A Book, Untitled by Shushan Avagyan

This book doesn't contain any novel ideas.

It simple (re)visits the main events of the past, and tries to understand the present, which is incomprehensible.

Yet the brilliant writers (who never did meet each other) were writing about their realities with such clarity and foresight that even after a hundred years their ideas have remained so relevant.

...And when each time my mind wanders back to Yerevan.

Armenian writer Shushan Avagyan's A Book, Untitled imagines a meeting between two forgotten masters of Armenian literature: Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan. Though they came from different centuries, different backgrounds, even different parts of Armenia--the Soviet East and the Turkish West, roughly and respectively, as I understand it--but they are similar insofar as their poetic achievements have been overlooked, either entirely (as is the case with one--I forget which--Yesayan?), or in the sense that their revolutionary work has been ignored in order to portray them as a "domestic," feminine poet. By imagining a meeting between them, Avagyan brings together threads of Armenian literary history that have never been allowed to connect.

Or perhaps the real subject of A Book, Untitled is the creation of the book itself: Avagyan weaves together the story of Khurginian and Yesayan's meeting with bits of research and poetry, as well as conversations between herself and her research partner Lara, as they investigate the poets' archives. Avagyan describes the book she's writing as having "four authors" of which she is only the "typist/writer/translator"; stupid me didn't pick up till the very end that she means herself, Lara, and the two poets, who are cast as equal contributors. Or perhaps Lara is not included, and the fourth is the reader themself, whom Avagyan invites into the process of composition. The novel's many threads--Khurginian and Yesayan, Avagyan and Lara, poetry, research, snippets of the poets' interrogation at the hands of the state, even scraps from postcards written to an anonymous lover--are scattered so freely, often alternating from one line to the next, that the whole thing seems like a kind of puzzle that must be pieced together. Avagyan even invites the reader to give the book, ostensibly untitled, a title of their own satisfaction.

I really hate when people say stuff like, "This book was too hard," or even worse, "It felt like homework." Yet I couldn't help feeling, as I read A Book, Untitled, that I was failing some test the book was putting out for me, or if not a test, then failing to take up some puzzle or game in the spirit it's intended. I wonder if knowing more about Armenian history might have helped here--it wasn't clear to me, even, who the interrogators seeking to censor Khurginian/Yesayan (which was it, again?) were supposed to be--Turks or Soviets? I came to appreciate the motifs of distance and collision, the way in which the distance between the author of the postcards and their recipient mirrors the way in which the poets at the heart of the novel are kept apart, spiritually, socially, culturally, etc. But the metafictional aspects of it felt more alienating and grueling than illuminating, to me. Surely the failure is mostly mine; hopefully there are readers out there more game for the puzzle than I was.

That said, I love this press, Tilted Axis, which is dedicated to English translations of all kinds of world literature. This is the first book I've read by an Armenian writer, which brings my "Countries Read" list up to 91!