Between the Stillness and the Grove

By Erika De Vasconcelos

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0676973272
• ISBN13: 9780676973273
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.22 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Brings back so many memories

Dzovig, a young woman brought up in communist Armenia, escapes to Portugal after her love affair with Tomas ends in tragedy. In a small Lisbon restaurant where she takes a job in exchange for shelter, she is forced to face the unspoken truths about the horrors of war and, ultimately, taught how to love again. Vecihe, Tomas's mother, mourns the death of her son as she confronts a disintegrating marriage and comes to terms with her own past, all the while searching for Dzovig, the girl who would have become her daughter. 'Between the Stillness and the Grove' is a novel that speaks to the weight of history, the leave-taking of lovers, families and land, as well as the price of silence. - Quoted from the cover of the paperback editionVirtually, this is a contemporary story of two women, Dzovig and Vecihe, who are fleeing from their turbulent past, a baggage that has been passed onto them by fate. Vecihe, the daughter of the 1915 Genocide survivor, who finds solace in painting and trying to erase the atrocious memories passed down by her mother. Dzovig, who is lost between the crude Soviet life and a passionate love affair with Tomas, a young troubled man. De Vasconcelos, being an outsider, paints a very graphic canvas on the neglected psyche of a people that survived the invisible years of the 1988 earthquake, Perestroika, Independence from the USSR, Sumgait, the war in Karabakh and the post-Soviet Renaissance. "Like beaten dogs, who are suddenly let free," these people are traumatized and lost in an unfamiliar system. A moment of anarchy in the history of the newly established Armenian Republic, that changed the whole life of a generation. This is a chronicle of real persons, where one's past reflects indirectly on the other's future, and where nothing can be contained between the stillness and the grove, except a screaming silence.Special thanks to Lara Aharonian, for introducing me to De Vasconcelos's second most unique novel. Shnorakalutiun!