DISTINGUISHED BY THE DEAD
Ha’aretz
April 8 2010
Without preaching, pathos or overwhelming guilt, Romanian writer
Varujan Vosganian has created a powerful portrait of the Armenian
genocide
"Cartea soaptelor" ("The Book of Whispers") by Varujan Vosganian,
Poirom, 528 pages
No one expected Varujan Vosganian to write the best novel in Romanian
literature. He was, after all, the finance minister of Romania until
not very long ago. He is an economist and mathematician by profession,
a talented rhetorician, a brilliant intellectual, president of the
Armenians Union of Romania and vice president of the Romanian Writers’
Union. Advertisement
Although he has written poetry in the past, this book (which has
not been translated as yet into English) is entirely different. From
the first page of his first prose work, "The Book of Whispers," the
unbelievable happens and the surprise is clear and powerful: This
is a classic, a true literary celebration. Vosganian’s whispers are
truly mesmerizing. Regardless of cultural status or political-literary
association, readers bleed with the vanquished, are persecuted and
flee with them, and become Armenians like them.
How does Vosganian, an Armenian Romanian, succeed in depicting the
events and at the same time elevate the reader and deepen his belief
in and grasp of humanist values? How does he create speech with
universal validity? Without preaching, without pathos and without
overwhelming guilt, he lets the facts speak for themselves, at the
same time becoming a more reliable and convincing narrator who reveals
the incomprehensible.
In Vosganian’s depiction of events in the history of the Armenian
people, he awakens our own experiences, our pain, our lives – lived
at times without shield or armor in the bloody 20th century – our
vanquished lives. Vanquished, but surviving and reviving, in order
to allow us to declare: We exist, we have survived and now we must
also remain human, because of what happened, and despite what happened.
"We are not distinguished by what we are, but rather by the dead whom
each of us mourns," says the narrator’s grandfather Garabet from the
small town of Focsani in Moldova. Garabet, who claimed that the best
taste of all is the taste of wind, and who believed that as long
as you live you are immortal, found a similarity between Armenian
carpets and the Bible: "You find everything in both of them – from
Genesis to our day."
The grandfather had "an almost Kantian" vision of the world: "The
roof over your head, the altar before your eyes and the soft carpet
beneath your feet."
In truth, "The Book of Whispers" contains another book, consisting
entirely of this nonchalant grandfather’s pearls of wisdom, based on
his experience: "’Don’t rush,’ he’d always say. ‘The person who has
won is rarely the real victor. History was made by the vanquished,
not by the victors. In the end, victory means exiting history’ …
Precisely for this reason, grandfather Garabet thought the real
heroes who make history are not the generals but rather the poets,
and the real battles are not to be sought under the horses’ hooves."
"Victory," says the other grandfather, Starak, from Craiova, "isn’t
the power to spill other people’s blood. Victory is the power to
spill your own blood."
Every great writer is first of all a poet, and every fiber of
this novel is rich in metaphor. With verbal thrift and precision
of language, the novel creates an electrical-emotional tension, as
though the reader is taking part in what is happening. When a Russian
soldier threatens the narrator’s grandfather and orders him to move
away, down the street, the narrator writes: "No one would be able
to say what silence is if he has not heard at his back the rustle
of a weapon being cocked." In another place the prison is described
as dampness that comes and goes, "And the moment it penetrates your
bones you carry it from within."
Perhaps the book succeeds in sinking into the soul because of the
richness of the poetic characters, because "the soul cannot think in
the absence of an image," as Aristotle has taught us.
‘Abandoned path’
After recounting his memories from his grandfathers’ homes (we hardly
know anything about his parents’ homes), the narrator brings alive
the Armenian folk epic, which survives and abounds in open wounds.
Nevertheless, he writes, "Every open wound is the start of an abandoned
path. To the extent that it heals, you are damaged." And the dead? "The
dead have moved house in the pictures on the shelf." Or: "The picture
became the request for forgiveness by those who in this hasty century
left without having time to bid farewell."
Dante, under instructions by Virgil, built in his poet’s imagination
the sad spaces of hell. Vosganian guides us through the hell of his
people at the start of the 20th century. He reconstructs this hell
meticulously, basing it on historical documentation and his own
intuition as a poet and writer.
The author does not look back in anger. He is there and he takes us
with him. It is clear to the reader that, had we been born in another
place and another time, we could have been those Armenians.
"More important than death is memory," according to the narrator.
"Among the many lives I carry inside myself the most real, like a
bouquet of snakes tied at its end, are the lives I have not lived."
Every character in "The Book of Whispers" is a unique and actual case.
Vosganian, who is not of that period, could not have lived those lives,
but each of the characters he depicts – with his own unique habits,
dreams and history – joins the other characters to create a bouquet
of people. These are people connected to one another by the ties and
tissues of the human catastrophe caused by those who saw the Armenians
as a human mass that had to be annihilated. Writes Vosganian: "All
the means they used to kill the Armenians on the roads of Anatolia
served the Nazis against the Jews, except in the Nazi camps the Jews
had numbers on their arms."
It is amazing to find that among the Armenians, too, the generation
that survived the genocide, and even its children, did not talk about
the horrors in Anatolia. The generation of survivors has died and its
memories have been buried with it. Suddenly the third generation has
discovered it knows nothing about the slaughter of its family and
people. Is this a trauma that lasts a lifetime? Guilt? Shame?
David Grossman, who was a guest of honor at the International
Literature Festival in Berlin in 2007, devoted a large part of his
speech to this phenomenon. Interestingly, he used the word "whispers"
in the context of the explanation of why he refused to answer his
son’s question, "What did the Nazis do? I did not want to tell him. I,
who had grown up within the silence and fragmented whispers that had
filled me with so many fears and nightmares, who had written a book
about a boy who almost loses his mind because of his parents’ silence,
suddenly understood my parents and my friends’ parents who chose to
be mute. I felt," said Grossman, "I felt that if I told him, if I
even so much as cautiously alluded to what had happened over there,
something in the purity of my 3-year-old son would be polluted; that
from the moment such possibilities of cruelty were formulated in his
childlike, innocent consciousness, he would never again be the same
child. He would no longer be a child at all."
There isn’t a shadow of a doubt that there is a similarity between
Grossman’s silence and broken whispers and those depicted in
Vosganian’s book. Just as a painter mixes many colors together to
obtain a unique hue, "The Book of Whispers" is full of numbers, data,
historical facts and literary portraits, bringing us closer and closer
to a picture of the reality. An ordinary writer might have failed in
this thicket of exact and meticulous detail, or might have surrendered
to sentimental, moralizing excess. But Vosganian is not an ordinary
writer. He knows how to navigate elegantly and skillfully between
Scylla and Charybdis.