Azad Alik

QUO VADIS VERSO?

Deep Mountain: Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide

By: Ece Temelkuran London: Verso, 2010, 256 pp., $26.95, paperback, $16 —

Reviewed by G. M. Goshgarian

NEW POLITICS – In a sober, balanced sketch of the history and historiography of the 1915 Armenian genocide included in a two-part article on Turkey published in the London Review of Books in September 2008, Perry Anderson notes that the perpetrators’ academic defenders have largely abandoned a discredited strategy of blanket denial for one of minimization or relativization, now increasingly discredited in its turn. He might have added that there has been a shift from genocide denial unabashed to genocide denial light in non-academic writing as well. The difference is that, outside the university, efforts at relativization or minimization continue to enjoy credit in the unlikeliest places. Verso, for example, has just released one: Ece Temelkuran’s Deep Mountain: Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide, a translation of some lightly upgraded newspaper journalism that began life in the mainstream Turkish daily Milliyet in 2006 and appeared in book form in Turkey two years later. The cover blurb touts it as a “nuanced and moving exploration of the living history [of] and continuing dispute on the Armenian genocide.”

For more see: http://newpol.org/node/413