The Daydreaming Boy

The book elucidates the destiny of many of those who, like Vahe, survived the Genocide.

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.

Marcom's second novel, The Daydreaming Boy, carries forward the story of the refugees from the twentieth century's first genocide, and it shows the growth of this young writer as a gifted and fearless stylist. Vahe Tcheubjian is an upstanding, unremarkable member of the Armenian community of Beirut in the 1960s. He and his wife attend concerts, dinners, partake of the sophisticated, continental culture that marked pre-civil war Beirut as a cosmopolitan capital on the Mediterranean, the "Paris of the Middle East." But inside, he is in turmoil--wracked by memories of the escape from the campaign of genocide, the years spent in an Armenian orphanage, the brutalities of his fellow orphans, ferocious and desperate and unloved. Vahe seeks refuge in an outrageous and graphic fantasy life that flirts dangerously with emotional catastrophe, just as the Beirut he has come ...