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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Literary Novel That Must Be Read!, April 17, 2004
This review is from: The Daydreaming Boy (Hardcover)
Marcom's "Three Apples Fell From Heaven" was my favorite book of 2001 and one of the best debuts by an American novelist in my six years of selling literary fiction. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the stunning quantum leap forward Marcom has taken with The Daydreaming Boy, her second novel. Marcom has matured into one of the most powerful, focused and effective voices in American fiction. While Three Apples. . . focused on the events of the Armenian genocide shifting in perspective with each of its characters, The Daydreaming Boy stays in the voice of a single narrator, an orphan of the catastrophe, who carries the memories with him not as a haunting, a vaguely nostalgic wound that will never heal. It informs everything about him- from his dreams of an unknown mother lost, to his refusal to meet anything or anyone in his life without disspassion and cold distance, other than a chain smoking primate in the zoological gardens. The language, which was strong in Marcom's first novel, is overwhelming, beautiful, restrained, perfect, here. She has learned how to control her story. It has the feeling of being distilled through the reflection of a mirror. What was seen head-on in Three Apples. . . has been fractured here, so that the reader can appreciate every nuance of light. The narrative recalls the haunting passiveness of one of Sebald's narrators mixed with the erotic detatchment and short shocks of imagery of Marguerite Duras. At other times one is reminded of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, but at all moments one is shaken by the unique pace and movement of Marcom's beautifully cruel, startling and original, poetic voice. The fact that I can only find comparisons to writers like Duras, Sebald and Durrell- all deceased- underscores how singular a talent Marcom is. She is a writer that we, as readers of literary fiction, cannot afford to squander.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Spellbinding, August 30, 2005
This review is from: The Daydreaming Boy (Hardcover)
Following her masterpiece Three Apples Fell From Heaven, Micheline delivers this incredible testament to a staggering result genocide: the death of language and being. The book unravels as mostly inner monologue, but Vahe is the story: he is the unhistoried, unlived narrator, a man who from the ashes of a history crushed and ignored has no foundation for his consciousness--the book is a reading of the mind of a refugee, one who from the beginning of his life was refused a place to become anything: the only existence allowed to him is one of a specture, "unhistoried". While not exactly uplifting, reading this book is an incredible experience, and one that will leave you unable to let it settle in you, which is precisely what it should do: Vahe could not learn the speak of language, and this book will, on some level, help you begin to comprehend the horror of this, creating a space and empathy inside of you that will affirm and commemorate the humanity of those orphaned of language and a history from the Armenian genocide. Absolutely recommended.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
The Unspeakable may now be spoken., October 8, 2007
"The Daydreaming Boy" is serious fiction, not a book--as one reviewer said--to be casually consumed at the beach. And both epigraphs are highly appropriate: the Faulkner, because it succinctly states Vahe's moral crisis; the quotation from St. Matthew, because Vahe, as one of "these little ones" has been dreadfully sinned against, but in turn offends another "little one," the outcast boy who later comes back to haunt him. The book elucidates the destiny of many of those who, like Vahe, survived the Genocide. Their past has been utterly destroyed, in fact obliterated, and yet their sufferings continue. Indeed, the orphanage which takes him in is a house of horrors that makes "Lord of the Flies" look like a kindergarten picnic. But this work does not detail the complete depths of depravity and perversion that are possible for human beings; perhaps no one would have believed them at the time--the mid-Twentieth century. But now, in the early twenty-first century, we feel that we have seen it all. The unspeakable has become rather commonplace, and the Armenian Genocide merely inaugurated a century of unprecedented depravity, cruelty, and atrocity. Alas, one wishes that all the victims of genocide had learned from their experiences to be kind, instead of cruel. But some, like the protagonist of this novel, learned only to perpetrate what they had experienced themselves. Still though the reader may be annoyed with Vahe's preoccupation with the monkey in the zoo, and even more with his sexual obsessions, one understands them as a consequence of his experiences. They are both a re-enactment and a balm on his wounds. Marcom has made advances in this her second novel. She constructs a gripping narrative from one character's point of view, whereas in her previous fine work "Three Apples Fell from Heaven," she told the story in the voices of many characters. Like "Three Apples Fell from Heaven," "The Daydreaming Boy" is not for the faint-hearted. Brutalities, and bodily effluvia of all sorts are graphically presented, a portrayal made even more immediate by the single-character narration. Inside Vahe's head is not a comfortable place to be, but one does not read a book like this to be comfortable.
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