A New Book

This posting will be different from my usual ones, as it introduces a new book I co-authored. I did hesitate for a second since my blogs are in English and this book is in French, but I know that many of the visitors to my sites are multilingual.

So, here is the story behind this book:

It was 1977 when on a flight from Montréal to Paris I sat next to a young reporter returning from an assignment in Kurdistan, Iraq. During these eight hours of confinement to our seats, we talked about history repeating itself, art, and yes good food. For a number of years we corresponded as friends. Then, in my vagabonding from continent to continent, we lost touch.

Thirty three years later, thanks to email, we re-established contact. This time, we had our careers as authors well recognized in our separate fields. But our interest in history, and now our search for identity lead us to undertake an extraordinarily unusual challenge, that of writing a book together, from a distance.

And they say we get wiser with age…!!!!

The central theme of the book is our common cultural heritage, that of being Armenian. Janine’s father was Armenian, while both of my parents were. Her grandfather died during the 1915 massacres and her father, through the exodus via Syria and Lebanon, had landed in Canada. My grandfather had survived the same fate and time period, and established his family in Lebanon. We both grew up with the stories of Armenians, of genocide, immigrant’s outlook to life, the Diaspora, and the push for becoming global citizens without losing our identity.

Three years of writing and we are delighted that Art Global in Montréal, Québec, affiliated with Flammarion Canada, is the publisher of our book.

Above is a screen shot of the publisher’s page announcing our book, the title, in English being “When is the flight from Paris to Yerevan?” Of course, Yerevan is the capital of Armenia.

For those polyglots who visit my blogs, here is the link to the publisher (Ctrl+click): http://www.artglobal.ca/index.php?com=catalogue_livre&lang=fr_FR&id=118

Epilogue: This is my 10^th book and the only one I wrote in French. I have now published books, articles and poetry in five languages (Armenian, English, French, Italian and Spanish) but this one has a special meaning: it is the story of our parents, of Armenia in the past century, the massacres that made our parents immigrants and our childhood deeply influenced by our Armenian heritage. The autofictional dimensions of the book are held together by a unique friendship between us authors, and our personal quest for cultural identity.

About the cover picture: I took this picture in Nazaré, Portugal. You can see the original on my photography blog “Vahé's Streets” under the ‘Nazaré” entry.

April 1, 2014

© Vahé Kazandjian, 2014


PS1/ For those interested in reading it as an e-book, it is available at Amazon under:

http://www.amazon.ca/quand-vol-Paris-Erevan-Janine-Saine-ebook/dp/B00KN8DMAO/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1401915771&sr=1-2

PS2/ You can also see the English version of the book's synopsis on the publisher's site:

http://www.artglobal.ca/index.php?com=catalogue_livre&lang=en_EN&id=118