‘THE SANDCASTLE GIRLS’ BY CHRIS BOHJALIAN
Boston Globe
July 17 2012
MA
The year 2015 will mark the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide,
and it is likely that Chris Bohjalian’s newest novel, “The Sandcastle
Girls,” will represent just the beginning of what will be a steady
stream of publications remembering this tragedy. Unlike his mystery
books, this one is a historical romance, but the cool and lucid tone
infusing it is unmistakably Bohjalian’s.
Laura is a writer and mother of two, and granddaughter of Elizabeth
and Armen Petrosian. She has happy memories of her visits to her
grandparents’ comfortable Long Island home, with its “plush Oriental
carpets, and thick leather books filled with an alphabet I could not
begin to decipher,” and the perpetual aroma of the lamb chops her
grandfather ate for breakfast. But she has always been struck by the
“relentless formality” of the house, and decides to research what may
have fed the “subterranean currents of loss” she invariably sensed
in her grandparents’ presence.
Her quest takes her, and us, back to 1915, when the rulers of the
Ottoman Empire used World War I as an opportunity to exterminate
the Armenian minority, whom they feared might ally itself with the
Russians. Many Armenians were outright massacred; many more were
exiled on forced death marches through the desert.
It is at the end of one such march, in the Syrian city of Aleppo, that
Laura’s grandparents meet. There, on behalf of the Friends of Armenia,
Boston banker Silas Endicott has come with his daughter, Elizabeth,
to deliver humanitarian assistance. As the US consul escorts them to
their quarters, the Endicotts get their first glimpse of the human
calamity they have gamely, if naively, come to address.
A line of women staggers into the town square. “All are beyond modesty,
beyond caring. Their skin has been seared black by the sun or stained
by the soil in which they have slept or, in some cases, by great
yawning scabs and wounds that are open and festering. . . . The women
look like dying wild animals as they lurch forward, some holding on
to the walls of the stone houses to remain erect. . . . Their breasts
are lost to their ribs. The bones of their hips protrude like baskets.”
That detailed, clinical language works to great effect. Bohjalian
succeeds in depicting the horror, without sentimentalizing it,
using photographs as one of the book’s major plot devices. Shooting
images of the dead and dying Armenians are two German soldiers,
whose government is allied with the Ottoman Empire.
From: Baghdasarian