30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A novel about the Armenian Genocide and the complexities of memory, guilt, love, and forgiveness (4.5 stars), August 5, 2010
This review is from: The Gendarme (Hardcover)
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This book was haunting and beautifully written - this last being all the more noticeable and affecting given the utter ugliness and horror that the language is often portraying. Mustian brings to life with searing vividness the squalor, disease, and everyday violence that made up the caravans, tent cities, and refugee destinations of the Armenian Genocide. He uses the same blunt simplicity to describe both the rape of a woman trying to save her child in wartime Turkey and the seemingly unbridgeable gap existing between a daughter and her dying father at the end of the 20th century in America. There were many passages that I marked off as I read through, thinking that I would choose one or two to quote in my review, but now having finished the book I find myself unable to pick just a couple.
THE GENDARME is a novel about the two very different stories that make up one man's life. Emmett Conn (Ahmet Khan) is a man at the end of his life. He's 92-years-old, a widower, and has two daughters, neither of whom he is very close to. After being diagnosed with a brain tumor, he starts to dream about another life during another time in another land: that of a young 17-year-old gendarme in charge of driving a caravan of Armenians out of Turkey and into Syria.
Ahmet has very few memories of anything before his early twenties, when he was found by the British on a battlefield and taken to a London hospital to be treated. This life that comes to him in pieces and fragments is not one that he remembers, yet as the story of it begins to unfold, he recognizes it as his own and hungers for the complete picture and for the self-knowledge that has so long alluded him. This other tale is one filled with violence, confusion, anger, guilt, and love bordering on obsession. Central to it is the young woman Araxie, one of Ahmet's Armenian prisoners, and their meeting seems fated, with both lives irreparably and irrevocably changed as a result.
Through this novel, the reader is given a stark look at the Armenian Genocide and Mustian takes an incredible chance by portraying it all through the eyes of one of the perpetrator's. This is a heavy responsibility and a careful balance must be achieved, but the author is able to pull it off and the book, as well as its message, are all the stronger because of it. With his choice of heroes, Mustian leaves the reader conflicted from the beginning, for while we are able to relate to and sympathize with elderly Emmett Conn, the young Ahmet Khan is a rapist and murderer.
His actions are not described in a vacuum, however, and as we are shown the atrocities he witnesses and commits, we are also given insight into his own confusion and questioning over why this is all taking place and what the purpose is. He is not an unwilling actor and should by no means be seen as such, but the truth is that he is also a young man - almost a boy - who seems to be swept along by the events surrounding him, doing what he's been told to do, accepting the reasoning behind it, and not questioning at first whether it's right or wrong. As the full of Ahmet's story is revealed to Emmett, he is left with the pressing and urgent need to find the woman whom he loved so profoundly and to beg her forgiveness.
One criticism I can't go without mentioning is that I could never quite figure out Emmett's feeling towards and relationship with his wife, Carol. She remained something of an enigma to me throughout the book and although she's not actively present in either the main story or the flashbacks, I thought she should have nonetheless been more fully developed. I'm also not certain how I feel about the conclusion in the second-to-last chapter; it brought me to tears, but I think the story might have been served better and the reader left more satisfied if it had been written in a different manner. (It would be a spoiler if I wrote anything more or included my suggestion).
I'm curious to see what the reaction to THE GENDARME will be, given the political tensions and continued sensitivity that surround the Armenian Genocide, including even using the word "genocide." I think the book would make an excellent book club selection and might be further enhanced by being read alongside a non-fiction account. One that the author mentions is Peter Balakian's
Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past, and there is also
The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response by the same author, both of which are highly rated. (I myself have not read either).
Overall, I would highly recommend this book: it is a well-written, emotionally involving, and deeply moving story. Mustian seeks to highlight the importance of seeking forgiveness and the necessity of remembering, and he succeeds wonderfully. THE GENDARME is about forgiveness and guilt, memory and forgetting, acknowledgement and denial, love and hate, and the strength of the human spirit and the complexity of human beings. It reinforces the undeniable truth that we can never be just one thing or one act, but that we are defined by a culmination of all aspects of our character and all the actions and decisions that we make throughout our life.
