Penelope

"I was born a black panther –\/\/ Untamed, fast, flexible. \/\/ And I live not on flesh – \/\/ but on faith, \/\/ Not on blood – \/\/ but on fragile hope." These few lines from the poem by Goar Markosyan-Kasper speak of her more than a page of biography. Faith and hope, the ability to play with words and the capacity to find meanings in them that are not obvious to others, the talent to give prose a poetic quality – all of this is present in her books. Goar Markosyan-Kasper was born in Armenia, lived in Estonia, and loved Italy. But both her poetry and prose were written in Russian. And she felt it like few others. A candidate of medical sciences, a doctor, a talented poet and prose writer, she combined in her texts the lightness characteristic of poetry, the depth and psychological insight that distinguish true prose, and a unique perspective on the world, which only those who truly know what life and death are, and how closely they sometimes come to each other, can possess. What do we know about Penelope? The faithful wife of Odysseus, who, while waiting for his return to Ithaca, wove an endless shroud for her father-in-law and rejected numerous suitors vying for her hand. Penelope Goar Markosyan-Kasper lives not on sunny Ithaca, but in the wintry Yerevan of the 90s, where electricity is a luxury, and a hot bath is a dream that requires considerable effort to realize. Penelope has fewer suitors than her ancient namesake, but her heart is trying to be won by a classmate who races around the city in a Mercedes. And, of course, she has her Odysseus – Armen, a doctor who went off to war. "A ray of sunshine woke Penelope up." Thus begins this witty, sparkling, wordplay-filled novel about one day that we are to spend with the heroine, wandering from one Yerevan house to another and enjoying the warmth that is spread across these pages.