The Gendarme
Search in google:
What would you do if the love of your life, and all your memories, were lost- only to reappear, but with such shocking revelations that you wish you had never remembered... Emmett Conn is an old man, near the end of his life. A World War I veteran, he's been affected by memory loss since being injured during the war. To those around him, he's simply a confused man, fading in and out of senility. But what they don't know is that Emmett has been beset by memories, of events he and others have denied or purposely forgotten. In Emmett's dreams he's a gendarme, escorting Armenians from Turkey. A young woman among them, Araxie, captivates and enthralls him. But then the trek ends, the war separates them. He is injured. Seven decades later, as his grasp on the boundaries between past and present begins to break down, Emmett sets out on a final journey, to find Araxie and beg her forgiveness. Mark Mustian has written a remarkable novel about the power of memory-and the ability of people, individually and collectively, to forget. Depicting how love can transcend nationalities, politics, and religion, how racism creates divisions where none truly exist, and how the human spirit fights to survive even in the face of hopelessness, The Gendarme is a transcendent novel.The New York Times - Mike Peed…Mustian appears to confront an enormous subject: the Turkish deportation of Armenians during World War I, when hundreds of thousands died amid a hellish march into Syria—an expulsion that has, outside Turkey, often been labeled as genocide. But in truth, Mustian…tells a story that probes a timeless array of life's general adversities: the tricks of memory that enable us to carry on with our daily existence; the brash decisions and subsequent regrets of the young; the ever present need for forgiveness; the way a single event can be subject to many interpretations. Mustian embodies the intractability of these difficulties in the image of an Armenian girl with mismatched eyes…She sees the past and the present, the good and the bad, our side and theirs. Her mystery is life's mystery.
