Micheline AHARONIAN MARCOM
( n. 1968 )

A masterly depiction of the internal dislocation of a refugee—a fictional self-portrait that is at once lyrical and phantasmagorical, hallucinatory and searingly acute.
Micheline Aharoman Marcom's impressive and lauded fiction debut, Three Apples Fell from Heaven, depicted the lives shattered by the Turkish government's brutal campaign that resulted in the deaths of more than a million Armenians. Now, her second novel, The Daydreaming Boy, carries forward the story of the refugees from the twentieth century's first genocide, and it shows the growth of this young writer as a gifted and fearless stylist.
Vahé Tcheubjian is an upstanding, unremarkable member of the Armenian community of Beirut in the 1960s. He and his wife attend concerts and dinners, and partake of the sophisticated, continental culture that distinguishes the Beirut of his time as a cosmopolitan capital on the Mediterranean, the "Paris of the Middle East." But inside, Vah6 is in turmoil—racked by memories of the escape from the campaign of genocide, the years spent in a Lebanese orphanage, the brutalities of his fellow orphans, ferocious and desperate and unloved. He seeks refuge in an outrageous and graphic fantasy life that flirts dangerously with emotional catastrophe, just as the Beirut he has come to adopt as his home edges toward a devastating civil war.

Here is a novel of import and style, set in 1915-1917, the years of the Ottoman Turkish government's campaign of unspeakable brutality that resulted in the deaths of more than a million Armenians. In a sequence of chapters that have the weight and economy of poetry, Micheline Aharonian Marcom introduces us to the stories of Anaguil, an Armenian girl taken in by Turkish neighbors after the death of her parents, who now views the remains of her world through a Muslim veil; Sargis, a poet hidden away in his mother's attic, dressed in woman's clothing and steadily going mad; Lucine, a servant and lover of the American consul, reviled by villagers for the illusory privilege she enjoys; Maritsa. a rage-filled Muslim wife who becomes a whore while her husband is at the front; and Dickran, an infant left behind under a tree on the long exodus from an Armenian village, who reaches with tiny hands to touch the stars and dies with his name unrecorded. Through these lives, we witness the vanishing of a people.
In pages replete with indelible images of beauty and horror, Marcom conjures the steam and the gossip of the hamam, the ghostly fragrance of rose-petal preserves the metallic chill of fear. Her novel is an elegy to the final days of Orientalism and an elegant memorial to the victims of the twentieth century's first genocide. Together, the stories of these lives form a narrative mosaic—faceted, complex, exquisite in its detail, a devastating tableau.