Black Dog of Fate

I want to start by admitting that I knew almost nothing of the Armenian Genocide before I read this book. But what surprised me more was how long it took Peter to learn about it as well, despite the fact that his family had experienced the genocide firsthand.

As others have discussed, the structure of Peter's book struck me as particularly important. It spans his varying perspectives of his family and his upbringing as he begins to obtain more and more information about his family's Armenian history. He did occasionally allude to the genocide and his future knowledge: "I did not understand then what the presence of a new generation meant for a culture that had been nearly expunged from the planet only forty-five years earlier" (5); "In 1960 I hadn't even heard the phrase 'starving Armenians,' nor did I know that my ancestors were among the more than two million Armenians who, if they weren't killed outright, were marched into the deserts of Turkey in 1915 and left to starve" (52). For the most part, however, readers are on the journey to uncovering this past alongside Peter. We feel the mystery in his grandmother's stories and his parents' behaviors. And maybe even empathize with Peter's frustration and desire to distance himself a bit from it, seen in scenes where he is seemingly entrenched in the American suburbia of the 1950s. (Which also gives great context to the apparent strangeness, in some instances, of his Armenian family.) Later, when he begins reading about Armenia, we are in the scene with him as he moves back and forth between his mail carrying runs and sitting somewhere in NYC, to read more of his book. We're uncovering the history with him.

What I also found of particular importance, which sort of serves as a reasoning for my own ignorance of the Armenian Genocide, is Peter's investigation and explanation of Turkey's intense denial. And how they have been able to continue to persuade the United States to take part in this denial. I thought of how Peter needed to write an essay for his class but couldn't find any information in the encyclopedia about Armenia or in any books on Turkey that he found, forcing him to write an essay on Turkey instead, which ultimately sparked conflict between him and his father. In this way, the book seemed to have a cause-and-effect structure of sorts.