Remnants

"Remnants is an inheritance. It has been described by turns as a novel of the catastrophe, as testimony, even as myth. But its author, Hagop Oshagan (1883-1948), intended it above all as a bequest. Unfolding in the late nineteenth century in a Turkish-Armenian village located between the ancient town of Nicaea (Ottoman Iznik) and the former Ottoman capital, Bursa, Remnants recounts an epic family drama precipitated by sexual transgression, crime, and betrayal. Oshagan claimed that his characters had really lived and that he had merely embellished them. An entire world, destroyed by the 1915-16 Armenian genocide and otherwise lost to memory, comes to life here, as the narrator recounts the decline of the once prominent Nalbandian clan. Faced with the extinction of their family line, the enterprising women of the clan’s main branch take creative, criminal measures to protect their inheritance and prolong their legacy. Oshagan depicts the devastating consequences in engrossing depth and detail. G. M. Goshgarian’s groundbreaking translation renders Oshagan’s notoriously terse Western Armenian  in a form that is accessible to a modern Anglophone readership."     – Nanor Kebranian, Columbia University