The Gendarme

by Mark Mustian Narrated by Neil Shah

Overview

Author and attorney Mark T. Mustian has won rave reviews for his ambitious novel, The Gendarme. Plagued by failing memory, Emmett Conn dreams he was a gendarme in World War I and that his great love, Araxie, was separated from him after the war. With the lines between past and present blurring more every day, Emmett sets out to find the woman he lost all those decades ago.

“Extraordinary ... This is a harrowing and truly important novel by a splendid American writer.”-Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

Editorial Reviews

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.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

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.)

Library Journal

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

APRIL 2011 - AudioFile

Emmett Conn, a 92-year-old widower with two estranged daughters, lives in the U.S. under a mistaken identity because of a WWI brain injury and 70 years of amnesia. Near the end of his life medications and brain tumor surgery trigger dark memories of war crimes he committed as a 17-year-old Turkish gendarme. Neil Shah perfectly renders the return of Conn's memory, which begins with horrific nightmares and ends with remorse. His depiction of Conn's skittish, elusive dreams, which linger into his waking hours, is compelling. With tight pacing and a staccato delivery, Shah adds realism to scenes of Conn's rape of an Armenian prisoner and his part in a forced death march of Armenian refugees. Shah's outstanding performance of human suffering and the quest for forgiveness is memorable. G.D.W. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170963119
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	10/08/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged

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