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Book Review: Genocide's mark upon a tortured soul

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  • Book Review: Genocide's mark upon a tortured soul

    Los Angeles Times
    June 5, 2004 Saturday
    Home Edition

    BOOK REVIEW;
    Genocide's mark upon a tortured soul;
    The Daydreaming Boy: A Novel; Micheline Aharonian Marcom; Riverhead
    Books: 214 pp., $23.95

    by Bernadette Murphy, Special to The Times


    "The man who has no mother's form to form him is a sad man,
    unanchored man, vile and demoniac," confides Vahe Tcheubjian,
    narrator of Micheline Aharonian Marcom's beautiful and disturbing
    second novel, "The Daydreaming Boy," which details in stark terms the
    psychic aftermath of the Armenian genocide. Having written
    compellingly about the 1915-1918 massacre of more than a million
    Armenians in Turkey ("Three Apples Fell From Heaven"), Marcom turns
    her attention to the recurring distress of that event as played out
    in the life of one man.

    A middle-aged, successful Armenian businessman living in 1960s
    Beirut, Vahe is haunted by his past. He watches idly, smoking
    cigarettes on the balcony of his apartment, his back cooled by the
    cracked tiles, as scenes from his younger years replay themselves.
    Raised in a Beirut orphanage after having been abandoned in the wake
    of the massacre, with no knowledge of his family, he has spent his
    lifetime trying to undo the memories of his youth. Over the years, he
    has managed to convince himself that the child Vahe, the orphan, did
    not exist. He has placed that young boy, and all the other people he
    knew back then, in a "walnut box," he tells us: "I forgot them
    completely; I unexisted them and they accordingly disappeared from
    the box and then the box itself disappeared."

    But the past has a way of catching up with us even when we close it
    off from ourselves, and on Vahe's 46th birthday his younger self
    reappears like some monstrous dark specter, and the film of his
    childhood begins "playing and replaying and forward and back," until
    the memories threaten to unravel Vahe and the small comforts he's
    found.

    He soon becomes a man who can do little else but indulge in
    fantasies, which alternate between scenes of nurturing comfort and
    graphic sexuality, of gentle tenderness juxtaposed with
    survival-driven cruelty. His desire for his lost mother's loving
    touch converges with adult lust as he hungers after his neighbor's
    teenage Muslim maid. He takes countless walks in the city's zoo,
    imagining in the monkey Jumba a lost soul like himself, and he
    envisions viciously killing Jumba to relieve his own misery. Appalled
    at his thoughts, he wonders, "How did I become this sort of man?"

    Slowly and artfully, Marcom reveals to the reader (and to Vahe
    himself) the suffering of his early life. When he was first brought
    to the orphanage, he recognized the Armenian word for "mother" but
    spoke only Turkish, the language of the enemy. Was his father a Turk
    and his birth the outcome of his Armenian mother's rape? He knows
    nothing for sure. In the orphanage, he was taunted by the other boys,
    who beat out of him the only language he knew, until he found someone
    weaker than himself to be the object of their ridicule and cruelty.
    Vahe himself joined in the brutality visited on the newcomer, in an
    effort to shut off any tender feelings or signs of frailty. "I cannot
    bear it: the wars; the bloodletting; the untold things. I cannot,"
    Vahe exclaims as the memories flood back.

    >>From his reverie on the balcony he moves on to a reexamination of his
    hollow, midlife years married to Juliana, with whom he lives
    comfortably in pre-civil war Beirut and in whom he cannot confide --
    then on to explicit fantasies of sex and violence before winding his
    way back to what he can remember or conjecture about his origins.
    Eventually Marcom leads us into the 1980s and the destruction of
    Beirut by warring Christian and Muslim factions, mirroring Vahe's
    own, interior self-destruction.

    Marcom's stream-of-consciousness writing is deft and impressionistic:
    "I am lying on my back and it comes back to me; harks back to that
    other summer 1915, the summer of our death and yet my birth two years
    later, mine own birth after the death of a race and our tongue....
    How do I know something occurred if I myself have not been witness to
    it? How can the invisible history stories be so strong as to engender
    a hate that will lift a knife and plunge it into the flesh of another
    beast, a man; or to slaughter him with a rifle semi-automatic? ... I
    am no man to answer such questions, or even to posit them; I think:
    what did I do to deserve this?"

    Marcom answers Vahe's initial question -- "How did I become this sort
    of man?" -- by giving us his full and excruciating history, but that
    other question, the final one, remains unanswerable. Why do humans do
    horrible things to one another? How are we to survive such brutality
    -- except as Vahe has, by endeavoring to dream it all away?

    "The Daydreaming Boy" is a dazzling and disquieting account of what
    happens when our dreamscapes stop working as a defense against the
    past, and the awful reality of what we do to one another reasserts
    itself.

    GRAPHIC: PHOTO: VAHE'S STORY: In her second novel, "The Daydreaming
    Boy," Micheline Aharonian Marcom writes about a middle-aged Armenian
    businessman living in 1960s Beirut who is haunted by his past.
    PHOTOGRAPHER: Lawrence K. Ho Los Angeles Times
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