BUCHAREST, JANUARY 28, ARMENPRESS.  The Writers' Union of Romania on January 27 decided to offer Varujan Vosganian’s candidature in 2014 Literature Nobel Prize. Three other Romanian writers novelists Nicolae Breban, Norman Manea, as well as poet Mircea Cărtărescu are included in the list of the candidates. “Armenpress” reports citing Romanian  MEDIAFAX News Agency that  the Chairman of the Writers' Union of Romania Nicolae Manolescu informed that “literary value of their works and translation into foreign languages” served as a standard for introducing above mentioned four writers in Nobel Prize.

Author of “Whispers” novel which was translated into many languages ​​and won international fame Varujan Vosganian was as well  introduced in Nobel Prize of Literature by three countries at the same time last year - Romania, Armenia and Israel.

The Book of Whispers begins in a picturesque register, on a lane of the Armenian quarter of Focşani in the 1950s, among the steam of freshly roasted coffee and the scents of grandmother Armenuhi’s larder, among the old books and photographs of grandfather Garabet. But the reader is not left to savour the intimacy of this hearth and home and nor is he invited to chat with the merry folk who in peacetime spin stories about Ara the Fair and Tigran the Great. Varujan Vosganian’s “old Armenians from childhood” have no delectable tales to tell, but rather events that are thoroughly disturbing. In narrating these events, they attempt to disburden themselves of a trauma – their own and that of their forbears. 

The history of the 1915 genocide against the Armenians, the history of the interminable convoys of those banished into the Circles of Death, into the Deir ez Zor Desert, the secret history of Armenian freemasonry in Romania, of General Dro’s army, the history of the Armenians who followed the path of exile in the Stalinist period – all these and many other biographically filtered histories are to be found illustrated in the pages of this unsettling book.