The Brick House

by Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Fiction. THE BRICK HOUSE is a place where people dream of love and loneliness, of the world's beauty, and of ongoing environmental degradation. In this short but moving work, travelers confront their lives in the strange, elemental language which dreams allow for, a strangeness mirrored in the accompanying illustrations by Fowzia Karimi. Inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and following in the tradition of Armenian illuminated manuscripts, THE BRICK HOUSE is a delight to the eye and mind.

Genres: Fiction

144 pages, Paperback

Published November 2, 2017

About the author

Micheline Aharonian Marcom has written seven novels, including a trilogy of books about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the 20th century. She has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the US Artists’ Foundation. She was a 2022 finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Marcom is the founder and Creative Director of The New American Story Project [NASP], a digital storytelling project exploring the forces of migration and the lives of new Americans newamericanstoryproject.org. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange house on the moors holds rooms destined for dreamers, summoned hence from their ordinary lives for unknown reasons. The loose narrative shifts from the house to scenes from its tenants' lives to their verbatim dreams. Marcom's mysterious novel evoked comparisons to Jane Unrue for me, though this particular work lacks the intimate cohesion resulting from the single narrator approach Unrue has employed both in her earlier novellas and the 2015 novel Love Hotel. But there is that same incidental eroticism; those lonely, isolated characters; the travels into oneiric territory (here even more overt). In these pages, though, there also exists deep concern and sorrow over human-caused environmental degradation and its resultant ecological havoc. Depictions of modern car-centric urban design are juxtaposed with scenes of young seabirds dead in the South Pacific, their bellies brimming with plastic waste. And humanity fares not much better, most notably in love, where marriages stagnate and end and initial connections wither on the vine. Through all these episodic fragments lie scattered markers, tugging at one's reading memory, just barely keeping this fragile narrative from splintering into so many separate shards. As with Unrue's work, rereading is a virtual requirement.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

An engrossing, erotic, strange Invisible Cities in our age of environmental degradation. Oulipo meets Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.

[Isla McKetta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few books have the power of returning me to myself. This strange, complex and beautiful book did just that. I'll read it again and again.

[Noah Skocilich · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the more interesting books I’ve read in some time.

The feeling of reading it is something like the feeling of watching the movie Waking Life but if it were more intimate. Sexual and earthy.

A very beautiful and moving work of art.

[Mills College Library]

Fiction M3212h 2017

[Caitlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got this book because a literal house of dreams sounded right up my alley. It's tough to say how it failed me, but disappoint it did. I was hoping for strange and lovely, or perhaps nightmarish and thoughtful, but it felt hollow. Dark, emotionless encounters. Short, hopeless fragments of stories. I found a turn of phrase here or there interesting, but overall it left me disengaged.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poetics can be a little impenetrable and the dream-telling frames don’t always transcend the tiredness, but even when all cylinders aren’t firing the language is dynamite.