oneirocrite
Zareh Vorpouni’s novel The Candidate (meant in the academic rather than the political sense) is a somewhat messy book. Set in the Armenian refugee community in Paris in, perhaps, the 1920s (it could be somewhat later), it outlines the fallout of what the US government was, until quite recently, content to call ‘the unfortunate events of 1915’. 1 It is tempting to take the use of the word ‘fallout’ here for the lazy shorthand that it to often is (‘the fallout of a relationship gone sour’), but the main characters of Vorpouni’s story – Minas, Vahakn, Apkar – do seem like particles flung through space by a cataclysm beyond their control or ken, who are driven to act by their inner brokenness, rather than essential character. It is an unpleasant book, about people who have, in general, been made unpleasant by chance and are trying, fairly unsuccessfully, to cope with that fact.
This would be (and has been) sufficient material for a novel, but Vorpouni goes a step further and attempts to add another layer of artifice, as Minas Yerazian, the focal point of the novel (although not, I think, the main character), is a poet, and his rather flat observations on the difficulties of choosing the right word, of addressing a letter in the right way, punctuate and attempt to twist the narrative into something cleverer and weaker than it could be. Interestingly, the introduction and afterword, as they advocate for the depth and meaning of the book, never mention that the root of Yerazian’s name, yeraz– (երազ), means ‘dream’; this sort of blindness (or willful refusal of the obvious) sits uneasily in a narrative warped by dreams and nightmares (explicit and implicit). Note that I do not count myself exempt from this willfulness.
I am not speaking clearly. I did not like the book, because it focused too much on the erotic/death nexus and is contemptuous of its female characters, who are all sexual predators (which makes sense as a relic of the sexual assault of one of the main characters, but is, well, unpleasant) or pewling baggages (or both). The book tries to accommodate these dogmatisms through structural acrobatics (letters, shifting timelines, shifting points of view), but the narratorial hangups (one hesitates, perhaps unwisely, to identify them too much with the author’s own hangups) provide their own structural illogic. A different reader would find it a powerful and evocative reading experience. I am but an indifferent reader, however, so I did not. 2
- Acknowledging genocide is difficult, you see, if there are political stakes for doing so.[↩]
- Reading Sinan Antoon’s Collateral Damage at the same time, which covers some of the same ground (in a different context), certainly did not increase my sympathy for The Candidate.[↩]