30,000 Mornings

by Hiag Akmakjian

A funny, sideways look at life in the Big Apple through the eyes of Inge - a twenty-something Finnish model, who has a photographer boyfriend with more than just an eye for art. Inge torments herself with imaginary kidnapping scenarios after the disappearance of her fellow Finn Karen. Visits to her shrink are preoccupied by thoughts of Karen, but slowly Inge begins to admit that the terrifying sense of loss may not be entirely about her ...

309 pages, Paperback

First published January 5, 1999

About the author

Hiag Akmakjian was born in New York of Armenian immigrant parents. He is a photographic artist, taught by Ansel Adams, and is the author of the novel 30,000 Mornings and the nonfiction Snow Falling from a Bamboo Leaf: Haiku. His short story "A Room on the Left Bank" appears in the anthology 3:AM London, New York, Paris.

Reviews

[rainbow3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

30,000 Mornings - Hiag Akmakjian ~ ISBN: 0140279466
Tagline on the front cover: 'Quick fire dialogue ... along with a nice line is sassy humour and bitchy put-downs' THE TIMES

Back Cover: 'New York: no city in the world like it - not London, not Paris, not anywhere ... New York is what life is all about ... being alive in a wild and sensual Manhattan ... the purest poetry there is ...'

Inge, a Finnish model cum photographer cum diarist on Manhattan life, roams the urban jungle of wintry New York surviving on a diet of sex and vodka. She and her fashion-photographer lover Hal mix with the mad, the bad and the beautiful at the parties, and gallery openings and bars of the Upper East Side. But Inge's thoughts are buzzing with the disappearance of her friend blonde Finn, Karen, she of the Icy Nordic beauty and the world-famous nude centrespread, who went travelling to Morocco and never, returned…

Free with NOVA. Not for re-sale. Penguin Fiction www.penguin.com Cover photography by Victor Boullet.

Inner front page: Hiag Akmakjian was born in New York of Armenian parents. This is a first novel.
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Inge's a feisty, straight talking model, fascinated with the disappearance of Karen, another model she knew only as one of a crowd. That is, until Karen mysteriously didn't return back to life with the in-crowd in New York and Inge starts asking around. Much less of a taut suspense as a meditation on life. Quietly mesmerising, this is in first person narrative and the format, rather like a diary is beguiling. Mid-way through I was hooked and looked forward to reading another by this author but believe this is their only published book? I think if you like Haruki Murakami, you will like this?

Here's some of the review notes I put together previously: With a delightfully springy instep 30,000 Mornings just devoured almost every waking minute once I got into it's stride. What a treat. On starting it I didn’t entirely get it. I think I was going at the wrong speed, but once I clicked into it I loved the day to day journey of it. More of a reflection on life than a taut mystery with a definitive end. The meditative musings that are jotted down by this armchair detective are haunting, arresting or irreverently amusing. Its visual quality is arresting and I enjoyed the many poignant observations, and delighted in the great one liners and gosh, those delicious descriptions “seagull’s like rusty hinges in the sky”. I loved the Finnish under-glaze of it too. The smell and sound of life by the sea, the contrasts of life in Finland to the life in NY.

Hmmm, is this a cult film waiting to happen? If so please, please, please anyone embarking on such a project use a European or Canadian director, don’t let Hollywood anywhere near it!

[Thu 13 Oct 2011: found out today, Hiag Akmakjian has also published Snow Falling from a Bamboo Leaf: The Art of Haiku. Gosh, that sounds like a treasure, would love to get a copy of that!]

I'll register this copy with bookcrossing soon and it will be my third copy registered as I thought it such a powerfully atmospheric piece of writing and am very keen to share it with other readers! Also keen to get a book-ray going on this copy to garner other reviews on it.

Any bookcrosser interested in that, a postal book-ray, contact me on Bookcrossing.com as I don't have the faintest idea how to get mail from goodreads sent to my virgin inbox and I only pop into goodreads a few times a year.

[Johanna Sassu · Rating 3 out of 5]

At rhe beginning I enjoyed reading it but than the plot was slow paised and I lost interest.

[Kaoru · Rating 3 out of 5]

An extremely peculiar reading experience.

Told in first person by Inge, a young Finnish photographer cum model who lives in mid gentrification Manhattan. Her life and relationships are reminiscent of a bleaker, more grit-in-the-Oyster version of Carrie Bradshaw's Sex and the City.

The book is more a series of elliptical observational vignettes on the transience of urban life, love, sex, art, death, media and artistic legacy than a novel per se. The voice is by turns engaging, irritating, hopeful and cynical.

A subplot involving a model friend ("New York's next supermodel" type) who has disappeared in suspicious circumstances at the start of the novel and for whom the protagonist halfheartedly searches, never really ignites but still runs like a scar through the book's pages and epitomises the bleakness of the narrative.

Then, half way through reading it, I discovered that the author, far from being a young Nordic woman or someone who could otherwise be (from lived experience) expected to authentically portray the first person of a young, female narrator, was in fact a male, septuagenarian second generation Armenian immigrant. A painter and photographer. This completely knocked me sideways. Was Inge a Mary Sue? Or were the young photographers and jaded artists she encounters versions of the author?

I never really emotionally engaged with this curiosity of a book. I got it as a free gift with a women's magazine and consumed it piecemeal in between other books. It never really goes anywhere, but paints an impressionistic picture of the 1990s bohemian milieu it purports to authentically depict. As a woman, I was disturbed by the disparity between the identities of the author and his fictional narrator, but I have to say the disparity is so pronounced that it is more intriguing than problematic.

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Clearly a case in which a male author attempts to write a novel from the first-person perspective of a woman -- and not all all successfully. There are two ways to make a novel interesting: through plot development or through character development. This book fails on both counts. Not only did I feel zero affinity for any of the characters, the plot itself was nearly nonexistent. And the conflict set up in the first chapters is never resolved (nor do any of the characters change or learn anything).

This is the sort of book I think Lena Dunham would like and maybe allude to reading in an episode of Girls. I do not mention this as a positive thing. At best, it's a shallow account of overprivileged and slightly nihilistic yet hedonistic life in turn-of-the-century Manhattan.

All in all, if I hadn't gotten this for 48¢ at the Strand I'd feel really ripped off. As it is, I still think I paid 23¢ too much.

[Zena Schtyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gripping and entertaining read. Can't wait to read the follow up!