Earlier this winter, I ordered Three Apples Fell from the Sky by Armenian writer Narine Abgaryan (translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden) out of a desire to internationalize my reading habits and expose myself to different narrative styles and structures. That said, I will admit I chose the book out of the great sea of recent international titles in large part because of its quaint green, red, and yellow cover, with a stylized apple tree and rooster (though a white peacock might make more sense, after reading the book), not to mention the blurb by Ludmila Ulitskaya: “Read this book. It’s balm for the soul.”
Well, after my husband and I lost our nearly twelve-year-old Australian shepherd to a brief but sudden illness this week, I really needed some balm for my soul, and I am grateful this book delivered on its blurb. It’s a quiet, beautiful story that focuses on the aging inhabitants of Maran, a tiny, isolated Armenian village that is in many ways lost to time. There’s also a light touch of magical realism—such as a the aforementioned peacock that seems to have some otherworldly qualities and a man tormented by visions of the future.
According to this review in The Common, Abgaryan has referenced Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s fictional town of Macondo from One Hundred Years of Solitude as an influence, and I definitely see the similarities, minus two hundred pages and the extremely confusing family tree. While Three Apples doesn’t quite reach the same literary heights as One Hundred Years (which would be quite a tall order), it has the virtue of being a much less demanding read that nevertheless gives in great abundance in terms of reading pleasure.
The book initially felt more like a novel-in-stories, focusing on the individual stories of several connected characters from the village, but gradually opened up into broader, more coherent novel arc that pulled these many characters and story threads together in a satisfying way. The characters are not strangers to tragedy; in recent decades, Maran has been ravaged by famine, earthquake, war, and mudslides, as well as the more garden variety heartbreaks, illnesses, and family traumas. Spectacularly, the book is not dominated by gloom but rather a gentle humor (there is a great little bit involving a cooking-ingredient related privy mishap) and, more importantly, hope—a kind of stubborn, knowing hope that is certainly sometimes disappointed but also rewarded with unexpected joy.
There is a deep sense of the village’s history—each character’s story is typically accompanied by some explanation of the origin story of their family name, for example—and enduring hope for its future. In one house, a crack stubbornly appears and admits light despite the occupants’ best attempts to repair it. This crack might be the perfect window into the village and the book: a slightly magical reminder not only of our great vulnerability to disaster and loss, but also of the persistence of the unlooked for joys and gifts of life amidst those sorrows. I will leave you with this long, beautiful excerpt from p. 148-149:
“Over time, a barely noticeable crack that had appeared on the day of the earthquake began growing along the wall of the marital bedroom and rising toward the ceiling. After reaching the very top, it moved sideways, painstakingly carving out a narrow space in the stone through which a lone ray of sun pushed its way during the day and a dim patch of moonlight at night. Vano had reinforced that side of the house with wooden beams and filled in the crevice with mortar, but it felt as if their residence were breathing and walking, creaking its shutters and sides, so the mortar didn’t hold well and began crumbling with time, baring the wall’s torn wound again…By the time the exasperated Vano again set to filling in the crack, spiders had spun their ethereal webs in the blades of grass and a thin jagged strip burned by the sun’s persistent heat had blossomed on the wooden floor, which was painted dark blue. ‘There’s life everywhere,’ marveled Valinka, scrutinizing cobwebs chock-full of dried insect corpses and stunted stalks of grass making their way into the room. ‘There’s death everywhere, and life too.’”