The Daydreaming Boy

Publishers Weekly

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 Vah 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 Vah 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 Vah '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 Vah must confront each day, as much as he might try to make himself more comfortable in the world. Agent, Sandra Dijkstra. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Continuing the story of the Turkish genocide of Armenians begun in the award-winning Three Apples Fell from the Tree. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An Armenian wrestles with memories of his terrible childhood, the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Turks. Marcom confronted the genocide head-on in her first novel, Three Apples Fall From Heaven (2001). Some people never recover from childhood. Vahe Tcheubjian is one. In 1963, the 46-year-old cabinetmaker is living in Beirut with his Armenian wife, Juliana. The two have a childless but calm, stable marriage. But suddenly, Vahe's memories surge back. The first enduring image is his arrival in Beirut at age five, having traveled from Turkey, with hundreds of other Armenian orphans, in filthy boxcars. The train stops, and the naked children are running joyously into the Mediterranean. The joy is short-lived, however, and Vahe will spend his next 11 years in an orphanage of Dickensian grimness. He'll be taunted as a "Turk dog" because he speaks only Turkish, having been abandoned by his mother in circumstances Vahe can't nail down. His unlikely savior is Vosto, the utterly abject newcomer who replaces Vahe as the lowest of the low. Vahe rapes Vosto along with the others. Marcom uses the steady accretion of images to build her story, and her capricious punctuation mirrors Vahe's tortuous mental processes. In adulthood, his routines change, putting his marriage at risk. No more church on Sunday: Instead, he goes to the zoo, burning Jumba the chimp with his cigarettes-the chimp making a fitting substitute for the former "monkeyboy." The same mix of cruelty and affection emerges in Vahe's obsession with the Palestinian servant girl from the refugee camps; eventually, he forces himself on her (and Juliana interrupts them). It's more than simple lust: In penetrating this outsider's wretchedness,Vahe is back where he belongs, in the jungle. Marcom's second (squarely in the Joyce/Faulkner tradition) isn't easy going. It amounts to a dogged examination, through an individual consciousness, of how the beast in us, properly nurtured, is always ready to spring. A brave undertaking, if only partially successful.