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Columbus Dispatch
July 22 2012
Book Review | The Sandcastle Girls: Family's story illuminates
genocide Chris Bohjalian
By Margaret Quamme
For The Columbus Dispatch Sunday July 22, 2012 9:58 AM
During World War I, 1.5 million Armenian civilians died at the hands
of the Turks. Some were killed; others were `relocated' to regions
where they were left to starve or die of disease.
Like any other genocide, the `Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing
About,' as the narrator of The Sandcastle Girls calls it, is almost
too horrifyingly immense to put into fiction.
Armenian-American novelist Chris Bohjalian, whose earlier novels are
set in contemporary times, succeeds by focusing on a few individuals
and moving fluidly among their points of view.
For a historical novel, The Sandcastle Girls is remarkably supple,
employing only the most telling of details.
The novel moves between the present and the early years of the war.
The narrator, Laura Petrosian, has grown up in an assimilated
part-Armenian family in a `tony suburban enclave outside of Manhattan
or in Miami.' She remembers her Armenian grandparents' home in a New
York suburb as vaguely exotic, with hookah pipes, Oriental carpets and
`the enveloping aroma of cooked lamb and mint,' but she knows very
little about their pasts.After their deaths, she is drawn to find out
more, and what she discovers becomes the story revealed gradually in
the novel.
The woman who would become Laura's grandmother, Elizabeth Endicott, is
a recent graduate of Mount Holyoke when she arrives with her
banker-philanthropist father in Aleppo, Syria, in 1915, with the
intent of nursing the Armenian refugees there.
Laura's future grandfather, Armen, is an Armenian engineer who has
come to Aleppo in search of his missing wife and infant daughter. Yet
he is almost certain they have died.
The two fall in love but are separated as Armen leaves to join the
Australians and New Zealanders fighting the Turks at Gallipoli.
Their then separate stories, which appear in brief episodes, alternate
with the stories of others: a young girl rendered almost mute by what
she has seen as she is taken to Aleppo, the thoughtful American consul
in the city, two Germans who take pictures to record what has happened
to the dislocated Armenians, a desperate young widow, a Turkish
soldier torn in his loyalties.
Laura, who finds herself increasingly obsessed with her grandparents'
story, pulls the reader into an experience that might otherwise seem
too far away in time and place - and in extremity - to process.
`My sense is that if you look at anyone's family in 1915 - an era we
see through a haze of black-and-white photographs or scratched and
grainy silent film footage, the movements of everyone oddly jerky - it
will feel rather epic. And I honestly don't view my family's saga as
epic.'
She and Bohjalian keep their eyes on the personal, the little moments
that illuminate broader social movements. The Sandcastle Girls doesn't
have an entirely successful plot: Elizabeth and Armen fall in love too
fast, and Bohjalian resorts to coincidences that would make Dickens
blush. But moment by moment, and passage by passage, the novel lights
up a disturbing period of history.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/life_and_entertainment/2012/07/22/familys-story-illuminates-genocide.html
July 22 2012
Book Review | The Sandcastle Girls: Family's story illuminates
genocide Chris Bohjalian
By Margaret Quamme
For The Columbus Dispatch Sunday July 22, 2012 9:58 AM
During World War I, 1.5 million Armenian civilians died at the hands
of the Turks. Some were killed; others were `relocated' to regions
where they were left to starve or die of disease.
Like any other genocide, the `Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing
About,' as the narrator of The Sandcastle Girls calls it, is almost
too horrifyingly immense to put into fiction.
Armenian-American novelist Chris Bohjalian, whose earlier novels are
set in contemporary times, succeeds by focusing on a few individuals
and moving fluidly among their points of view.
For a historical novel, The Sandcastle Girls is remarkably supple,
employing only the most telling of details.
The novel moves between the present and the early years of the war.
The narrator, Laura Petrosian, has grown up in an assimilated
part-Armenian family in a `tony suburban enclave outside of Manhattan
or in Miami.' She remembers her Armenian grandparents' home in a New
York suburb as vaguely exotic, with hookah pipes, Oriental carpets and
`the enveloping aroma of cooked lamb and mint,' but she knows very
little about their pasts.After their deaths, she is drawn to find out
more, and what she discovers becomes the story revealed gradually in
the novel.
The woman who would become Laura's grandmother, Elizabeth Endicott, is
a recent graduate of Mount Holyoke when she arrives with her
banker-philanthropist father in Aleppo, Syria, in 1915, with the
intent of nursing the Armenian refugees there.
Laura's future grandfather, Armen, is an Armenian engineer who has
come to Aleppo in search of his missing wife and infant daughter. Yet
he is almost certain they have died.
The two fall in love but are separated as Armen leaves to join the
Australians and New Zealanders fighting the Turks at Gallipoli.
Their then separate stories, which appear in brief episodes, alternate
with the stories of others: a young girl rendered almost mute by what
she has seen as she is taken to Aleppo, the thoughtful American consul
in the city, two Germans who take pictures to record what has happened
to the dislocated Armenians, a desperate young widow, a Turkish
soldier torn in his loyalties.
Laura, who finds herself increasingly obsessed with her grandparents'
story, pulls the reader into an experience that might otherwise seem
too far away in time and place - and in extremity - to process.
`My sense is that if you look at anyone's family in 1915 - an era we
see through a haze of black-and-white photographs or scratched and
grainy silent film footage, the movements of everyone oddly jerky - it
will feel rather epic. And I honestly don't view my family's saga as
epic.'
She and Bohjalian keep their eyes on the personal, the little moments
that illuminate broader social movements. The Sandcastle Girls doesn't
have an entirely successful plot: Elizabeth and Armen fall in love too
fast, and Bohjalian resorts to coincidences that would make Dickens
blush. But moment by moment, and passage by passage, the novel lights
up a disturbing period of history.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/life_and_entertainment/2012/07/22/familys-story-illuminates-genocide.html