtual self-portrait). The characters of the enchanting Anna (a descendant of Flaubert's Emma Bovary and Fontane's Effi Briest, and forerunner of countless later literary heroines), the lover (Vronsky) who proves worthy of her indiscretion, her bloodless husband Karenin and ingenuous epicurean brother Stiva, among many others, are quite literally unforgettable. Perhaps the greatest virtue of this splendid translation is the skill with which it distinguishes the accents of Anna's romantic egoism from the spare narrative clarity with which a vast spectrum of Russian life is vividly portrayed.
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89478-8
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
PERSPECTIVES
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