2010 book 244

Mark Mustian's The Gendarme
This book was an IndieBound pick so I checked it out from the library, but just didn't care enough to read it. I mean, it's by some lawyer from Tallahassee. Then it got a fairly good review in the NYT and I picked it back out of my library stack.

But, dudes? This book is terrible. I agree with the NYT that the writing is stiff, but it's not the writing that's the problem, it's the completely ridiculous and unbelievable story. We start with a 92-year-old man who grew up in Turkey but lost all his memories after an injury in WWI, and married an American nurse and moved here and blah. Now he has a brain tumor and is having crazy dreams--which, conveniently enough for the reader, appear sequentially and are full of detail--where he was one of the Turkish guards during the Armenian genocide.

Now here's a big problem I have with this book--for a story that is ostensibly about the Armenian genocide, it barely covers the actual genocide. There's a couple brief chapters covering the deportations/marches of the Armenians to Syria, but then it's all about the guard being obsessed with this girl, trying and failing to rape her (because he can't get it up, not because he feels bad), shooting guys in front of her, going to work in a Syrian brothel while courting her--and we're supposed to believe that she would reciprocate his (completely ridiculous and unbelievable) feelings? Not to mention that the end of the story kind of negates the whole Armenian genocide thing. If I was an Armenian, I'd be really pissed about this book.

Much of the story takes place in an institution where the old guy is committed after having a bunch of seizures; these passages are boring too, and present a bunch of entirely irrelevant characters to spout pithy and/or profound sentiments. His relatives are also stock characters who don't add any depth to the story. Basically I hated everything about this book and found it offensive on several levels, and have no idea why people are so excited about it. F.