Alot Makes a Great Pet

People who can't spell in their posts make me crazy (especially people who are supposed to be professionals).  This goes a long way to making it better.

Hyperbole and a Half: The Alot is Better Than You at Everything

Review of and some thoughts on Chris Bohjalian's The Sandcastle Girls

To the Government of Aleppo.  It was first communicated to you that the Government, by order of Jemiet, had decided to destroy completely all the Armenians living in Turkey... An end must be put to their existence, however criminal the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex nor to conscious scruples.
-- Talat Pasha, Minister of the Interior, September 16, 1916

I came to the work of Chris Bohjalian via a friend:  she pressed Midwives into my hands declaring that I must read it, and that if I did not like it she didn't want to hear about it.  Several years and several volumes later I am still reading him, and have become the person urging him on others.  While I have enjoyed all of his work that I've read, Night Strangers has been, by far, my favorite.  Until last week.  Last week I had the great good fortune to read Bohjalian's The Sandcastle Girls, due to be released in July.  My first reaction could be summed up in three words:  intense, immediate, surreal.  And that was just Part One.

When most people think of Turkey in 1915, they think of Gallipoli and World War I.  Most of us have forgotten that at the beginning of the 20th century there was no "Turkey" as such:  it was still the Ottoman Empire.  In Sandcastle Girls, Bohjalian sets us squarely in the last days of that dying  behemoth at the beginning of, his narrator tells us, "the Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About."  Bohjalian writes the events of 1915 in the present tense, giving them an eyewitness immediacy and intensity that a more common third-person, past tense narrative would have missed.  The matter-of-factness of tone, too, gives the relating of genocidal horrors the surreality that makes them that much more terrible.  For example,

He stares more closely out the window at a massive pile of tree limbs -- a messy pyramid -- no more than thirty or forty meters from the tracks.  The branches have been bleached white by the sun on one half of the mound, but are blackened on the other side, as if someone stared to burn them but the fire never quite spread and eventually burned itself out.  He is wondering briefly why someone cleared the few trees in this stretch of land and chose this spot to incinerate them when he realizes they are not tree limbs at all and his gaze grows transfixed... In the end, it was the skulls that gave it away... He can't imagine how many bodies it took to make the hillock.  Hundreds?  A thousand?  More?

And then there is this mystery:  why here?

In a moment the train is beyond them and the bones have disappeared into the landscape.  Across the train carriage his lieutenant snores.  The businessmen do, too.

There and gone, a Boschian nightmare that the mind cannot quite convince itself occurred.  Except that it did.  Deliberately and calculatedly, to be exceeded only in scale some twenty-five years later.  Several times while reading the Sandcastle Girls I realized I was looking at the genesis of all the horrors of the 20th century; Aleppo and Der-el-Zor are the direct progenitors of Dachau and Auschwitz, and the things they've spawned.

Within this larger tragedy plays a more intimate one of love, loss, secrets never told, and the echoes of that decision.  When so much is lost and so many agonies felt, what is left to sacrifice?  Mr. Bohjalian is a keen and sympathetic observer of women; his female characters have agency and are fully human, and never "types."  The four women at the center of the Sandcastle Girls -- Elizabeth, Nevart, Hatoun, and Karine (above, around, within all, Karine) -- collectively and singularly engender the repercussions of the Genocide on generations removed in time and space.

In his acknowledgments, Mr. Bohjalian lists several titles as being of particular help in understanding the Armenian Genocide, and names three novels specifically.  With the Sandcastle Girls, I believe, for the rest of us, he has added a fourth.

Publishers Weekly: The Sandcastle Girls
Barnes & Noble
Chris Bohjalian