Fleeting City

Tekgyozyan’s novel has been described as a “virtual movie-novella, where mysticism and urban typologies, grotesque and humourous transitions are all interlaced.” He touches on themes previously taboo in Armenian but which characterize much of the new Armenia, including virtual reality, sexuality, suicide, and drugs. His style resonates with an almost cartoon-animated quality. Equal parts humorous, absurd, serious, and surreal, Tekgyozyan is able to draw an animated film on paper, where objects come to life and human beings take on unsuspecting forms. In this novel, one of the characters has hair that seems to have branched out like a tree and comes alive. The two main characters in Fleeting City, Gagik and Grigor, tell the same story but from two different perspectives, adding and subtracting. The result is a narrative as complex as Tekogyozyvan's reality.

Hovhannes Tekgyozyan was born in Yerevan in 1974. He graduated from the State Institute of Theater and Cinema and has written short stories, novellas, plays, essays, screenplays, and two novels. He has won major prizes, including the Armenian-American IGEFA Prize for the best young writer, the Best Online Playwright Prize, the Vahan Tekeyan Prize, and the Grish Darbinyan Award.