Armen Melikian’s 2023 novel, Expraedium, is a beguiling piece of work, part Joyce, part Orwell, part Pynchon, with a smattering of Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange thrown in for good measure.
If I read Melikian correctly, then the novel’s protagonist Brathki even performs the nifty trick of dying before he is born — three years before to be exact, as announced in the “Ololog” — Melikian’s version of a prologue.
Melikian is the author of a previous, humoristic novel, Welcome to Virginland, which garnered some critical praise. It also infuriated governmental and clerical leaders in post-KGB Armenia enough to warrant several assassination attempts and have him excommunicated from Armenia, a country to which the author returned after having lived in the West for several decades.
Melikian’s current, sometimes hard-to-decipher but joyously expounded text is part incantation, part mariner’s tale, part nonsense. Made up of poetry, prose and in-between writing that limns the (in)comprehensible, Expraedium combines several languages including Latin and English, with smatterings of Armenian, Hebrew and Greek and some cleverly made-up terms, to produce what Melikian terms “anti-literature.” The work’s title, according to ChatGPT, is a rare Latin legal term meaning “out of the estate” or “beyond the land or property,” used to describe rights that exist outside the boundary of an estate. In the present context, one assume that it self-referentially designates a work that exists beyond the usual limits of literature or what is commonly read. As a linguist and an avid reader, I found it a welcome if sometimes laborious exercise to try and extricate meaning from the narrative.
Expraedium takes place in a vaguely recognizable somewhat apocalyptic world where references are made to lost empires, capitalistic lands of rapacious destruction and a world that exists beyond exact time and place. Some easily recognizable tribes which inhabit this world include Slavs, Vikings, Russians, Israelis, Armenians, Europeans/Frenchmen, Greeks and Americans: all caught up in a world that the author blasphemes with somewhat joyous flair. That being said, religious institutions fare particularly poorly in Melikian’s estimation. And the author is learned, have no doubt about it, as evidenced by the names that he references in the following passage from the beginning of the book:
“Haik Primogenitor. A silhouette hushtoric. God of Cron. In analogue, Kronos, Occulted, Uranos, God of genesis. Daughters, sons, reflections on the origin of measurement. Guardians of moons. Urmashu. Zodiac’s birthplace…Bel, Hayk’s nemesis. to Baldasar of Urmashu’s foundation epos aneyl corresponding. Balthazar: Babylonia-Bel Shazzar, Bel Shar.”
