Arts & Book Review
January 18, 2008
First Edition
Where memory becomes legend;
Alev Adil
Skylark Farm By Antonia Arslan, trans. Geoffrey Brock Atlantic £12.99
(275pp) £11.69 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897
BOOKS; Pg. 26
It is 1915, and Sempad the prosperous pharmacist and his family are
excitedly making preparations for his brother Yerwant’s visit after
decades abroad. The Pharmacie Hayastane, named after the lost
homeland of the Armenians, is a "beacon of prog-ress and
civilisation" in their little Anatolian town. The Arslanian family
are busy putting the finishing touches to Skylark Farm, their new
country house, with tennis and croquet lawns and rose-covered
pergolas, while in Italy Yerwant dreams of building a villa nearby
where he can retire.
This is a bucolic paradise, yet from the first we know that disaster
looms; most of the family will perish. The reader has already met
little Henriette, three in 1915, as an old lady accompanying the
author to her first name-day church service in Italy. Arslan’s first
novel is also a family memoir, and bears witness to the Armenian
massacre that wiped out so many of her forebears in Turkey.
Her imagined history is frequently mystical. Some have had
premonitions, "smelled blood in the air, caught the scent of evil" or
had visions of the archangel surrounded by evil fire. The
paterfamilias, Hamparzum, sees the horsemen of the Apocalypse as his
toddler grandson feeds him grapes on his deathbed. He entrusts the
child to the Virgin as he dies.
The atrocities they suffer are hard to read, both because of the
horrific events and Arslan’s purple prose. Leslie is "flung against
the wall, where his small round head smashes like a ripe coconut,
spraying blood and brain across the delicate floral designs." Carnage
becomes religious kitsch, as when Hripsime sees her baby skewered on
a bayonet, "the joyous soul of her little Vartan hesitantly trying
out his new wings".
Leaving aside literary quality, Arslan’s novel raises compelling
questions about the traumatic historical events that shaped our
inherited identity – here, where memory becomes third-generation
legend. The Armenian massacres are said to have served as a model for
Hitler’s subjugation of Poland. Here the collective memory of the
Holocaust serves as the model for imagining the Armenian genocide.
Arslan inappropriately attributes Nazi ideologies to the Ottomans.
Setrak the baker becomes a sub-human collaborator with the Kurdish
guards. Arslan calls him "a capo": I read this to mean kapo, a term
borrowed from Nazi concentration camps. This was the only moment
Geoffrey Brock’s translation offered anything less than lucid
clarity.
The narrative has echoes of Schindler’s Ark. Ismene, a wily Greek and
Nazim, a Turkish beggar, save the survivors. Nazim is no Schindler,
though, compelled by greed as much as remorse. There’s little hope
for redemption or reconciliation here, in the face of an inherited,
implacable grief.