Matani

"I remember my childhood, and my tender heart falls ill," Anatoly Mariengof wrote. We all keep inside this beautiful, tender illness, and each of us has it in its own color, taste, impulse. Just as each person’s childhood is also unique—special—because there is no such thing as “ordinary” in the world, and now we have before us an exceptionally “unusual” childhood.

The author of these stories grew up in Armenia. No wonder they call this sunny country. But the boy’s life is not always sunny; there are dark spots in it—strange and dangerous events. Time there flows differently—sometimes slow and sticky, sometimes wild and frantic. Mountains, travels, brawls, quarrels, scandalous pranks coexist with the purest childlike love, with grandmother-grandfather’s sunny warmth, with the strongest friendship, and with that feeling of taste, light, and the scent of life that happens only in childhood.