To Go On Living: Stories
By Narine Abgaryan.
Plough, 2025.
Hardcover, 220 pages, $24.95.
Reviewed by Michial Farmer.
Modern Westerners live with a delusion. We actually live with a lot of delusions, but perhaps the most insidious one is that the normal condition of humanity is peace, that we in fact deserve peace, and that war is shocking and scandalous. War, as it happens, is shocking and scandalous, but not because it’s a rarity: like plague (which we also imagined ourselves immune to until recently), it has been humanity’s constant companion for all of our history, and the fact that it’s mostly stayed out of Western Europe and North America for the last few generations doesn’t bear as much metaphysical weight as we like to imagine.
Our ancestors, much less able to control their lives than we are, were quite aware of the fragility of their existence. And the same goes, I imagine, for people whose lives are less certain than we imagine ours to be: the refugees, the famished, and of course, those for whom war is a direct, rather than a distant or imagined, reality. I think of the Salve Regina prayer: “To thee do we send up our sighs, / mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” How many of us middle-class Americans actually experience our lives as a valley of tears—or at least as one that can’t be solved using pharmaceuticals?
The Armenian writer Narine Abgaryan’s short-story cycle To Go On Living—freshly translated and published by Plough—shows us another world. The small town of Berd, Armenia, was one of the casualties of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan. (I was, in my western ignorance, not even aware of this war before reading the book.) The actual conflict lasted five years, but, as Abgaryan shows in these stories, the scars that it left behind are unlikely to heal anytime soon. She knows that war “has a tendency to start but never ends. That it destroys houses and takes away the men, and then, when it calms down, it inflicts incurable diseases upon the women. After having its way with the adults, it takes the young people who can’t handle their fears and pushes them over the edge of sanity.” It is a totalizing force.
Abgaryan’s prose, as translated by Margarit Ordukhanyan and Zara Martirosova Torlone, is as spare as the titles of the stories, which are all single words: “Baklava,” “Lace,” “Prayer,” and so forth. It very much recalls Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, another short-story cycle about small-town sufferers, but the suffering of Abgaryan’s characters is much more visible, and in most cases, less alienating. These stories depict misery but are not themselves miserable. I won’t say reading them is a pleasurable experience, but it’s not a devastating one, as the subject matter might suggest.
The stories are all short—the longest of them doesn’t make it to double digits—which allows Abgaryan to include just enough details to make the point, then end things before all the implications become clear. But here the short-story format works greatly to her advantage. Characters recur in multiple stories; the dead are raised, the living are lost, and we end up seeing not quite the same event from multiple perspectives. If her writing were not so humane and laconic, it would feel disorienting. Instead, one gets the impression that Abgaryan is trying to tell the whole story, knowing that much of it cannot be told after such devastation.
Very few of these stories could be called “war stories,” in the sense of telling of the experience of active soldiers. This is the point: To Go On Living is not about war, but about what war does to people who aren’t allowed to be bystanders. The first story, “Merelots,” gives us five slice-of-life pages about Metaksia, who learns to live with and love her stepson, Razmik. Then Abgaryan drops the hammer:
When the war came, people in villages along the border didn’t worry too much about it—all the families had been friends for decades and regularly visited each other. The war was somewhere out there, in the distance, and they were convinced it wouldn’t touch them. God willing, Metaksia rejoined with the rest. That was why she didn’t worry when she went to visit her mother, who had taken ill, on the other side of the border. All she did was cook extra food and ask the neighbor to take the laundry off the line when it had dried because Razmik would never have remembered to. Late at night, word reached her that things were restive in Omarbeyli—sounds of gunfire reached the village from the border, and some houses were on fire.
The war beats her back to Berd. When she returns, Razmik’s body is lying in the backyard, and, not knowing what else to do, she eats the dirt he lies on before gently preparing his body for burial. (Merelots is the Armenian day of the dead, which Metaksia is celebrating for much of the story, the war itself occurring in flashback.) The characters in To Go On Living, like Metaksia, are all trying to deal with their grief and their guilt. No one is untouched, and almost no one saw it coming. The fragility of human life has slapped them in the face, and it takes decades to figure out how to respond.
My favorite story in the cycle is “Hunger,” which begins with a description of immense postwar agricultural abundance but hinges on a much more homely gift of dried fruit to an adolescent girl who has lost everyone in her family. Its protagonist, Aleksan, rejects every form of competition, choosing instead the Christian value of solidarity with everyone who suffers. When the war disrupts the agricultural cycles, townspeople begin sneaking onto his farm to steal what little he still has: “Aleksan found this upsetting but he couldn’t help pitying the townsfolk: How could you hold a grudge against people who had been driven by despair over the treacherous mountain pass to scavenge food for their families by theft?” It is a form of goodness accessible to all, although of course most of us don’t allow ourselves to rise to it, not even in much less dire circumstances.
Nor, of course, does everyone in Abgaryan’s fiction. The angriest we see Aleksan is when he comes across an elderly refugee—the aforementioned twelve-year-old’s great-grandfather—who has been caught in a bear trap while trespassing on the farm of Aleksan’s friend Tsolak. As soon as Aleksan takes the man to the hospital, he returns to Tsolak’s property and promptly punches him in the mouth. But, as is the pattern in this book, the truth is always more complicated than it initially appears, and we learn essential information about Tsolak a few stories later—information that neither Aleksan nor anyone else in Berd ever discovers.
To Go On Living is a remarkably open-hearted book. Abgaryan loves these characters, and always seeks to understand them in their gentleness and their cruelty, to insist on their dignity, and to show us the depths of the mystery of their suffering, which reveals the even deeper mystery of human life. And that mystery is humanity’s shocking response—or rather, responses—to the unfathomable ugliness of the world, punctured from time to time with unspeakable beauty. Some of us turn on ourselves and replicate the bitterness and hatred around us, and some of us, unaccountably, offer grace. As Abgaryan puts it, “Ask Aleksan what the purpose of human life is, and he’ll say without hesitation: caring for others.” When we remember that war, plague, and human suffering of all sorts threaten to destroy every scrap of meaning in the world, these words are good to remember.
Michial Farmer is the author of Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction (Camden House, 2017) and the translator of Gabriel Marcel’s Thirst (Cluny, 2021). He teaches history in Atlanta.
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