https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1143920691
Overview
Trashland starts off with its hero Gam-which in Armenian means both « I exist » and « or else »-a clever play on words, standing atop a hill as he relieves himself on the Armenian capital of Yerevan below. Once a muckraking journalist nicknamed « The Hedgehog, » Gam fled a life-shattering earthquake in his home city of Gyumri into a life of subsistence, living in a small hut near the garbage dump. Trashlandwas received with dismay by many of Armenia’s so-called intelligentsia. Everything from the title to the brutal honesty of its narrative took many by surprise. Just as Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao takes a candid look at the Dominican community in New York City and the Dominican Republic, Trashland offers an insider’s view of an often-insular society. As a diasporan Armenian, Donikian writes from a privileged vantage point. Playing devil’s advocate, he has superseded the expectations assigned to diasporans as cash cows to be bilked for imaginary projects or retirees who come to spend their hard-earned money in their golden years. To cross this line, one must love one’s people and community. To lay bare its deepest wounds and expose its most deep-seated corruption-those are the signs of a true patriot and humanist. Few novels deliver quite such acerbic, and at times lively societal criticism. Trashland serves as a dirge- and underneath it all, a paean- to a country abandoned to its worst tendencies.
About the Author
For close to 50 years, Denis Donikian has been a voice for the voiceless, a great littérateur and artist, an outspoken critic of corruption and dictatorship wherever he has found them-briefly said, a rare voice among Armenian writers. Born outside of Paris in the city of Vienne to parents who were both survivors of the Genocide, Donikian is the author of more than 40 volumes of poetry, non-fiction, and prose. He most recently published « La Petite Encyclopédie du Genocide Arménien, » a four-hundred-page book that breaks down the Aghet by topic and theme. The author writes mainly in French and sometimes in Armenian, having attended the Collège de Sèvres as a child and later at Yerevan State University. He studied in Armenia and then traveled to and fro, between Armenia, the Ukraine, and Georgia where he met luminaries such as filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov. Everywhere he has gone he has written, taught, created, and shared generously of himself.
Christopher Atamian is a New York-based writer, filmmaker, translator, and editor. He has written for leading publications such as The New York Press, The Huffington Post, The New Criterion, The Armenian Mirror-Spectator, and The New York Times Book Review and concentrated exclusively on Armenian culture and history in a previous column at http://www.yevrobatsi.com. His first book of verse, « A Poet in Washington Heights, » was nominated for a National Book Award and received the 2017-18 Tololyan Literary Prize. He has translated five books from French and Armenian and most recently co-edited a volume on Bedros Keljik, « Armenian-American Sketches. »
Ecrittératures 