smorg's Full Review: Michael J. Arlen - Passage to Ararat
Perhaps I should be familiar with Michael Arlen (born Dikran Kouyoumjian), the noted Armenian-British novelist... but I'm not. So I approached his son, Michael J Arlen, 's book without much expectations, thinking it a travel essay of some sort (after all, I picked up this really well worn hardback for only 50 cents from a used bookstore nearby).
As it turns out, though, it is really more of a blend between a travel essay and a memoir of a rather confused man who is haunted by the memory of his father and who then embarked on a long trip to Socialist Armenia (the book was published in 1975) in search for his own identity.
Most of us would already know that Ararat, the fabled mountain where Noah's ark supposedly came to rest after god had let loose with the garden hose and flooded his backyard (and all of his neighbors' too, for good measure), is now officially in Turkey. For a long long time, though, it was the revered homeland of the Yerevanian Armenians. There seems to be this tendency among the mountain folks who live in isolated places to develop a deep attachment to the great mountain in the area, I think... reading and imposing humanly moods into every shade and shadow and even weather pattern coming off its rocky wall. The mountain becomes something of a true friend that will be there to watch you die (and guard over your tomb forever afterward) rather than the other way around - some consolation over all the conquests by the Greeks and the Turks and the Russians and whoever else that fancy that little high patch of land between the Caspian and the Black Sea.
So, having to now brood silently over the fact that Ararat is no longer accessible to Armenians, the Yerevan that the younger Arlen and his wife flew into wasn't such a cheery place. It suited him just fine, though. The man didn't know what he wanted out of the place anyway, and squandered much of his time isolating himself rather than going about to find out more from the people there... Reading up on history books and filling his head with things that made him both identify with all the while resenting his Armenian blood and trait. He sees his dead father everywhere and is ever bedeviled by both the elder Arlen's Armenianess and his passive denial of it.
To tell the truth, I don't get why he is so obsessed about being Armenian in the first place. Arlen senior was born in Bulgaria to Armenian parents and married a Greek American. Arlen junior was born and raised in England before emigrating to America... Yet he is very fixated on 'being an unworthy Armenian' (simply because his dad was one and he got teased for it in grade school). I guess his mom's heritage just doesn't count to anything at all! While many people hero-worship their father, MJ Arlen apparently anti-hero-worship his!
Anyhow, it is an interesting book if you want to learn more about Armenians and Armenia, how it had progressed from early tribes to the genocide at the hand of the Turks and the Russian dominated SSR era... and if you like to read how a man grapples with and psychoanalyses his own psyche. Much of it is quite well written (if occasionally maddeningly stuck in a brooding mode). Arlen starts with a brief look on how he had grown up in England with an Armenian father who did almost everything he could to disassociate himself with his ethnicity, his move to the USA and visits with Armenian expats and the noted novelist William Saroyan (I didn't know that Fresno, CA was such an Armenian enclave!) where he was finally pursuaded that the best way to learn about what it is like to be an Armenian is to travel to the fatherland.
He made some friends and finally went out to see the countryside and its populace a bit before sort of coming to accept his heritage, though there seems to be no real closure to his identity quest. I'm not sure if that is because there really isn't one available or if it is just that he really doesn't want to accept one (being in his soul a southern Slav with the inborn addiction to the melancholy). He did make his peace with his anti-hero dad, though, having taken up the baton of passive-Armenianism in his stead...
In the end I find the whole thing a bit irritating. I don't regret having read it, however. I learnt loads from it, but all the same, I'm the impatient type who like to learn the lesson and move on rather than to dwell and grow unnecessary gray hair over it. Maybe I'll like this book better on re-reading a few decades from now once I've mellowed a bit.
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