Book of Adam, The

The Book of Adam is Karapents’ second novel, written in 1980 and completed in less than a year and almost a decade after his first novel, the Daughter of Carthage (1972). It has received rave reviews by several Diaspora Armenian writers and literary critiques. It is the winner of the Armenian General Benevolent Union’s (AGBU) Alex Manoogian Literary Award and French-Armenian Writers Society’s Eliz Kavookjian-Ayvazian Literary Award. The second edition of the novel was released in Armenia in 2012. The novel has also been twice adapted for the stage, once in Tehran (2005) in honor of Karapents’ 80th birth anniversary under the direction of Seto Gojamanian titled “Where are we to be buried” and then in Los Angeles (2017) by Armen Sarvar titled “Yes, Adam Nourian.”

The Book of Adam is constructed on three levels: the state of the American social order in the final decades (1980s) of the twentieth century; the current crisis of the Diaspora Armenian; and the crisis of man finding himself at the end of the twentieth century. The characters and plot serve as the means of linking this triad of knots together and reaching a certain truth. “Aside from flashback,” as observed by the late editor, writer and translator Aris Sevag, “the book is written to understand life by the return trip and to live life by the road ahead, the metaphysical with the real, sometimes relying on non-existent realities which are more powerful than the real; therefore, from tie to tie, there surfaces a dry journalistic style to produce a clash between tangible and intangible realities. From this standpoint, the Book of Adam enters the self-contained current of contemporary American literature, which is a sad and nondescript visit to solitary persons and solitary communities.”