Helpful Score: 2
~ A NOVEL ABOUT THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND THE COMPLEXITIES OF MEMORY, GUILT, LOVE, AND FORGIVENESS (4.5 stars) ~
This book was haunting and beautifully written - this last being all the more noticeable and affecting given the utter ugliness and horror that the language is often portraying. Mustian brings to life with searing vividness the squalor, disease, and everyday violence that made up the caravans, tent cities, and refugee destinations of the Armenian Genocide. He uses the same blunt simplicity to describe both the rape of a woman trying to save her child in wartime Turkey and the seemingly unbridgeable gap existing between a daughter and her dying father at the end of the 20th century in America. There were many passages that I marked off as I read through, thinking that I would choose one or two to quote in my review, but now having finished the book I find myself unable to pick just a couple.
THE GENDARME is a novel about the two very different stories that make up one man's life. Emmett Conn (Ahmet Khan) is a man at the end of his life. He's 92-years-old, a widower, and has two daughters, neither of whom he is very close to. After being diagnosed with a brain tumor, he starts to dream about another life during another time in another land: that of a young 17-year-old gendarme in charge of driving a caravan of Armenians out of Turkey and into Syria.
Ahmet has very few memories of anything before his early twenties, when he was found by the British on a battlefield and taken to a London hospital to be treated. This life that comes to him in pieces and fragments is not one that he remembers, yet as the story of it begins to unfold, he recognizes it as his own and hungers for the complete picture and for the self-knowledge that has so long alluded him. This other tale is one filled with violence, confusion, anger, guilt, and love bordering on obsession. Central to it is the young woman Araxie, one of Ahmet's Armenian prisoners, and their meeting seems fated, with both lives irreparably and irrevocably changed as a result.
Through this novel, the reader is given a stark look at the Armenian Genocide and Mustian takes an incredible chance by portraying it all through the eyes of one of the perpetrator's. This is a heavy responsibility and a careful balance must be achieved, but the author is able to pull it off and the book, as well as its message, are all the stronger because of it. With his choice of heroes, Mustian leaves the reader conflicted from the beginning, for while we are able to relate to and sympathize with elderly Emmett Conn, the young Ahmet Khan is a rapist and murderer.
His actions are not described in a vacuum, however, and as we are shown the atrocities he witnesses and commits, we are also given insight into his own confusion and questioning over why this is all taking place and what the purpose is. He is not an unwilling actor and should by no means be seen as such, but the truth is that he is also a young man - almost a boy - who seems to be swept along by the events surrounding him, doing what he's been told to do, accepting the reasoning behind it, and not questioning at first whether it's right or wrong. As the full of Ahmet's story is revealed to Emmett, he is left with the pressing and urgent need to find the woman whom he loved so profoundly and to beg her forgiveness.
One criticism I can't go without mentioning is that I could never quite figure out Emmett's feeling towards and relationship with his wife, Carol. She remained something of an enigma to me throughout the book and although she's not actively present in either the main story or the flashbacks, I thought she should have nonetheless been more fully developed. I'm also not certain how I feel about the conclusion in the second-to-last chapter; it brought me to tears, but I think the story might have been served better and the reader left more satisfied if it had been written in a different manner. (It would be a spoiler if I wrote anything more or included my suggestion).
I'm curious to see what the reaction to THE GENDARME will be, given the political tensions and continued sensitivity that surround the Armenian Genocide, including even using the word "genocide." I think the book would make an excellent book club selection and might be further enhanced by being read alongside a non-fiction account. One that the author mentions is Peter Balakian's BLACK DOG OF FATE: AN AMERICAN SON UNCOVERS HIS ARMENIAN PAST, and there is also THE BURNING TIGRIS: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND AMERICA'S RESPONSE by the same author, both of which are highly rated. (I myself have not read either).
Overall, I would highly recommend this book: it is a well-written, emotionally involving, and deeply moving story. Mustian seeks to highlight the importance of seeking forgiveness and the necessity of remembering, and he succeeds wonderfully. THE GENDARME is about forgiveness and guilt, memory and forgetting, acknowledgement and denial, love and hate, and the strength of the human spirit and the complexity of human beings. It reinforces the undeniable truth that we can never be just one thing or one act, but that we are defined by a culmination of all aspects of our character and all the actions and decisions that we make throughout our life.
In one of the last pages, a character remarks: "A few things remain, seared so deep as to defy alteration. ... Maybe there are some things that should be passed on, that should never be forgotten" (p.283). This is echoed in Mustian's Author's Note, where he writes: "Remembering is living. Forgetting, as Ahmet Khan learns, has its costs. ... We want to know. Sometimes that knowledge is painful, or inconvenient, or even damning. But it is essential. It exposes us for what we have been, and can be."
