Hungary: The PesText Literary Review in Budapest published in 2019 following excerpt from „The Book of Whispers”:

„In The Book of Whispers, photographs often take the place of living people. Because the twentieth century mowed down so many lives prematurely, people did not manage to match up the dead with the dead and the living with the living. In that century, death took mankind by surprise, more than any century before. When one of their number disappeared, standing in their dwindling circle, the Armenians put a photograph in his place so that the circle would not be broken. is is why, in their native lands, in the triangle among the three lakes (Van, Sevan, and Urmia), and wherever else they wandered, a photograph was a kind of harbinger of death for the Armenians.

For the Armenians of those days photographs were like a last will and testa- ment or like a life insurance policy. If the person came back from the convoys of deportees, the orphanages, the voyages in the holds of ships, the photograph was once more put away for safekeeping, and the person resumed his place among the living. If he did not return, then the photograph brought the deceased back to the midst of his family when they opened the old, handsomely carved boxes on feast days. In that too hurried century, the photograph became the excuse of those who had departed without managing to say farewell.

The Armenians of my childhood lived among photographs more than they did among people.”

Foto: The Cover of the review.