Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Solace of Trees
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: VT
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: three.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and novelist. Worked in Spain as a laborer, in Italy as a deckhand on a ship, and in Alaska on a railroad and as a crew member on a fishing boat.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Robert Madrygin lived in U.S.-occupied Japan for a time a a youth and learned to speak Japanese. His father’s career then brought him back to the United States and then to Morocco, Spain, and France, where the family lived in Paris. Due to his mother’s ongoing illness, Madrygin spent a considerable amount of time in temporary homes when he was a young boy. A subsequent stroke suffered by his father and his mother’s death led Madrygin to be on his own at a young age. Although he began writing in his early twenties, it would only be decades later that he returned to writing seriously after his children were grown.
In his debut novel, The Solace of Trees, Madrygin tells the story of a Bosnian war orphan who years later is living in the United States and ends up part of the post-9/11 rendition program in the United States. The Solace of Trees is “a book that speaks to the heart of what is going on with American foreign policy in the world today, with how we respond to the plight of people entering the U.S. as immigrants and refugees,” noted Paul Olchváry, head of the book’s publishing company in an interview with Benjamin Cassidy for the Brattleboro Reformer Online. In the same article Madrygin revealed that he he was motivated to write the novel by a research project connected to the Bosnian War he had undertaken in the 1990s. Madrygin also noted in the Brattleboro Reformer Online article that as his research progressed “the more I was shocked by how little I actually really knew about it.”
In The Solace of Trees, Amir is just a young boy of secular Muslim heritage when he sees his family murdered during the Bosnian War. Hiding in forest with war refugees, Amir is in shock and unable to speak. It is his deep connection with nature, especially the trees that surround him the forest, that helps Amir survive, thus the book’s title. “Trees, which become … [a] vital tableaux in the novel, originates with Madrygin and his unique childhood,” wrote UWIRE Text contributor Joshua Balicki. Madrygin told Balicki that after his family returned to the states he often played in the woods because his family did not own a television. “Moving place to place, nature was my stable friend,” Madrygin told Balicki, adding: “Trees are an extraordinary life form, and sometimes we forget that.”
In the novel, Amir eventually makes his way to a United Nations camp for refugees and then is relocated to the United States via a charitable organization. Amir ends up living with retired psychology professor Margaret Morgan in Massachusetts. Suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, Amir remains unable to speak for some time and communicates via sign language until he is eventually able to talk again. Amir goes on to become interested in film in college and ends up on a project editing a documentary film about the plight of Palestinian refugees created by a professor of Islamic studies. However, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the professor is accused of having ties with terrorists and is arrested. Because Amir worked on the documentary and is a Muslim Bosnian refugee, he also ends up getting arrested and questioned about potential ties he may have to terrorists. The novel follows Amir as he struggles to prove his innocence in a country so caught up in a War on Terror that innocent individuals end up suffering.
“Using firm, quiet language to agonizing and ultimately infuriating effect, debut novelist Madrygin tells an important story,” wrote Barbara Hoffert in Xpress Reviews. Alexander Moran, writing in Booklist, noted: The novel “is deeply informative and moving, and it will spark debates regarding American foreign policy.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June, 2017, Alexander Moran, review of The Solace of Trees, p. 55.
Publishers Weekly, May 29, 2017, review of The Solace of Trees, p. 43.
UWIRE Text, September 6, 2017, review of “The Solace of Trees Reading,” p. 1.
Xpress Reviews, June 30, 2017, Barbara Hoffert, review of The Solace of Trees.
ONLINE
Brattleboro Literary Festival Website, http://brattleboroliteraryfestival.org/ (April 17, 2018), author faculty profile.
Brattleboro Reformer Online, http://www.reformer.com/ (December 8, 2017), Benjamin Cassidy, “Publisher Reveals the Secret: Books that Provoke Tears.”
Robert Madrygin
Author
Robert Madrygin, author of The Solace of Trees, has experienced the meaning of culture, ethnicity, and language from many perspectives. As a child he lived in US-occupied Japan, attended a local school, and learned to speak Japanese. His father’s career then brought him back to the US to live on both coasts, and subsequently to Morocco, Franco-ruled Spain, and Paris. The adjustment in cultural shifts and moving from home to home were made all the more difficult due to the illness his mother suffered throughout her life, causing long periods of hospitalization and necessitating that he be placed in a succession of temporary homes during his early childhood. While Madrygin was in his teens, his father suffered a series of massive debilitating strokes and his mother died. On his own at a young age, he continued a life of travel. He worked in Spain as a laborer, in Italy as a deckhand on a ship, and in Alaska on a railroad and as a crew member on a fishing boat. Madrygin first started writing in his early twenties but put it aside when he met his future wife, married, and started a family. During this period, Madrygin, his wife, and three children lived in the US, Ecuador, and Spain and traveled widely. It wasn’t until years later, while living in Spain, with his children now grown, that the call to writing returned, and Madrygin, informed by a lifetime of experience, took up where he had left off decades earlier. He and his wife live in Vermont.
Posted Friday, December 8, 2017 5:36 pm
By Benjamin Cassidy, The Berkshire Eagle
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Williamstown resident Paul Olchv ry doesn't always carry a suitcase filled with books, but the publisher of New Europe Books arrived with one in hand to greet a reporter at The Williams Bookstore on Monday morning. "The Solace of Trees," by Robert Madrygin, of Brattleboro, Vt., was among the short stacks of novels and nonfiction works occupying his portable portfolio.
