Skylark Farm [Hardcover]

Antonia Arslan (Author), Geoffrey Brock (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 23, 2007

A beautiful, wrenching debut novel chronicling the life of a family struggling for survival during the Armenian genocide in Turkey, in 1915.

At the center: Yerwant, who, at thirteen, left his home in the Anatolian hills of Turkey to study at an Armenian boarding school in Venice. Now, in May 1915, after forty years, he is planning a long-awaited reunion with his family at their homestead, Skylark Farm. But while joyful preparations for Yerwant’s arrival are being made in the town of his birth, Italy enters the Great War and closes its borders. At the same time, in Turkey, Yerwant’s family begins a brutal odyssey of forced marches and prison camps, hunger and humiliation at the hands of the Young Turks who are determined to rid their nation of minorities. In the unfolding story we follow Yerwant’s family as it struggles to survive and as four of its children set out on a dangerous and daring course of their own: to reach Yerwant, and safety, in Italy.

Antonia Arslan draws on the story of her own family to tell the story of Skylark Farm. She has transformed the “obscure memories” that are her heritage into a novel as lyrical and poignant as a fable.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This bleak, unsparing debut novel traces one Armenian family's experience during the Armenian genocide of 1915. Yerwant, 53, is a 40-year expatriate living in Venice in the months before WWI. He hopes to reunite with his family on their idyllic farm estate in Turkey—his brother, Sempad (a successful pharmacist); Sempad's wife and children; and the men's little sisters, Azniv and Veron—but WWI ignites, and the ruling Young Turks party closes the border. Yerwant's family in Turkey is rounded up, their fates hastened by a star-crossed love affair between Azniv and a Turkish soldier. The town's men are brutally exterminated, and Yerwant's remaining family suffers concentration camps, forced marches, physical torture and starvation. The kindness of neighboring Turks and Greeks helps them survive as they try to reach Yerwant in Italy. Arslan, a onetime University of Padua professor of Italian literature, depicts the family (based on her own) with broad, epic strokes. The bluntly omniscient narration dampens the characters, but Arslan delivers vivid, powerful testimony of horrific cruelty and immeasurable loss. (Jan. 24)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Genocide figured in both world wars, but whereas the Holocaust is massively attested, the deliberate extermination of Armenians in 1915 is far less so. Retired professor Arslan's first novel, based upon the experiences and using the names of her family, conjures that terrible time with consummate art. Arslan adopts the tones of a teller of legends as, first, she introduces her grandfather Yerwant, an important physician in his Italian adopted hometown, and her diminutive aunt Henriette, a survivor of 1915, as she knew them when a child. Then, in the book's two principal parts, she depicts the prelude to and outburst of the genocide in the small western Turkish city in which the Arslans lived, and then the trek south to Aleppo in Syria that the city's other Armenian women, girls, and elderly were forced to make on foot by soldiers who harassed them constantly. Not many survived, but Henriette, then a child, and, because he was playing in a sister's old dress when the other males were taken, three-year-old Nubar made it, eventually to Italy and Yerwant. Squirmingly suspenseful throughout, this soul-shaking novel feels like a masterpiece. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (January 23, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400044359
• ISBN-13: 978-1400044351
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 4.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #258,110 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poignant reading, May 12, 2007

By 

E. M. Petit-Tinkelenberg - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Skylark Farm (Hardcover)

I had ordered this book and received it very quickly. The moment I started reading, I couldn't put it down. I think it is well written and extremely sad, but not overly dramatized. A story of tremendous courage and family love in the face of unimaginable brutality. I have just returned from a visit to Armenia and visited the Genocide Museum in Yerevan and some of the horrible photo's on display, made me think of the family in this book and what they suffered.

If ever another book comes out written by Antonia Arslan, I will buy it immediately.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Skylark Farm, April 28, 2007

By 

Joyce Chorbajian "joyzcho" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Skylark Farm (Hardcover)

I am always reticent when I pick up a book that discusses the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917. Being the offspring of parents who survived the Genocide in Marash, Turkey, I've lived in a cocoon--my cocoon being the United States. On the other hand my reality is that my parents went through these atrocities.

Professor Arslan must have faced many of the same issues that I have in dealing with her families tortured past. Her book truly reflects the depth of her emotions in committing her families' story to paper.

I could not put her book down although I was tempted to do so many times particularly during the forced march to Aleppo, Syria. Although I knew the outcome, I still wanted to live the experience despite that fact that none of it was new to me. My families' story parallels Professor Arslans as would undoubtedly be true of many other Armenian families that were subject to this tragic period in history.

This is a book for everyone. One does not have to be Armenian to become a member of the family as they lived and loved in their city in Turkey.

Skylark Farm is a story of love, passion, sacrifice, hope and the will to go on despite the evil that was perpetrated.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Heart-wrenching story, beautifully written, August 28, 2007

By 

SNKojoian "Esquire Mom" (Studio City, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Skylark Farm (Hardcover)

I believe I have read all the novels about the Armenian Genocide, and have been touched by all of them, but this was the only book that made me cry. Ms. Arslan's description was heart-wrenching, painful to read, and I couldn't bring myself to put it down. Knowing that this is based on Ms. Arslan's own family, made it all the more moving. Sadly, the reader clearly comprehends that the events depicted were not a singular episode, but multiplied tens of thousands of times. A beautiful book that should become required reading for schoolchildren, starting in middle-school.