In one of the last pages, a character remarks: "A few things remain, seared so deep as to defy alteration. ... Maybe there are some things that should be passed on, that should never be forgotten" (p.283). This is echoed in Mustian's Author's Note, where he writes: "Remembering is living. Forgetting, as Ahmet Khan learns, has its costs. ... We want to know. Sometimes that knowledge is painful, or inconvenient, or even damning. But it is essential. It exposes us for what we have been, and can be."
[This review is of an advanced copy format of the book]
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
4.5/5 stars - Haunting Literary Debut, August 14, 2010
This review is from: The Gendarme (Hardcover)
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The haunting cover art, portraying a lovely young girl with two different colored eyes, is what first attracted me to this debut novel, The Gendarme. Trust me, once you finish this story it will stay with you for days to come.
In 1990, Emmett Conn is a 92 year old Turkish-American man, who is recovering from surgery for a brain tumor. In Georgia, to his family and friends he seems confused or senile. However, what has happened to Emmett is that after his surgery he is experiencing vivid dreams of World War I events he had previously or purposely forgotten. Memories that were lost, perhaps due to a war injury, have now returned some 70 years later.
The novel goes back and forth in time to when Emmett was a Turkish Gendarme who brought Armenians from Turkey in a death march to Syria.
"The original two thousand deportees have dwindled now to three hundred, many of these suffering from dysentery. A number of the guards are gone, too, leaving only three gendarmes, including myself to prod our group on its way. Our progress has been slower than before, maybe six or seven miles per day. At this pace it will take four or five days to reach our destination. Food is scarce, water even scarcer. The dead and dying increase daily. At the current rate of loss, only fifty or so of the deportees might actually make it to Aleppo."
Araxie is a lovely Armenian girl that Emmett becomes obsessed with and tries to protect. In his dreams he is reunited with his captive who he thought of as the love of his life. He is desperate to find her, and to beg her forgiveness for his sins of the past.
MY THOUGHTS - Even though this story is a work of fiction, I feel like I was given a painful lesson in history. Sadly, Armenian Genocide is a subject that I knew nothing about. The story is sad and haunting and tough to read in parts, but it is so well done that most readers will find themselves effortless and eagerly finishing the novel quicker than anticipated. It is clearly a story that demonstrates the evil that good people are capable of. The ending is not what I anticipated, but in some ways that was a good thing. I think this story would make an excellent movie.
RECOMMENDED - 4.5/5 stars
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"THOSE WHO FORGET ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT", October 17, 2010
This review is from: The Gendarme (Hardcover)
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What exactly is Mark Mustian's book The Gendarme? It's a story of love set against the background of war and intolerance; it's a history lesson about the Armenian genocide that most of us didn't get in school; it's a commentary about how we treat our elderly when they become physically or mentally incapacitated; it's the story of dreams and lost memories and what they tell us about ourselves; and finally, it's an examination of divisive use of religious differences and racism created and justified by nations in order to advance political agendas. And while this book examines all of the aforementioned, some of it is done in a rather ephemeral and perfunctory manner.
Alternating between Wadesboro, Georgia in the 1990's and Turkey and Syria 75 years earlier we are given two narratives delivered by the same man at different stages in his life. Emmett Conn (Ahmet Khan) is currently 92 years old and suffering from a terminal brain tumor that has triggered vivid dreams of events buried in his subconscious since he suffered a head injury in WW1. His recollections of the brutality involved in the forced march of Armenians from Turkey to Syria appear, to this reader, to be shockingly authentic however, his memories of Araxie (she of the mismatched eyes) and their bittersweet love teeters on the brink of preposterous and puts me in mind of some old "bodice-rippers" in which the heroine is raped by the hero, falls madly in love and follows him to the ends of the earth. Emmett's dreams too are suspect because not only do they recall the past in sequence, but his brutality seems to replay as less callous and barbaric than his cohorts like Mustafa.
Finally, I found the circumstances surrounding Emmett's trip to New York to be implausible for a 92 year old suffering from a brain tumor to accomplish.
Overall - I have mixed emotions about this book. I loved some things about it, hated others. I suppose if you are a person who enjoys historical fiction, and you can refrain from examining the logic of certain story elements to closely you will find The Gendarme to be a pleasant diversion.
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