The Broad and Beautiful Capacity of Human Life
A Review of
To Go On Living: Stories
Narine Abgaryan (Author)
Margarit Ordukhanyan & Zara Torlone (Translators)
Paperback: Plough, 2025
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Reviewed by Eric Herron
I had To Go On Living by Narine Abgaryan on my desk at work the other day when a co-worker stopped by. “That’s a bleak title,” he quipped. I mumbled something in response. I hadn’t quite found the words yet to describe the book. On the jacket, this fictional work is described as a collection of “poignant short stories [that] show how the people of a village ravaged by war pick up the pieces and carry on.” It definitely is this.
But this book is more. Through Abgaryan’s unique approach to storytelling, through her illustrative prose, and through the host of interrelated characters, To Go On Living creates a montage of community survival that is marked by perseverance, compassion, and hope.
The author weaves together these 31 stories (plus epilogue) using a very unique literary approach. Each 4-7 page vignette stands on its own, but when read consecutively, the stories present an intricate meta-narrative. However, it’s not a chronological series of events that connects these tales; it’s the relationships between characters who appear and reappear—and reappear again—from story to story.
For example, a gravedigger known only as Tsatur appears as a peripheral character in the story titled “Merelots.” Then, in the very next story called “Tights,” we meet Mayinants Tsatur in the central role.
In another example, a woman named Antaram is first mentioned briefly in the story “Gulpa,” when the character Khoren confesses, “I couldn’t keep my own daughter, Antaram, safe.” In the very next story, “Rug,” we find that Khoren’s granddaughter, Krnatants Lusine, is getting married and receives a rug as a gift from her groom. It is a rug made by Lusine’s mother, Antaram. The rug, along with Antaram, had both been lost for years, ever since she took it to town for an exhibition during a ceasefire, only to return the next year—her body and her arms in separate bundles. Finally, in “Valley,” we not only learn the name of Lusine’s groom, Karen, we also find him shooting an Azeri (Azerbijani) boy while on watch duty, and subsequently planning to exchange this injured prisoner of war for two Armenian prisoners—or perhaps for one prisoner, plus Antaram’s lost rug, which he has promised to recover for his beloved bride, Lusine, Antaram’s daughter.
This imaginative approach to storytelling is thoroughly engaging. After I recognized Abgaryan’s method, I found myself approaching each story with great expectation, “When will the next character reappear? Who will it be? To whom will they be related, and how?” Beyond its novelty, though, this compelling literary approach also serves to effectively introduce the broad and diverse Armenian community of Berd.
Berd (which also happens to be the author’s actual birthplace) is a rural town on the border of a war. The village is “tiny, no bigger than a pinhead,” as one character describes it, but it’s caught in the middle of a large conflict, the Nagorno-Karabakh War.
When the Soviet Union was collapsing in 1988, ethnic Armenians—who were the majority group living in this region of Azerbijan—voted to join neighboring Armenia. This sparked ethnic violence between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces, which lasted for six years. Around 30,000 people were killed and a combined number of one million Armenians and Azerbaijanis were displaced. Fighting was renewed in 2020 and escalated again in 2023.
It’s an interesting history, but it’s not at all necessary to know the details of this conflict to appreciate Abgaryan’s stories. That’s because the specific geo-political details do not matter as much as the specific consequences of the war, which are described in brutal and beautiful detail throughout the book.
There’s Ninek, a widow of war, whose baby (her dead husband’s child) also choked and died while under Ninek’s mother’s care. Nevertheless, Ninek “loyally and lovingly” cares for her infirm and unappreciative mother, while carrying her own debilitating grief and pain with “wordless, humble dignity.” As the author observes through another character, “Life has meaning for as long as you have someone to take care of…”– a theme that resonates throughout the book.
There’s twelve-year-old Anna, who is shoved underneath the sofa by her grandmother when soldiers storm into their apartment. From that hiding place, Anna is forced to watch one of the intruders stomp her four-year-old brother to death. Another character editorializes, “The worst thing about death isn’t its existence so much as the fact that it enjoys deforming and humiliating the human body.”
Then there’s Nuzgar, who carried the corpse of his dead brother (murdered by looters) for three days through forests, fields, and rivers so that he could bury him somewhere he could visit, to keep his memory alive. Nuzgar finally arrives at his sister’s home with “a bunch of wild daisies he had picked along the way.” He was out of money, but had been raised to “never to visit people empty-handed.”
Bleak? Definitely. So, then, why would someone want to read To Go On Living? As I read these stories, I found a profound empathy building in my soul, not just for these fictional characters, but for their counterparts in our contemporary world.
I found myself thinking of the everyday struggles of Gazans, caught in a conflict between their own corrupt leaders and neighboring Israel. I thought of the Israelis waiting to find out whether or not their family being held hostage would be returned alive—or dead. I also thought of the Ukrainians, under constant threat of missile strikes, while their children still attend school, and the parents of those children still go to work.
In addition to these lessons in empathy, Abgaryan’s stories have reminded me about the importance of presence with the ones you love. And her characters have modeled attention to the ordinary, and the beauty therein that is everywhere around us, all the time. Even in spite of their ongoing struggles with death—of parents, children, siblings, beloved animals— the residents of war-torn Berd have discovered boundless ways to celebrate life,
“ …admiring the lilac-colored eyes of a young girl; loving a stepson; listening to the sounds of morning through a bedroom window; sharing a huge tray of baklava; mastering the art of rug weaving; feeding crusts of bread to hungry sparrows; composing poetry late into the night with a cup of thyme tea; teasing jokes between life-long friends; being surprised by a stranger; strolling casually through town; tasting sour apples; standing beneath the cypress grove; smelling summer in the canned vegetables…”
Now, if someone inquires about the bleakness of To Go On Living, and the value of such a book, I have a simple (and difficult) answer that’s illustrated in a variety of colorful and poignant ways, through each of Abgaryan’s stories. And this answer is also neatly summed up by the author herself, in the very last sentence of the epilogue: “Life is fairer than death, and that’s what encapsulates its unbreakable truth. It is necessary to believe this in order to go on living.”
Through fiction, To Go On Living makes the argument that “Life is fairer than death.” And it’s proven to be true, inasmuch as the characters reflect the broad and beautiful capacity of human life, even in times of war.
Eric Herron
Eric Herron holds a Masters in Theology and the Arts from Fuller Seminary. In addition to writing witty copy for a popular grocery store chain, Eric is the author of Future Xian on Substack, where he’s seriously reconsidering everything he learned as a seminary student, pastor, and missionary.
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