You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Carol Edgarian, the author of Rise the Euphrates.

It's a first novel recently published by Random House.

Now, how do Armenians begin a story?

They begin it with the phrase Garuchigar, which means there was and there was not.

And can you explain to me, how does that, what does that mean?

Well, it's, you know, and our version would be once upon a time.

But I love, I love that sense of garghar, there was and there was not, because of course, that tells you right off the bat that every story contains light and also shadow.

There's what is and there's what is taken away or what isn't.

And I think that's a great way to set up a story.

I love that in all the Armenian folk tales.

That's how they begin.

It's an interesting novel, this novel, which begins with a memory of the 1915 genocide of the Armenians

as performed by the Ottoman Turks,

because the book begins with the answer to the heroine Cedarloom's quest.

She is looking through her life for the story of her grandmother.

And that begins the novel rather than ends it.

And I was wondering how the book came to be structured in that way.

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