{"id":11380,"date":"2025-07-01T18:52:45","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T18:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=11380"},"modified":"2025-07-08T18:55:57","modified_gmt":"2025-07-08T18:55:57","slug":"to-go-on-living","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/01\/to-go-on-living\/","title":{"rendered":"To Go on Living"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Living in the Midst of the Death<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Through mundane depictions of everyday life in an Armenian village plagued by war, Narine Abgaryan shows in detail what it looks like for life to go on.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Elle Muller<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Narine Abgaryan\u2019s newest novel captures an Armenian mountain village in the aftermath of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the early 1990s. Fueled by religious, ethnic, and cultural differences, the conflict has ebbed and flowed, with a new war breaking out in 2020. In To Go on Living, <\/em>thirty-one linked stories breathe life into villagers who are surrounded by death. Abgaryan\u2019s stories weave together to paint a picture of the current landscape and a potential path forward amidst a war with no clear end.<\/p>

Going into this book, I knew very little about the details of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Abgaryan herself was born in Berd in 1971, so she is intimately familiar with the landscape and the stories she\u2019s telling. The stories will, of course, speak to the people who are familiar with the landscape and its tragedies. But for me, and for many readers, they introduce an Armenia that is familiar, from school or news articles, yet still unknown. In the pages of this book, I found myself learning intimate details about the ongoing experiences of war that go beyond factual reporting\u2014each vignette provokes empathy and understanding in a way that only storytelling can.<\/p>

While the book is largely centered around Berd, a mountain village in Armenia, Abgaryan did not want to write a book that simply said the Christian Armenians are good and the Muslim Azerbaijanis are bad. In fact, in a book launch talk at the Armenian Cultural Center in Massachusetts, Abgaryan said, \u201cWars happen when people divide themselves into good and bad.\u201d<\/p>

Many of her stories in To Go on Living <\/em>play in this uncomfortable space in between: One, where a daughter watches her father keep an Azerbaijani refugee in their barn, before her grandmother lets him go. Another, where an old and blind Azerbaijani woman reaches out to touch the hand of a younger Armenian in Derbent, Russia. Another, where Armenians bury the bodies of both sides. \u201cPeople who live in a line of fire have less hatred than those that live in the rear,\u201d Abgaryan observed. This message in particular has stayed with me long after finishing the book\u2014many of us live far in the rear and only witness the line of fire through stories.<\/p>

The book is filled with slow melodic descriptions of everyday life, like cooking gatas <\/em>or baklava. Then, suddenly, a flashback will rip into the serenity and detail the violent brutalization of a body or destruction of a location, often of a person or home whose memory we just read about.<\/p>

This jolting back and forth is difficult to read, at first. In fact, the book was a slow read for me because every now and then, a scene physically hit my stomach and I\u2019d have to take a few days between stories. But as the book progresses, we see the world grow and intertwine, leading me to finish the later episodes in quick succession. Halfway through the book, I was fully engrossed in the world of Berd.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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War will go on fighting. Writers will go on writing.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Originally written in Russian, To Go on Living <\/em>was translated into English by Margarit Ordukhanyan and Zara Torlone. Both translators have personal connections to Armenia, just like Abgaryan. The challenge of literary translation is to convey the meaning of the original text while maintaining the stylistic nuances that bring the work to life. This book is a great demonstration of holding these ideas in tension. At the book launch event at the Armenian Cultural Center, Ordukhanyan explained that \u201cAbgaryan writes in Russian that is clearly Russian written by an Armenian,\u201d explaining that her sentences pull in the ways that an Armenian speaking Russian would sound. So, she explained, in translating the novel, Ordukhanyan and Torlone had to fight the temptation to smooth the roughness of the original text.<\/p>

One of many examples of this that I found captivating is that Ordukhanyan and Torlone chose not to translate certain words. There are moments that I don\u2019t fully understand, but that make me feel as though I\u2019m in the room as the characters cook or clean in their vibrant homes so vividly depicted by the text.<\/p>

In addition to the untranslated words, there is a certain musicality in the English that calls to mind the original Russian text. For example, the sentence structure is unique, pulling in detail upon detail through parentheticals and varied sentence structure. The effect feels like brushstrokes in watercolor paint, dreamy and melodic.<\/p>

The roughness of the language and the simple, almost understated, descriptions cause certain moments to ring out like the aftermath of an explosion. This melodic nature is on full display when Abgaryan describes the noise of a man\u2019s truck early in the morning that cuts through the silence. It isn\u2019t until the end of the episode, once we have flashed back and forth in time, that we learn why he hates silence. That delayed understanding is prevalent in the winding prose.<\/p>

Muradants Andro knows about pre-dawn Berd what even the birds that herald the arrival of a new day with their cheerful song don\u2019t. While their idle chirping, rising from the edge of the valley, soars up to the summit of the ancient Eastern hill, awakening it from its stony slumber, Andro\u2019s rusty, ramshackle truck, coughing out heavy petroleum fumes and burned machine oil, huffing and periodically driving one of its wheels into the crusted-over ditch, goes yard to yard, scaring off animals and waking people at an ungodly hour.<\/h2>

Because the stories often made me feel like I was in the room with a family, attending Abgaryan\u2019s talk brought the book into vivid color. Reading alongside a map and recalling Abgaryan\u2019s voice as I was reading made the world come to life and the community begin to breathe off the page.<\/p>

As I became more familiar with the community, the tragedies of the episodes hit harder and harder. There were times when I felt a little hopeless, knowing that the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan sparked again in 2020. It all felt like an endless cycle, maybe even inevitable, but I kept coming back to Abgaryan\u2019s words, \u201cWe live from war to war and somehow have to write from war to war.\u201d<\/p>

The stories in this collection take events we may have read about in news articles or history books, and bring them to life. In times of conflict, vignettes like the episodes in To Go on Living <\/em>give us snapshots of the real people who are affected. The experience of reading this book reminded me of reading Voices from Chernobyl <\/em>by Svetlana Alexievich, an episodic oral history of those who lived through the nuclear disaster. With both books, while we may know the historical facts, it is a much different experience to read a personal narrative that brings the events into the realm of a lived reality. Gaining a greater sense of their day-to-day experiences helps us empathize and understand to a greater degree.<\/p>

This book captures the lives of the people who, in the 1990s, had no choice but to continue on after the unspeakable. Now, perhaps, there are those who will write about the people living through the 2020s in Armenia. Some of the stories will be similar\u2014the same people or families, with a different writer\u2019s voice, style, or format. Abgaryan doesn\u2019t suggest that this conflict will end neatly. Instead, she gives us stories to teach ourselves and teach others.<\/p>

She writes in the epilogue, \u201cLife is fairer than death, and that\u2019s what encapsulates its unbreakable truth. It is necessary to believe this in order to go on living.\u201d With this book, the people in these stories will go on living. War will go on fighting. Writers will go on writing. They will write for the people who understand, for whom the stories sound like home. They will also write for the people outside the line of fire, for us to learn to understand.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Elle Muller<\/strong> holds a BA in English & Creative Writing and Theatre from Dartmouth College. She is currently based in Boston, where she can be found dancing and writing.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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To Go on Living: Stories <\/strong>was published by Plough Publishing House on April 22, 2025. Fare Forward<\/em> appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Through mundane depictions of everyday life in an Armenian village plagued by war, Narine Abgaryan shows in detail what it looks like for life to go on. 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