Description
A modern-day Armenian American girl, Seta Loon finds herself caught between her grandmother, a survivor of the Turkish massacre of Armenians, and her mother, and struggling with her own feelings of conflict and alienation
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This stunning tapestry of world history and intimate family truths marks the debut of a supremely gifted novelist. Carol Edgarian has written a story remarkable for its psychological insight and the unique perfection of its lyric prose. "These are the things that were not lost. My name is Seta Loon," begins the womanly wise narrator of Rise the Euphrates. From birth, Seta is impelled on a perilous journey to unravel the secret she inherits from her grandmother Casard.At the heart of the story is a moment of survival when a young girl narrowly escapes a holocaust - the 1915 Turkish massacre of over one million Armenian men, women and children. In the diaspora that follows, the girl comes to America bearing a legacy of trauma that her granddaughter Seta will be left to explain. Seta is the chosen one, the one upon whom the generations pin their hope and despair.Rise the Euphrates vividly brings to life a historic tragedy - the world's first modern genocide - and illuminates the archetypal pattern in which the first generation denies, the second generation forgets and the third generation rediscovers the event.When Casard emigrates to America she puts the atrocities behind her, yet, as the years pass, she infuses her only daughter, Araxie, with a legacy of anger and shame. Willfully, Araxie marries outside the clan, making her husband and their children odar - outsiders. It falls to Seta to heal the family."The daughter assumes what is unfinished in her mother's life," Seta tells us. "The unanswered questions become her work."Caught between the generations, between American and Armenian cultures in her Connecticut town, Seta confronts an even fiercer division, the one within herself. Haunted by survivor's guilt, silence and isolation, Seta longs to love, to speak, to be free. Her song and the wisdom and beauty of life are Carol Edgarian's triumph in Rise the Euphrates. Widely recognized and acclaimed before publication, this profoundly moving and richly accomplished novel establishes Carol Edgarian among the foremost American writers.
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