Armenia — Journey to Virginland: Epistle I

I think Armen Melikian’s experimental novel is pretentious garbage; I fully admit I might be wrong, but he hasn’t motivated me to check

The “do absolutely no research and just pick something recent at near random” approach has finally backfired. This book sort of looked the part on a cursory glance, but I found it borderline unreadable, and to be honest I only skim-read much of its middle third.

This book thinks it’s Finnegan’s Wake. I’m fairly confident the emperor has no clothes, but I admit it is possible that there might be layers of meaning worthy of peeling back that I simply wasn’t motivated to peel.

But there’s a red flag pretty early on in that it starts with a letter of recommendation from a literature professor telling you how ambitious and experimental this book is. Good ambitious and experimental literature doesn’t need to tell you that it is ambitious or experimental. Also the same letter compares the book to Orwell — perhaps the least ambitious and experimental of the major authors of the 20th century and one of the authors this book is the least reminiscent of.

The writing is highly stylized, and unlike say Ridley Walker or even Joyce or Falkner, it doesn’t leave you much in the way of breadcrumbs to cling on to and motivate you to persevere. So at a certain point I stopped trying to understand the text literally and just tried to let it wash over me (which can work for the trickier parts of Joyce) and then at a certain further point I gave up even doing that and just started to scan the text for things happening.

So I admit I didn’t give it a fair shake and am therefore unable to tell you reliably what the book is about, but as far as I can tell it’s essentially an extended monologue from the author as we follow the semi autobiographical story of his attempt to find a) a country where he feels welcome and b) a girlfriend. This quest takes them repeatedly between Armenia, Israel, Russia and the USA, as the author finds themselves to be too western for Armenia and too Armenian for anywhere else.

Most of this monologue is a rant that oscillates repeatedly between hating men in general and Armenian men in particular for their misogyny, followed by hating women for their maladaptive responses to said misogyny, followed by realising that those responses are consequences of the original misogyny… and so on. He also rants about all the usual things people rant about: maths, god, politics etc… The effect is rather like that Fence parody of DH Lawrence: “before we have sex, here are several of my opinions”.

At one point he mentions Colin Renfrew, who I know, and that makes me think that there probably is quite a lot of detailed research hiding behind all the stylisation, but again one isn’t particularly motivated to dig deeper. The arguments that are made in the parts that are easy to follow are fairly superficial, which leaves the suspicion that even in the more obscure parts the author has mistaken, or hopes we will mistake, opacity for depth.