The Gendarme Mark T. Mustian

The Gendarme Mark T. Mustian

Overview:

Mustian brings to life with searing vividness the squalor, disease, and everyday violence that made up the caravans, tent cities, and refugee destinations of the Armenian Genocide. He uses the same blunt simplicity to describe both the rape of a woman trying to save her child in wartime Turkey and the seemingly unbridgeable gap existing between a daughter and her dying father at the end of the 20th century in America. There were many passages that I marked off as I read through, thinking that I would choose one or two to quote in my review, but now having finished the book I find myself unable to pick just a couple.

THE GENDARME is a novel about the two very different stories that make up one man's life. Emmett Conn (Ahmet Khan) is a man at the end of his life. He's 92-years-old, a widower, and has two daughters, neither of whom he is very close to. After being diagnosed with a brain tumor, he starts to dream about another life during another time in another land: that of a young 17-year-old gendarme in charge of driving a caravan of Armenians out of Turkey and into Syria.

"Mark T. Mustian has written an extraordinary novel dealing with some of the most difficult issues of the twentieth century, issues that profoundly threaten this new century as well. The Gendarme explores humanity's capacity for large–scale evil and how that capacity expresses itself through ordinary, small–scale, individual lives. This is a harrowing and truly important novel by a splendid American writer."

—Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Hell and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain


"One reads this masterful work thinking all the while of its literary cousins—The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Snow by Orhan Pamuk. Books such as these, novels like The Gendarme, writers like Mr. Mustian, keep our world afloat amidst the tempests of history. Humanity would no longer recognize itself, its enduring passions and cruelties and triumphs, without them."

—Bob Shacochis, National Book Award–winning author of Easy in the Islands and Swimming in the Volcano


"I love this book. The haunting lesson from this gifted writer is that even the legacy of war cannot triumph over the human spirit. Where there is love and humanity, the human spirit triumphs. Read it."

—Sandra Dallas, New York Times bestselling author of Prayers for Sale


"The Gendarme does what few have the courage to do: haunted by memories of war crimes he committed under another name, he turns and enters his nightmare to find the woman who was his enemy then and now, decades later, is still his first great love. Mark Mustian shows the reader what the face of history looks like without the makeup. Mainly, though, he paints an unforgettable portrait of the human spirit at its bravest and most resilient."

—David Kirby, member of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, NEA and Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and author of The Ha–Ha


"Ahmet Khan's spiritual transition to Emmet Cohn is emotionally resonant. This is an important and unique journey told with compassion and a stirring sense of humanity."

—Atom Egoyan


"Why are war stories so often truly love stories? Because, as Mustian proves in The Gendarme, love in the face of war gives testimony that love endures our savagery, our violence, our hatred. In this powerful retelling of the horrible crimes committed against Armenians at the beginning of World War I, The Gendarme is a beautiful, haunting tale of survival and resilience."

—Julianna Baggott, author of The Miss America Family and The Madam


ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!

Sincerelyours

And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!