Shelf Unbound October/November 2013 October 2013 | Page 18

“In English you don’t have this
word, and there’s no accurate translation of it. Is it nostalgia? Or yearning for the absent one? Or the love
that remains after the beloved has
gone? All of this could be saudade. 
Have you not seen your Christ on the
cross? And why does the Protestant
deny the image where the knowledge
can be felt.”
I love that, “where the knowledge can be felt.”  It is without
words, obscure, similar to the hermit
thrush’s song, to Whitman walking
with the “knowledge of death,” to the
elegiac voice of Amália Rodrigues,
to Maria’s internal place where she
goes when she is feeling pain, a place
without language. In fact, A Brief
History of Yes, and most of Micheline
Aharonian Marcom’s work, is a challenge to the sufficiency of language. 
She strives through neologisms and
disarticulated and run-on sentences
to press the English language to do
more. And despite the third person
perspective, A Brief History of Yes is
ultimately a private narrative, built
out of one individual soul’s language,
unhinged from collective rules of
punctuation and meaning and time.
There are few living American

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writers who write novels as challenging, mesmerizing, and intriguing as
Micheline Aharonian Marcom. She
proves herself again and again to be
a writer with an unremitting gaze,
and her work wounds and leaves
behind sacred scars as they show us
a love for humanity’s spectrum—
its gorgeousness and wretchedness.
Since she takes on as her subject
the ineffable in her characters, her
novels are difficult to talk about and
convey. Her characters often go to a
place—whether internally or externally—that is beyond or without
language. And, if they themselves
have no language for their feelings,
what is our hope in being able to
speak about it? We offer our silent
commiseration, our imperative as
sincere readers. Often I sense there
is something in the novels that aches
to re-experience the charge and mystery of myth, and as with A Brief History of Yes, her novels read like poetry.
Structured, yes, but full of sequences
that don’t succumb to the dictates of
prose, passages that go on unpunctuated and grow wild on the page.
—Jason DeYoung, in Numéro Cinq
(read the entire review here). Excerpted
with permission. All rights reserved.