The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Three Apples Fell from Heaven by Micheline Aharonian Marcom
James Crossley

Micheline Aharonian Marcom. Three Apples Fell from Heaven. Riverhead, 2001. 270 pp. $23.95.

In words cheapened by their appearance on the jackets of a thousand and one mediocre books, but necessary here: This is an impressive work dealing with family, memory, and loss. Three Apples Fell from Heaven is a first novel inspired by actual events during the years of the Armenian genocide, and as such, it’s a catalog of horrors. Among the several narrators who describe their sufferings is an infant left alone to die in a wasteland, the offspring of a tortured father and a mother who perishes of want during a forced march. The tale is terrible, but the brevity of the child’s existence spares him many of the brutal details that other chapters do not spare the reader. Scattered accounts of political rape, mutilation, and murder are told in a kind of matter-of-fact poetry and are threaded together by a central figure, Anaguil, an orphaned young woman whose life is saved at the expense of much else. She is taken in by her Islamic neighbors and forcibly assimilated into the culture that seeks to eradicate her own, at once stripped of family, opportunity, and language. The beauty of the novel lies mainly in the questions Anaguil’s dislocation raises—how can memory be retained, how can meaning be sought, how can a story be expressed when everything, even one’s native vocabulary, is gone? Marcom fluidly weaves English, Armenian, and Turkish as she commemorates public history and private struggle in a work of unrelieved intensity. Marcom doesn’t offer much redemption-as one of her anguished narrators puts it, “to die is different from what anyone supposed, in this sacrifice I do not know what is made holy”—but this book is proof that many of the figures on these pages prevail. [James Crossley]