Novel
Remnants
Մնացորդաց
Hakob Oshakan · 1932
Synopsis
On the eve of the catastrophe, in Ottoman Anatolia, the book follows the collapse of an Armenian family, the Nalbandians, house by house, in their businesses, their rivalries and their desires, and in relations between Turks and Armenians of a complexity that literature had not yet dared to show. Nothing in it yet shows the deportations: the book's approach is first to reconstruct the world that is to be destroyed.
Context
Written in Cyprus between 1928 and 1934, the novel runs to some eighteen hundred pages in three volumes, published in Cairo by Houssaper from 1932 to 1934. The author, who practically coined the word Aghed to name the catastrophe, wanted to carry his narrative up to 1915; the last volume, which was to depict the deportation itself, was never written. Almost ignored when it appeared, the book has for thirty years been the object of a cult following and of important studies.
Who it is for
Very long, in Western Armenian, with dense and uncompromising sentences. One enters through description rather than plot, and it helps to know a little about the history of 1915.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the great work of its author, one of the major figures of modern Armenian literature; its first volume has been translated into English by G. M. Goshgarian.