A review by siria
Three Apples Fell from the Sky by Narine Abgaryan

3.0

Three Apples Fell from the Sky is set in a small mountaintop Armenian village at an indeterminate period in time—isolated as Maran is, the distant war mentioned could be any one of a number of 20th-century conflicts. Narine Abgaryan tells a series of interlocking, multi-generational and magical realism-tinged stories about the inhabitants of Maran which slide back and forth in time. There are some lovely passages, and I did wonder if there were layers of meaning here that I just wasn't picking up on because I don't have enough knowledge of the social/historical/political contexts and tensions. (Abgaryan is an Armenian living and working in Putin's Russia.) But for me, despite all of the tragedies recounted here, this book was a bit too sentimental. Maybe it doesn't ever quite become what you could technically class as twee, but the ending,

in which a 58-year-old woman's (first?) epic bout of menstruation leads her to conceive and have a child for the first time, with her 70-something husband, all of whose children by his first marriage had died

, toed up to the line for me.