Penelope by Goar Markosyan-Kasper

I first read this book about five years ago, when the Dutch translation was published. I wasn’t terribly impressed by it. Now that I live in Armenia, I decided it is time for a reread and possibly a re-evaluation.

The timing of my rereading Penelope is even more fortunate, because this novel is set in Armenia in 1994. The early 1990s were a difficult time for Armenians: there was a war going on with neighboring Azerbaijan and because of this the borders with both Azerbaijan and Turkey were closed, there was no gas, there was electricity for only a few hours a day, people were using woodstoves for heating and cooking (during these years Armenia lost an amazing amount of its forests). In short, life was very difficult. These days people still remember those years and they -rightly or not- blame then president Levon Ter-Petrossian for their hardships then.

Ter-Petrossian was ousted in something akin to a coup in 1998 and he subsequently retired from politics and public life. Until September of last year when he made a comeback and became the main opposition candidate in the presidential elections of last February (and one of only two candidates who had a real shot at winning). He lost the elections in the first round and then staged continuous protests on one of the main squares in the center of Yerevan, After ten days the protesters were violently dispersed by the authorities, which resulted in officially ten dead and hundreds of wounded. This is why Armenia was in the headlines again for two brief days two months ago.

Back to Penelope. She is an unmarried thirty-something woman, living with her parents in Yerevan. The novel follows her one cold day in December 1994 on her search for a place to take a shower. When Penelope wakes up in the morning, she plans to take a shower at home. The two hours of electricity their apartment building is given daily, should be enough to warm the water and take a shower. Unfortunately, that day the electricity is cut early. Penelope decides to visit some friends and relatives to see if she can take a shower there. This turns into a quest that takes Penelope all day. The story is told as an interior monologue by Penelope with flashbacks and memories, we are in her head most of the time, literally reading her thoughts.

During her search she runs into the two men in her life, Edgar and Armen. Edgar was her lover a couple of years earlier. They attended the Kharabakh-rallies together. Then Edgar left Armenia and built himself a successful business in the Kaliningrad-exclave of Russia. Now he is back in Yerevan. He takes Penelope out to a restaurant and asks her to marry him (don’t worry, this is not much of a spoiler). She refuses. Later the same day Armen, her current boyfriend, suddenly shows up. Armen is a surgeon who is working in the field hospitals in Nagorno-Kharabakh during the war there against Azerbaijan. Penelope hadn’t heard from him in almost two months and here he is all of a sudden, on leave from Kharabakh.

Eventually, Penelope chooses neither of the two men and she returns home, goes to bed to read James Joyce’s Ulysses.

According to the blurb on the cover of the book Penelope could be seen as a metaphor for the newly independent state of Armenia, a bride who has to chose between tradition (Armen) and the new businessmindedness devoid of any culture (Edgar). I am not so sure I completely agree with this, as I found Edgar rather traditional as well. The type of Armenian man that I imagined him to be like, is indeed lacking any culture, is interested in status, money and showing off, but is also incredibly old-fashioned and traditional. For those who know Armenia and Armenians: I am talking about rabiz-style people.

A very fun part of reading the book for me was following Penelope wandering through Yerevan and actually knowing exactly at what crossroads she crossed the street and all the routes she would take. It actually got even worse than just recognizing where she walked. Penelope lives on Kochar Street not far from the metro and from Komitas Avenue. Now, there are three or four different Kochar Streets in the city, all named after different people (Kochar is an Armenian family name), but only one is uphill from a metro station and near Komitas Avenue. Before I moved to my current apartment, I used to live on exactly this Kochar Street where Penelope is living. I lived two blocks uphill from the metro station. Penelope also mentions that she attended a school named after Anton Chekhov (the Russian writer). The place I live now, is more or less on the other end of Kochar Street (which is several kilometers long and more or less goes from one end of the quarter to the other) from where I used to live and near where I live now, there is a school named after Chekhov. I am pretty sure this is the school Penelope referred to. Figuring out these things made me smile. It was great fun to read a book set in the city and neighborhood where you actually live and to be able to “walk along” with the main character.

As I mentioned in the beginning, the first time I read this book, I wasn’t too impressed by it. Unfortunately, the second time around by and large my opinion didn’t change. I still found the writing annoying: very long sentences that jump from one thing to the other, lots and lots of literary quotes and referrals. Fortunately, my edition has endnotes which explain many of the quotes and referrals. Also, part of my problem with the book is that I found the character of Penelope rather annoying: I found her too theatrical and worrying too much about nothing. The book was too much character-driven and driven by a character that irritated me more and more. There is hardly any plot, as you must have guessed from my description above. If this kind of book works for you, I recommend Penelope, because it does give a good image of what life was like in Armenia right after it became independent again. Though life is definitely a lot easier for most people now (for one thing: there is round-the-clock gas, electricity, though not always water, and food is more readily available), the book still gives a fairly good picture of the country.

Penelope was originally written in Russian, and it has been translated into English, German, French and Dutch as far as I know. A short biography of Goar Markosyan-Kasper can be found here and a short story by her is here. Unfortunately, both links are in Russian. I found it very hard – if not impossible – to find links worth linking to with good information about the author or the book in English. There is another review of Penelope here.