The Daydreaming Boy (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "WE ARE NAKED like Adam and the blue wide band now becomes what it is, the long sea rises before us, the notfish become what..." (more)
Key Phrases: fatty soup, bua bua, dead tongue, Bird's Nest, Madame Yusef, Ras Beirut (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A middle-aged survivor of Turkey's Armenian massacres living in Beirut in the 1960s contemplates his brutal past and loses himself in a series of adulterous trysts that bring him slowly to a realization of the moral compromises he has made. Early on in this elegant, penetrating novel, middle-aged Vahé asks, "How did I become this sort of man?" Marcom (author of the well-received Three Apples Fell from Heaven) supplies an answer with steely delicacy, as Vahé cycles through different memories: of the torments he both endured and visited upon weaker fellow orphans in an Armenian orphanage; of his long-gone family and his pain at his separation from them; of his infatuation with his maid, which turned his wife against him and angers her even as he lays this narrative out like a confession. The haunted, desperate tone reaches fever pitch in Vahé's description of his spiritual relationship with a strangely human-looking ape in the local zoo, as the narrator's imaginings of the beast's emotions are played out upon its contorted features. It is at times like this that Marcom shows her hand a bit too obviously. Yet her writing is mellifluous, so poetically inflected at times as to lull the reader into a trance. The shadow of impending violence troubles the calm, but it is the grim reality of what has already happened that is most harrowing-the evil that Vahé must confront each day, as much as he might try to make himself more comfortable in the world.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Marcom's much acclaimed debut novel, Three Apples Fell from Heaven (2001), was praised for both its beautiful prose and the casual candor with which it depicted the horrors of the 1915-17 Armenian genocide. Her follow-up, dealing with the persistent emotional aftermath of the genocide, likewise deserves praise for its fluid prose and haunting imagery, which now simultaneously articulate painfully clear memory and blurred, often brutal fantasy. Vahe Tcheubjian, the novel's protagonist, was orphaned in the genocide and rose from a childhood without love or touching to the life of a bourgeois businessman in Beirut. But survival and success haven't brought peace for Vahe, and turbulent fantasy constantly shadows him as he sits in cosmopolitan sidewalk cafes and lays smoking on the cold ceramic tile floor of his kitchen. Visits to local zoological gardens to smoke cigarettes with Jumba the monkey lead to horrid visions of mercy killing; longing for his unknown mother's body melds with illicit lust for his neighbor's too-young servant girl, and love is there, somewhere. And Beirut itself likewise lopes toward chaos. Evocative, unsettling, beautiful. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (April 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 157322264X
• ISBN-13: 978-1573222648
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,524,436 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Literary Novel That Must Be Read!, April 17, 2004

By	A Bookseller (San Diego) - See all my reviews

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spellbinding, August 30, 2005

By	John C. Danahy "John" (Weymouth, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

4.0 out of 5 stars The Unspeakable may now be spoken., October 8, 2007

By	Cassiane "Cassiane" (Acton, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Daydreaming Boy (Hardcover)

"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.