[This review is of an advanced copy format of the book]
This book was haunting and beautifully written - this last being all the more noticeable and affecting given the utter ugliness and horror that the language is often portraying. Mustian brings to life with searing vividness the squalor, disease, and everyday violence that made up the caravans, tent cities, and refugee destinations of the Armenian Genocide. He uses the same blunt simplicity to describe both the rape of a woman trying to save her child in wartime Turkey and the seemingly unbridgeable gap existing between a daughter and her dying father at the end of the 20th century in America. There were many passages that I marked off as I read through, thinking that I would choose one or two to quote in my review, but now having finished the book I find myself unable to pick just a couple.
THE GENDARME is a novel about the two very different stories that make up one man's life. Emmett Conn (Ahmet Khan) is a man at the end of his life. He's 92-years-old, a widower, and has two daughters, neither of whom he is very close to. After being diagnosed with a brain tumor, he starts to dream about another life during another time in another land: that of a young 17-year-old gendarme in charge of driving a caravan of Armenians out of Turkey and into Syria.
Ahmet has very few memories of anything before his early twenties, when he was found by the British on a battlefield and taken to a London hospital to be treated. This life that comes to him in pieces and fragments is not one that he remembers, yet as the story of it begins to unfold, he recognizes it as his own and hungers for the complete picture and for the self-knowledge that has so long alluded him. This other tale is one filled with violence, confusion, anger, guilt, and love bordering on obsession. Central to it is the young woman Araxie, one of Ahmet's Armenian prisoners, and their meeting seems fated, with both lives irreparably and irrevocably changed as a result.
Through this novel, the reader is given a stark look at the Armenian Genocide and Mustian takes an incredible chance by portraying it all through the eyes of one of the perpetrator's. This is a heavy responsibility and a careful balance must be achieved, but the author is able to pull it off and the book, as well as its message, are all the stronger because of it. With his choice of heroes, Mustian leaves the reader conflicted from the beginning, for while we are able to relate to and sympathize with elderly Emmett Conn, the young Ahmet Khan is a rapist and murderer.
His actions are not described in a vacuum, however, and as we are shown the atrocities he witnesses and commits, we are also given insight into his own confusion and questioning over why this is all taking place and what the purpose is. He is not an unwilling actor and should by no means be seen as such, but the truth is that he is also a young man - almost a boy - who seems to be swept along by the events surrounding him, doing what he's been told to do, accepting the reasoning behind it, and not questioning at first whether it's right or wrong. As the full of Ahmet's story is revealed to Emmett, he is left with the pressing and urgent need to find the woman whom he loved so profoundly and to beg her forgiveness.
One criticism I can't go without mentioning is that I could never quite figure out Emmett's feeling towards and relationship with his wife, Carol. She remained something of an enigma to me throughout the book and although she's not actively present in either the main story or the flashbacks, I thought she should have nonetheless been more fully developed. I'm also not certain how I feel about the conclusion in the second-to-last chapter; it brought me to tears, but I think the story might have been served better and the reader left more satisfied if it had been written in a different manner. (It would be a spoiler if I wrote anything more or included my suggestion).
I'm curious to see what the reaction to THE GENDARME will be, given the political tensions and continued sensitivity that surround the Armenian Genocide, including even using the word "genocide." I think the book would make an excellent book club selection and might be further enhanced by being read alongside a non-fiction account. One that the author mentions is Peter Balakian's BLACK DOG OF FATE: AN AMERICAN SON UNCOVERS HIS ARMENIAN PAST, and there is also THE BURNING TIGRIS: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND AMERICA'S RESPONSE by the same author, both of which are highly rated. (I myself have not read either).
Overall, I would highly recommend this book: it is a well-written, emotionally involving, and deeply moving story. Mustian seeks to highlight the importance of seeking forgiveness and the necessity of remembering, and he succeeds wonderfully. THE GENDARME is about forgiveness and guilt, memory and forgetting, acknowledgement and denial, love and hate, and the strength of the human spirit and the complexity of human beings. It reinforces the undeniable truth that we can never be just one thing or one act, but that we are defined by a culmination of all aspects of our character and all the actions and decisions that we make throughout our life.
In one of the last pages, a character remarks: "A few things remain, seared so deep as to defy alteration. ... Maybe there are some things that should be passed on, that should never be forgotten" (p.283). This is echoed in Mustian's Author's Note, where he writes: "Remembering is living. Forgetting, as Ahmet Khan learns, has its costs. ... We want to know. Sometimes that knowledge is painful, or inconvenient, or even damning. But it is essential. It exposes us for what we have been, and can be."
[This review is of an advanced copy format of the book]
