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Summary
Summary
A haunting, deeply moving novel-an old man comes face-to-face with his past and sets out to find the love of his life and beg her forgiveness.
To those around him, Emmet Conn is a ninety-two-year-old man on the verge of senility. But what becomes frighteningly clear to Emmet is that the sudden, realistic dreams he is having are memories of events he, and many others, have denied or purposely forgotten. The Gendarme is a unique love story that explores the power of memory-and the ability of people, individually and collectively, to forget. Depicting how love can transcend nationalities and politics, how racism creates divisions where none truly exist, and how the human spirit fights to survive even in the face of hopelessness, this is a transcendent novel.
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Author Notes
Mark T. Mustian is an author, attorney, and city commissioner. He lives with his wife and three children in Tallahassee, Florida.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Mustian's debut novel is a meditation on memory in which the dreams of a former Turkish soldier contain the truth of his past. Emmett Conn is 92 and living in Georgia when he begins dreaming of his youth and his involvement in the Armenian diaspora. After 70 years of amnesia caused by his WWI injuries, Emmett's past returns with a vengeance following surgery for a brain tumor. Emmett knows he fought the British at Gallipoli, was wounded, and was cared for by a nurse, Carol, whom he married and accompanied back to the U.S. But in his violent dreams, he relives his actions as a Turkish gendarme in the forced death march of thousands of Armenians into Syria. Emmett recalls snippets of his murderous and rapacious acts but also of his obsession with a beautiful young Armenian girl, Araxie. His dream life leads him to one conclusion: he must find Araxie and beg her forgiveness. Mustian's staccato prose, an attempt to emulate Emmett's skittish and elusive dreams, works sometimes better than others, but the novel effectively captures the human capacity for survival and redemption. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Memories of the Armenian genocide haunt an ancient Turkish-American in this novel from Florida attorney Mustian.When Ahmet Khan tried to join the Ottoman army in 1915 to fight the British and Russians, he was ruled too young, so the Turk joined the paramilitary gendarmerie instead. His first assignment was a baptism of fire. Later that year, in the army now, Ahmet suffered a brain injury and amnesia.A POW, he emerged from a long coma in a London hospital where Carol, an American nurse, protected and eventually married him. They moved to New York and had two daughters.Now, at the ripe old age of 92, Ahmet (his name Americanized to Emmett Conn) is living alone in Georgia, his wife's home state.Carol is dead.Ahmet has a seizure.Tests reveal a brain tumor. Suddenly, memories of that first assignment flood back in a series of dreams.Ahmet's job was to escort 2,000 Armenian deportees across Turkey.It was a death march, one component of the genocide.By the time they reached Aleppo, Syria, only 65 had survived. Disease had claimed many.Ahmet and his fellow gendarmes were brutal.Rape was their prerogative. Ahmet had taken a woman on the Euphrates riverbank, letting her baby perish.All set to rape another, something stopped him.Araxie was barely into her teens.Ahmet was transfixed by her strange beauty (she had mismatched eyes).A mutual attraction, perhaps?This wisp of a romance offsets the horror of the desert trek, a horror that becomes numbing.It's Hannah Arendt's banality of evil, tinged by melodrama.Mustian counterpoints this narrative with the small change of old man Ahmet's life in Georgia, his daughter Violet overseeing his hospital visits.It's an awkward mix.Ahmet comes to believe that his 17-year-old self was a monster, and he needs absolution, which leads to a wildly improbable conclusion.An honorable failure.The cruelty of a callow youth is an inadequate distillation of man's inhumanity to man.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
IN his second novel, Mark T. 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, a writer and lawyer from Tallahassee, Fla., who is himself distantly of Armenian heritage, 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, "the light eye questioning, the dark eye confirming." She sees the past and the present, the good and the bad, our side and theirs. Her mystery is life's mystery. That mystery is most deeply felt by the protagonist of "The Gendarme," a 92-year-old widower named Emmett Conn, who has just been told he has a brain tumor. Born Ahmet Khan in Turkey, he was so badly injured while fighting for the Ottoman Army at Gallipoli that when he was removed from the battlefield he was mistaken for a British soldier and sent to an Allied hospital. He recovered, but not without losing much of his memory. He married his American nurse, and together they returned to her homeland. But now Conn's tumor is precipitating graphic dreams, forming a ghastly narrative that casts him as a 17-year-old Turkish gendarme, escorting Armenians into exile. In his nightly visions, Conn becomes a perpetrator of atrocities: a murderer and a rapist. But when he falls in love with one of the deportees, the girl with the bewitching eyes, he begins to expiate his sins. The dreams, of course, reveal to Conn the reality of his teenage self. If one injury granted him a new life, another now asks for the old life back. By approaching the Armenian deportation indirectly, through Conn's dreams and opaque memories, Mustian broadens his field of vision, and ours. We learn the affecting details of Conn's wife's struggle with Parkinson's disease and how his two daughters essentially abandon him in his senescence, preoccupied by the complexities of their own lives. As Conn apprehends the magnitude of his offenses, his hope for redemption rests increasingly with his maladjusted mixed-race grandson. "You want him as your extension. Your surrogate to live your life over," his daughter tells him. "Is there that much you regret?" MUSTIAN refuses to flinch when describing the grim realities that resurface in Conn's thoughts of the past: "And then comes the horseman . . . directing his steed's hoof squarely onto the infant's skull, crushing it in a tiny burst of liquid, a smallish squish of sound." But too many of his words read as if lifted from a police report, variations of "An incident on our second day out exhibited the decline in our relationship." Mustian's characters don't speak their lines so much as recite them. "My shame is boundless," Conn declares, "my guilt so heavy it outweighs even truth." Eventually, Conn tries to find out what happened to the Armenian girl who haunts his dreams. In the process, he comes to a dismaying realization: "I am thinking, suddenly, of these hells scattered beyond just my own. Little, big, black, white, old, new, tired, alive. Pulling, with a force wrought from God, curling, perhaps intertwining. I am alone here. Are they not also alone?" Mustian's central character is an old Turkish man haunted by dreams of his youth in World War I. Mike Peed is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.
Library Journal Review
Though we try to deny it, the past comes to get us in the end. It certainly comes for 92-year-old Emmett Conn after he is rushed to the hospital, felled by a tiny brain tumor. Emmett starts having dark and unsettling dreams of refugees marched through a barren landscape and dying off in droves owing to hunger, thirst, dysentery, and the whims of the gendarmes herding them. These aren't dreams but suppressed memories; Emmett is actually Ahmet Khan, a soldier in the Ottoman army during World War I who was evacuated to London-he was mistaken for a British soldier-and then wed by an American nurse, who brought him stateside. What Ahmet is now recalling is his participation in the Armenian genocide. Yet on that march he scraped together enough humanity to rescue the charismatic Araxie, with whom he fell in love. Verdict First novelist Mustian writes relentlessly, telling his haunting story in brief bursts of luminous yet entirely unsentimental prose and reminding us that, when life gets bloody, we had better watch out for our own humanity. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/10.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
