ll-be-fresno/
There Will Be Fresno
By Andy Turpin – on May 6, 2009 – Email This Post Email This Post
Janigian’s New Novel `Riverbig’ Tells the Story of California’s Early
Armenian Community in Epic Saga
WATERTOWN, Mass. (A.W.) – It might be a bit too glib or give the wrong
impression to say that Aris Janigian’s newest novel, Riverbig (Heyday
Books, 2008) is sour grapes, because the novel is impeccably well
written with characterizations dead on their mark and craggy and worn
as Sierra mountain stone. But neither would you recommend the book to
someone depressed, unless they’re a glutton for fictional punishment.
Riverbig is Janigian’s sequel to his 2003 novel Bloodvine, which told
the story of Fresno’s Armenian community, as seen through the eyes of
Andy Demirjian and his rancorous half-brother Abe, both part of the
WWII `Greatest Generation’ of Armenian Americans.
Riverbig picks up the story just following World War II as Andy
embarks on a new chapter in his life. He is a new father, and a
California farmer and trucker desperately trying to make ends meet
after a blood feud with his brother over their once-joint farm leaves
him high and dry in the blazing sun.
The story goes forth from there and it would be indiscreet to give
away any of the arduous details of Andy’s struggle against adversity.
But what must be said about the tone and style of Janigian’s writing
and characters is that they tell the real, gritty, and by and large
weathered, untold story of an Armenian community never forgotten
today in modern Californian Armenian culture – but also never really
revered enough for their resilience
Riverbig is nothing less than one Armenian American’s Grapes of
Wrath, and Andy Demirjian is Steinbeck’s Tom Joad. There’s also a
visceral, seething anger beneath the surface of Janigian’s writing
and in his characters’ thoughts – that like all things undulated in
rage is beautiful and caustic at the same time.
At times, these perceptions are turned inward, unobtrusively but
deliberately at post-Genocide Armenian culture, both in California
and in general. Case in point: When Andy thinks to himself in the
novel, `In one generation, the Armenians had turned from growling
lions and wily foxes to poodles licking society’s boots. Of course,
society had gotten shrewder.’
He also turns the Armenian mirror convexly upon concepts of everyday
matriarchy when Janigian, through Andy, notes of an Armenian dowager:
`This woman was like a meat grinder. He’d seen it before, how these
mayrigs sit home doing kufte with their chubby hands while mentally
they are digging tunnels, laying booby traps, intercepting messages
and sending out others… Andy had known an untold number of Armenian
men who never left home, who at 40 were coddled the same as when they
were 6. They were scared of women on the one hand, and worshipped
their mothers on the other: a weird combination.’
For myself, more than twice Riverbig struck me as the modern
incarnation of the Javakhk and Georgian medieval epic known as the
Amiran-Darejaniani, or `The story of Amiran, son of Darejan.’
In the poem, empowered by the highest god Ghmerti (later the name of
the Christian deity), the hero Amiran combats a giant, and then in
his hubris challenges Ghmerti himself to mortal combat.
In response to this insolence, Ghmerti punishes him in three stages:
He fastens Amirani to a post driven deep in the earth; he buries him
in chains under a mountain pass, which forms a cave-like dome over
him; and for one night each year, the mountain opens to reveal
Amirani suspended in the air, where any human may release him and
usher in the end of the world. Inevitably, the mountain closes again –
dramatically, as a consequence of the excessive talk of women.
In Riverbig, Janigian hangs himself suspended in mid-air for readers
to release him and his angered characters’ souls, either in
redemption of or rage at post-genocide Armenian American culture.
After reading it, which emotion Armenian Americans will choose to
embrace is subjective. Regardless, the novel will incite chatter and
provoke thought.
What personal chains Janigian may rip forth from in future novels is
a question of suspense worth thinking about.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
