And three apples fell from heaven:

One for the storyteller,

One for the listener,

And one for the eavesdropper

Before Three Apples Fell From The Sky has even begun, we are met with this old Armenian saying from which Narine Abgaryan’s novel takes its title. The saying divides the book into three parts: the one who speaks, the one who receives, and the one who overhears. In doing so, it tells us that a story does not belong solely to the storyteller, nor even to the intended listener. We, as the reader, are not formally welcomed into Maran, the remote Armenian village at the centre of this novel. Therefore, we are the eavesdroppers, and the novel spends its time asking us: what does one owe a story once one has overheard it?

Originally published in Russian in 2015, and translated into English by Lisa C. Hayden, Three Apples Fell From The Sky is set in Maran, a village which has endured so much it feels almost miraculous that anyone is still alive. War, famine, pestilence, drought, landslides and an earthquake have all left their mark on the village and its people. By the time the novel begins, Maran’s population has dwindled to a few dozen inhabitants, most of them now elderly. However, Maran never feels like a pitiful artefact preserved under glass for the reader’s compassionate gaze. The village is instead quite noisy, superstitious, proud, comical and absolutely full of life. Maran’s villagers believe in curses and omens, in the meaningfulness of dreams, and in staying in a place where their ancestors are buried. Instead of the emptiness we assume the village holds from all it has suffered through, we actually spend time in a place where nothing is ever entirely over, and the dead are never truly gone. 

Anatolia Sevoyants had laid down to breathe her last, not knowing how many wonderful things awaited her.¹ 

The novel begins with Anatolia Sevoyants, who, at fifty-eight, is the youngest resident of Maran and believes she is about to die. She has been bleeding heavily for days and, assuming death to be imminent, prepares for it by feeding her chickens, laying her burial clothes out on the table, putting money aside for her funeral and opening up the window so her soul will have somewhere to go. When Anatolia awakens and finds herself still alive, begrudgingly, she gets up and prepares for another ‘final day’ of life. From Anatolia’s supposed deathbed, the novel opens outward into the life of Maran.

Structurally, Three Apples Fell From The Sky moves through the story in a rather peculiar way, somewhat circling through the narrative rather than going in a line from start to finish. A name mentioned briefly may later become the focal point of a chapter; an event may be revisited again from someone else’s perspective; a death may precede the life we end up encountering. It felt very much like telling one person’s story properly is to be forced into another’s, and then another’s. In Maran, identity is fundamentally relational. Everyone’s lives spill into each other’s; people are known by whom they loved, whom they lost, whom they married and whom they offended. 

At times, this does mean the book feels crowded. There are many names, many families, many tragedies and connections to keep track of, and the movement through time itself can be slightly disorienting. But strangely, I came to quite like that feeling. It goes to show that Maran’s diminishing population does not mean its life is now lacklustre. If anything, the village feels almost overpopulated with memory. The living and the dead jostle together where the deceased are not kept in the past, they remain integrated within the day-to-day of Maranian life, carried in the people’s minds and hearts. Despite the novel’s many tragedies, this aspect felt wholeheartedly consoling. The story and its plot is not linear, because love is not linear. We do not remember the dead in an orderly fashion, we remember them when we come across a certain familiar smell, or because someone repeats a phrase they once said. Then, their stories are told. 

Smiling, she would think about how human happiness can be multifaceted and merciful, too, in each of its manifestations.² 

Anatolia’s late-life love is, to me, the heart of the novel. So often, I find that fiction gives the youth alone the theme of ‘becoming’: the young are allowed to desire, to change, to be foolish and begin again. We see it in truly brilliant films and novels such as Normal People and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, whereas older characters are more frequently left as people filled with either wisdom or regret, and little else. However, in Three Apples Fell From The Sky, Anatolia is fifty-eight years old and encounters new possibilities. She herself comments how “What’s the difference, alone or not? I’ll grow old either way”³, and yet the story she’s in allows her to be desired, cared for and changed again. Her life is simply continuing, not beginning again. 

This book contains many deaths, forms of loss, and accounts of suffering that could have made the novel as a whole feel quite hopeless. Yet, Abgaryan keeps returning to joy: the joy of neighbours who interfere because they care, even when they are infuriating, or the joy of home, even when that home changes from what you first knew it to be. The novel really presses upon the sheer inconvenience of life, and how beautiful that inconvenience can be. Death may be inevitable, but the dead aren’t extinguished from Maran simply because they have died. They linger and remain a crucial part of the village.

“Let’s look on the bright side [...] Everything balances out, so now something good is on the way.”⁴ 

And this is where the title becomes so lovely again. The apple for the storyteller, the apple for the listener, the apple for the eavesdropper. Three Apples Fell From The Sky knows that stories are never solitary things. They require someone to give them, someone to receive them, and sometimes someone to listen in. As readers, we become that eavesdropper. We overhear what kind of life the people of Maran led, our toes dipping into an imagined life of what it would mean to be from such a place. It truly is a novel of great warmth. History has taken much from this village — its children, houses and almost the future itself — but it has not taken its stories. While stories remain, Maran remains. While someone tells, someone listens, and someone overhears, the dead are not wholly lost and the living are not wholly alone. This book reminds us that to live is to become, eventually, a story in someone else’s mouth; to love is to listen carefully enough to tell the story well; and to read is to eavesdrop, knowing that we have “listened and believed in what is good.”⁵