The Daydreaming Boy
The sequel to the critically acclaimed novel Three Apples Fell from Heaven continues the story of the refugees of the Armenian genocide.
Vahé 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. Vahé seeks refuge in an outrageous and graphic fantasy life that flirts dangerously with emotional catastrophe, just as the Beirut he has come to adopt as his home edges toward destruction.
“Beautiful and disturbing…dazzling and disquieting.”
“Beautiful, brutal and unsettling until the end…Marcom’s seamless, ethereal prose is suffused with raw emotion; there is heart-break on every page, but also hope.”
“Marcom's much acclaimed debut novel, Three Apples Fell from Heaven, 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. Evocative, unsettling, beautiful.”
–Booklist (starred review)
“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…[Marcom's] writing is mellifluous…poetically inflected…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.”
–Publishers Weekly
“In Marcom’s novel, the past returns in intermittent blasts, like power surges traveling down the neural pathways.”
–The Seattle Times
“It's a stunning portrait of war's bleak inheritance. Despite the grueling subject matter, Micheline Aharonian Marcom's prose spans the full range of human emotion with spellbinding and luminous beauty. The Daydreaming Boy is dreamlike - surreal, disturbing and stunningly beautiful by turn - but its final effect is one of awakening. As the pieces of the puzzle fall together, the picture that emerges is not just of one man but of the vast machine of conflict and war that has made (or unmade) him. Marcom's astonishing achievement is that this novel contains enough sadness to crush all hope but enough startling beauty and strength to ignite it all over again.”
–Rocky Mountain News