The San Diego Union-Tribune
April 1, 2007 Sunday
`Farm’: Family tree dripping blood bears fictional fruit
by Tiffany Lee-Youngren, Tiffany Lee-Youngren is a freelance writer.
Skylark Farm
Antonia Arslan
Knopf, 278 pages, $23.95
Each year in early spring, just as the crocuses are pushing their way
through the sun-warmed soil in a glorious display of regeneration,
the world commemorates the ashes and dust of the 6 million Jews who
perished during the Nazis’ "Final Solution." Early spring also brings
the anniversary of a lesser-known genocide, one that predates the
Nazi purges and killed more than 1 million Armenians. But in Turkey,
where most of those murders took place, Armenian Genocide Remembrance
Holiday goes officially un-commemorated. That’s because the Turkish
government, despite more than 90 years of international scholarly
research suggesting otherwise, insists that the Armenian massacres
resulted not from genocide but from inter-ethnic strife, disease and
famine caused by the chaos of World War I. When placed in this
contemporary political context, "Skylark Farm" bears the weight of
cold, hard evidence to the contrary. Antonia Arslan’s lyrical
meditation on the bonds of her Armenian family amid incomprehensible
suffering is too real, too harrowing to be a work of imagination or
obfuscation. Her decision to cast the members of her own family as
characters in her novel was a wise one: It brings murder on a
horrific and widespread scale down to a level any reader can
understand.
The merits of Arslan’s approach are nevertheless slow to reveal
themselves. It’s human nature (ghastly as it may be) to anticipate
the moment in a story when things go wrong, and this author takes a
long time getting there. She plucks names from her family tree and
drops them into her narrative like apples into a barrel, filling the
empty spaces, yes, but also weighing her story down with countless
names and faces.
But before this litany of family remembrances becomes too wearisome,
Arslan launches into the real story, a tale of humiliation, hunger
and suffering so great that it has gone down in history as the
world’s second-most studied case of genocide. With chilling attention
to detail, Arslan recounts the fateful day in May when most of the
men in her family were slaughtered as they picnicked on their
ancestral farm, save for one tiny baby boy whom the womenfolk had
dressed in girl’s clothing. Soaked with the blood of their husbands
and fathers, the females of the family were rounded up and marched to
a far-off city in the desert, food and water denied to them, human
dignity in even scarcer supply. Their struggle to survive becomes the
crux of Arslan’s tale, family lore passed down to her from the
estranged grandfather who tried to prevent it all from happening.
Arslan’s tone is detached enough to keep her story from becoming
maudlin, and although she has crafted a work that is technically
historical fiction, her poetic descriptions and portrayal of her
family’s Christian devotion imbue "Skylark Farm" with a poignancy
redolent of a fable. Arslan has done her family — and her people —
proud with this novel, proving herself an apt and capable chronicler
of a most shameful period in human history.
A Far Country
Daniel Mason
Knopf, 272 pages, $24
Starvation and suffering also play a central role in Daniel Mason’s
wrenching account of one girl’s search for her brother amid a
landscape of poverty and depression. "A Far Country" takes place in
an unnamed Third-World country that bears a notable resemblance to
Brazil, with its thorny backcountry and slum-riddled cities (one of
them marked by a cross on a tall mountaintop).
Isabel’s brother, Isaias, has joined the exodus of people who have
migrated from her tiny village to the city in the south, where
vermin-infested apartments and grueling factory jobs seem like an
escape when the worse fate is to spend one’s life cutting sugar cane
and subsisting on cactus during times of drought. Isabel, gifted with
the talent of "seeing farther," can’t bear to live without her
brother and soon follows him to the city, only to find racism,
violence and more poverty in place of the love she seeks.
But she also discovers that the skills she learned in the Backlands
— "skills for scavengers," she calls them — provide her with the
strength and savvy she needs to survive, the means to "find uses for
useless things."
Mason ("The Piano Tuner") has a preternatural gift for prose, and his
characterization of Isabel is one of the finest in any book of
fiction to have been released in the past year. Although Isabel’s
metaphysical talent for sensing presences is more alluded to than
illustrated in any detail, Mason has created in her a true heroine, a
young girl who manages to keep her honor and purity in a place and
time when anything can be bought, sold or stolen.
"It’s not too often that I get to do something good for someone
else," says a bus driver who takes Isabel to a hospital after she
collapses from dehydration. She may have found herself in "a far
country" with little compassion and little of familiarity to ground
her, but she knows the Earth, knows which people to seek out, which
trees to climb in search of the lofty salvation she is after.