Remnants: The Way of the Womb

by Hagop Oshagan

Second Edition. An unfinished, eighteen hundred-page work written between 1928 and 1934 in Cyprus, Oshagan's Mnatsortats (Remnants) is his magnum opus and the culmination of a series of powerful, innovative novels that have as their theme Muslim-Christian, and especially Turkish-Armenian, relations in the Ottoman Empire. Mnatsortats is a literary reconstruction of the pre-genocide world of the Armenians told through the horrific collapse of a family the Nalbandians. The author intended the novel to be divided into three parts (Part The Way of the Womb; Part The Way of Blood; Part Hell) but was unable to write the third part, which was to be devoted to the extermination of the Armenians, depicting the twenty-four hours during which the Armenian population of Bursa was annihilated.

250 pages, Paperback

First published November 25, 2013

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Yes. It's true. It took me two weeks to read a 190 page novel. That's mostly on me. But it is the kind of novel that doesn't read quickly. Solidly within the realm of modernist Weltliterature which is typically much bigger than the average reader. Difficulty lies not so much with the language as with the culture it is writing from and about, one quite unfamiliar to me. Also, the typical difficulty that attaches to enormous family sagas. This here very focused, as the subtitle indicates, on the female side of that saga.

At any rate, there's every good reason for you to pick this up and read it. And there is no good reason why your literary culture has kept this masterpiece hidden from your attention. But remember, good reader, it probably wasn't written for you.



____________
[stipulated :: this is an Armenian novel, not Turkish, no matter my shelving]

I kid you knot. Not a day goes by some obscure work from some corner of the world our politicians can't find on the map sends me down the rabbit hole and I wind up buying yet another book in a frantic attempt to beat the oop demons and drive the price of things through the roof. This one, the last copy from amazon, I picked up.

I blame this round on my Turkish Friend Manuk. If you're reading Turkish, please beFriend him ::
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4...
He's a real gr=Angel and keeps me on my Turkish toes.

He sent me this sample from Remnants ::
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/a...
I didn't read it. I just ordered the novel. But here's what the page says :: "A towering figure in modern Western Armenian literature" ; "producing a prodigious body of writing—often deemed controversial, subversive, even pornographic" ; "An unfinished, eighteen hundred-page work written between 1928 and 1934 in Cyprus, Oshagan's Mnatsortats (The Remnants) is his magnum opus and the culmination of a series of powerful, innovative novels" ; "but was unable to write the third part, which was to be devoted to the extermination of the Armenians, depicting the twenty-four hours during which the Armenian population of Bursa was annihilated." ; "Oshagan poses huge challenges for his Armenian-language reader as well as his translator." ; "in the tradition of Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Proust and Joyce, are not more widely known. In addition to his formal complexity, Oshagan often seems deliberately ambiguous, the sequence of words pointing in several, often contradictory directions at the same time. The translator is tempted to make Oshagan accessible by standardizing his language, making it seem natural, in short, by domesticating its semantic multiplicities and harnessing its torrential energy." ; [trans'r] says: "Oshagan's Armenian is not at all natural but barbarously beautiful." ; "the author's logic, deliberate puzzlers, and snares."

This blog'r is Oshagan's grandkid ::
https://talinedv.com/2013/11/18/mnats...

I just noticed that there are two English editions. Editions? Could just be printings. I don't know if any corrections/changes were made to the 2nd. Just for the record ::
2013 :: isbn10 1909382086
2014 :: isbn10 1909382108
Should you discover and differences between the two, please to let me know.

And naturally you are asking about Oshagan over at the complete review. Well. Book apparently received but not read ::
http://www.complete-review.com/saloon...
"I have now received the first translated-from-the-Armenian book I've seen here at the complete review, Hagop Oshagan's Remnants: The Way of the Womb."


Scratch any country on the planet and there's a book like this. One so important in some regard yet you've never heard naught of it. The kind of thing that keeps me goodread'n.

[Joseph Leidy]

"We don't cry in the same mechanical way we laugh... tears are sure. They have a thickness to them. They are expressive and a function of their moment. We are sincere when we weep along with a weeper and we don't feel the prick of conscience as we do when we laugh for other people's sake. Tears come from the depths and bring up, at the very least, the salts of an inner seafloor. They don't cease to be themselves even when we're insincere. More often, however, tears are our anguish - a meteorological epiphenomenon, perhaps, of the question of essence or being, which, leaving the gaseous state, becomes a liquid, repeating one of the infinite mysteries of creation. Every weeper is understandable."

[Harry Rutherford · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my book from Armenia for the Read The World challenge. Oshagan was born in 1883 in what is now Turkey — then the Ottoman Empire — and this novel is set in the Armenian community in Turkey before the genocide. ‘The Way of the Womb’ is actually just the first volume of a three volume novel; the third, unfinished volume tells the story of the genocide itself.

The Way of the Womb works well enough as a stand-alone novel, but obviously it would be a very different experience to read the whole work. Even without any explicit references to the approaching horrors, the context is unavoidable. It creates both dark foreshadowing and an elegiac note for a lost world. Not that Oshagan presents the lost Turkish-Armenian life as a golden idyll — his characters are feuding and manipulative — but there’s a certain amount of stuff about straight-limbed, strong Armenian youths living simple, honest lives among the olive groves, contrasting with an (understandably bitter) representation of weaker, more degenerate Turks.

This volume tells the story of a woman who, desperate to produce a grandson to continue the family name, is scheming to persuade her daughter-in-law to sleep with the hired help. That is used as a framing device to look back at the history of her family, the Nalbandians; once wealthy and powerful, built up by one man, Hajji Artin, and in terminal decline in the generations after his death.

I would like to be more enthusiastic about this book. The story itself, the characters, and the setting, are striking and interesting. But reading it was really hard work. The prose is quite dense and difficult anyway; I often found myself having to reread sentences several times. But it is made much harder by a lack of white space. The framing story has some pretty long paragraphs, but at least it’s frequently broken up by dialogue. The flashback to tell the story of the Nalbandians is 60 pages without a single paragraph break. 60 pages! I assume that’s a reflection of the original Armenian, but it was a real struggle to get through it.

It’s a pity. I can see why this is an important book for Armenians, and there really were things I liked about it; but it was just too much of a chore. It’s possible that’s the fault of the translation, rather than the original text… but either way, I won’t be picking up the next two volumes, if they get translated. For once I can see the appeal of a Reader’s Digest Condensed version, just for sake of the story, if anyone feels like producing one.