The Daily Star, Lebanon
Oct 28 2006
Novelist with roots in Beirut wins Whiting Award
Daily Star staff
Saturday, October 28, 2006
BEIRUT: Saudi-born novelist Micheline Aharonian Marcom has been
awarded one of 10 annual Whiting Writers’ Awards for emerging
authors, each worth $40,000. The winners of this year’s prizes –
given to two novelists, three short story writers, three poets and
two playwrights in total, all of them in the early stages of their
careers – were announced in New York on Thursday.
Marcom was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in 1968, of mixed American,
Lebanese and Armenian parentage. She grew up in Los Angeles but spent
her formative summers in Beirut before the Civil War broke out.
Marcom’s first novel, "Three Apples Fell from Heaven," was published
in 2001. Set in Ottoman Turkey during the tumultuous two-year period
between 1915 and 1917, the novel caught the attention of critics for
its stylistic complexity. Marcom’s book threw up multiple
protagonists in a series of interlocking vignettes. The cast includes
Maritsa, a young woman harboring desires to be a young man; Lucine, a
low-level employee at the US Embassy and the consul’s lover; Sargis,
a poet losing his mind while hiding out in his mother’s attic; and
Rachel, a ghost of sorts who haunts the novel by offering reflections
on all the other characters from the bottom of a well.
If Marcom’s debut dealt directly with the Armenian genocide, then her
follow-up, "The Daydreaming Boy" published in 2004, traces its legacy
– the emotional aftermath haunting survivors of the massacres living
in Beirut in the 1960s. A middle-aged man named Vahe distracts
himself with torrid, adulterous affairs, but they all fail to turn
his mind from his brutal past, which he sees before him day in and
day out.
Again Marcom’s language is impressionistic and rich. Some sentences
go on and on, coiling one vibrant image into another and yet another.
Other sentences are short and rhythmic. One passage describes a
photograph of an unknown boy ripped from an old Armenian journal and
tucked into the protagonist’s wallet.
"His look is the look of sadness – in this photograph I can see it.
It is not the rags that tell of it, his stance with the bared knee
slightly bent, or the invisible hands, I assume he has hands. What
marks the public sadness for this boy?" Marcom writes. "He could very
well have been my uncle, my mother’s youngest cousin; we are kin in
any case, kin made from an event in history. Not one moment, but many
bound together and routed from hearths and bundles up in his raggy
hat-turban – there is of course the moment of the photograph."
"The Daydreaming Boy" is the second installment in a planned trilogy.
Marcom is currently a writer-in-residence at Mills College in
California. The other winner’s of this year’s Whiting Writers Awards
are novelist Nina Marie Martinez; short story writers Charles
D’Ambrosio, Yiyun Li and Patrick O’Keefe; poets Sherwin Bitsui, Suji
Kwock Kim and Tyehimba Jess; and playwrights Bruce Norris and Stephen
Adly Guirgis. – The Daily Star