Tonight on Bibliocracy, 8 PM: ARIS
JANIGIAN. My guest tonight has written one of the first novels to consider
the LA riots. Twenty years later, Aris
Janigian has composed a beautiful, sad, funny and multi-layered book which
complicates, develops, personalizes and at the same time universalizes that
event. This Angelic Land, whose ambitions are fully, breathtakingly realized
in the novel’s characterization, description and perspective, tells the story
of that three-day and many
lifetimes-inducing moment for a family of
Armenian-American LA immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon,
of all places. They’d imagined perhaps a
new or different life but find, of course, that their new one is a similar tale
involving all-too familiar themes of racialization, class struggle, community,
hope and violence. The story is
told by one brother, a documentary film maker, looking for the experiences of
his younger brother, whose life becomes a complicated yet somehow exemplary
story, shifting its telling back and forth between the riots and their lives as
kids, in family, and in the younger sibling’s disappearance. The novel’s heart is in the tragedy of the
Armenian Genocide, and in Lebanon,
but also in the promise of Little Armenia and the multi-cultural experiment of
the city of Los Angeles.
With this novel, Janigian, author of two previous books, Riverbig and Bloodvine, establishes
himself as a confident, energetic, entertaining prose stylist full of poetic urgency, word play, humor and
ecstatic realist and historically confident everyday political layering of the
moments before, during, and after the violence and catharsis that was (and is)
the social earthquake of April 1992. This novel
comes highly recommended by, well, me! Thanks
for listening, live on the radio or online, and downloadable free for 90 days
from the KPFK archives.
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