Petrosyan plays with space and time, introducing parallel loops of narrative and a weird “Forest” with its own impenetrable laws. The house, it emerges, has hidden dimensions. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than sometime-later.” Tabaqui embodies Petrosyan’s inventiveness, her resistance to chronology, her penchant for false trails and signs. The number of narrators proliferates, including the appealing figure of Tabaqui the Jackal, whose entries provide a kind of authorial manifesto: “I don’t like stories. No single story can describe reality exactly the way it was.” Songs and fairytales are part of the textual patchwork, along with allusions, from Hieronymus Bosch to the Kama Sutra Later Sphinx tells his girlfriend, one of the novel’s relatively rare female characters: “Whoever’s telling the story creates the story.
It is we who make it interesting or dull,” explains a student called Sphinx. Individuality is a central theme, producing a symphony of narrative voices. One inscrutable youngster likes “seltzer, stray dogs, striped awnings, round stones” and hates “white clothing, lemons … the scent of chamomile”. Petrosyan excels at the fresh details that make up individual personalities. Alternating with this are flashback chapters in which, confusingly, several people have different, earlier nicknames. We first experience the house through the eyes of Smoker he is an outsider, who moves from the conformist “Pheasants” dormitory to the anarchic “Fourth”. Most of them are known only by a pseudonym or “nick”.
Mundane details may not always ring true, but there is nothing sentimental or tokenistic about these wisecracking young adults, sporting dreadlocks, tattoos and a murderball-style physicality.ĭifferent characters narrate an overlapping series of events. The teenagers use wheelchairs or prosthetics and the leader of the house is blind.
The House is a school for students with disabilities this literary ruse to isolate the protagonists is also an integral part of the novel’s exploration of identity. But Petrosyan has refused to write a sequel or sell the film rights to this complex and unusual epic. It has since inspired postgraduate dissertations, Instagram pages of fan art and long signing queues.
The following year, it was shortlisted for the Russian Booker and won several awards. Passed from hand to hand, it found its way to a publisher in 2009. In the mid-1990s, Petrosyan, an Armenian graphic artist, showed friends in Moscow the manuscript of her then-unfinished novel.
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