"If a book brings tears to my eyes, then that's a pretty good sign," Olchv ry said of the novel, which was released in July, while sitting at a table in the store's cafe.
In "The Solace of Trees," a Bosnian child, Amir, watches his parents get killed in the Bosnian War. Navigating to a United Nations refugee camp through rural Bosnia, he eventually lands with a retired professor in Western Massachusetts. College, love and a project editing a professor of Islamic studies' documentary film follow. In the aftermath of 9/11, however, the professor is arrested for terrorist ties, and Amir's own Muslim heritage soon finds him enduring his own difficulties as the War on Terror begins.
"It's a book that speaks to the heart of what is going on with American foreign policy in the world today, with how we respond to the plight of people entering the U.S. as immigrants and refugees," Olchv ry said.
Madrygin feels his book also makes broader statements about conflicts and the targeting of civilian populations as a strategy of war. A research project during the late 1990s motivated him to start working on the novel.
"The further I got into my research on the war, the more I was shocked by how little I actually really knew about it," Madrygin said during a Skype interview from Costa Rica.
The novel is the author's first. He has enjoyed working with a small publisher like New Europe Books, which boasts a staff of one, on the endeavor.
"It makes it very easy for a debut author who has no experience [with] the publishing world, which is much more complicated and more involved than I ever would have imagined," he said.
Olchv ry's job, in part, is to make the author's experience less complicated. The publisher has had years of practice. Olchv ry started New Europe Books in 2010 following a decade as a marketing copy writer at Princeton University Press and, later, Globe Pequot Press. Olchv ry, who grew up speaking Hungarian in Buffalo, N.Y., got started by translating books. "I'll confess: I initially looked upon translation as a backdoor to getting my own writing published. It didn't quite happen that way," he said. He continues that work today in North Adams, but focuses more now on publishing and writing.
New Europe Books published four books in 2012, including "The Essential Guide to Being Hungarian." The cultural guide sold well, a vital source of revenue for a small publisher.
Now based in a small Williamstown office, New Europe Books has expanded its geographic lens to all of Europe.
"The Solace of Trees" addresses a topic that has certainly fueled more than a few 140-character thoughts recently. It represents the publisher's desire to produce works that delve into timely political subject matter.
"This book, really, to my mind, is a book that has the potential to stir debate," he said.
The Solace of Trees
Publishers Weekly.
264.22 (May 29, 2017): p43.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Solace of Trees
Robert Madrygin. New Europe, $16.95 trade paper (352p) ISBN 978-0-9973169-0-2
In Madrygin's gripping debut, the horrors of war give way to the challenges of carving out a life in a hostile
country. Amir is an 11 -year-old living on a farm in Bosnia when his world is thrown into turmoil after the
breakout of civil war. When his family is killed, Amir joins a group of strangers who eventually make their
way to a UN camp. After a long, stifling wait at the camp Amir is finally given a chance to go to the United
States. Amir thrives in the new country. Fostered by a former university professor, he becomes a film major
and begins working on a documentary. But his upward trajectory and growing optimism are soon blunted by
xenophobia (particularly Islamophobia) and post-9/11 anxiety that place him instantly in the role of
antagonist in a country he has barely begun to know. Arrested and questioned about possible terrorist ties,
Amir struggles to find a way to prove his innocence. Madrygin's stark third-person narration allows focus
on the difficulties faced by immigrants and refugees, particularly children who are struggling with trauma.
But at times the writing becomes literal and overly detailed, walking the reader from point to point more
like reportage than prose. While the novel effectively captures the broad strokes of life as a refugee, it never
convincingly brings the human side of the story to life. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Solace of Trees." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 43. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500693/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e9bfe186.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500693
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521928164643 2/5
The Solace of Trees
Alexander Moran
Booklist.
113.19-20 (June 2017): p55.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Solace of Trees. By Robert Madrygin. July 2017.336p. New Europe, paper, $16.95 (9780997316902);
e-book, $13.95.
Madrygin's harrowing, compelling debut will live long in the reader's memory. It follows Amir BeganovicMorgan,
a Bosnian Muslim refugee, as he tries to rebuild his life in the U.S. After a prologue that hints that
Amir's ethnicity will once again render him guilty by association, the story moves back to an 11--year-old
Amir luckily escaping the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian War, but only after losing his family, speech, and
hearing. The story follows Amir from a UN refugee camp to a foster home in New England, and then on to
college. Though the writing can be didactic and occasionally falls into cliche, Amir is a character the reader
comes to care for deeply. When his promising life eventually clashes with post-9/11 attitudes and laws,
Amir's tale, like Dave Eggers' What Is the What (2006), exposes the consequences of the often arbitrary,
horrific policies of the war on terror. A timely novel that introduces a writer of huge ambition, The Solace
of Trees is deeply informative and moving, and it will spark debates regarding American foreign policy.--
Alexander Moran
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Moran, Alexander. "The Solace of Trees." Booklist, June 2017, p. 55. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498582705/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=20747982.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498582705
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521928164643 3/5
Madrygin, Robert. The Solace of Trees
Barbara Hoffert
Xpress Reviews.
(June 30, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Madrygin, Robert. The Solace of Trees. New Europe. Jul. 2017. 352p. ISBN 9780997316902. pap. $16.95;
ebk. ISBN 9780997316919. F
[DEBUT] Using firm, quiet language to agonizing and ultimately infuriating effect, debut novelist
Madrygin tells an important story, revisiting the raw and ugly violence that descended on the Balkans with
the splintering of Yugoslavia while also capturing the refugee's experience in America, trying to recover
from horror. When Bosnian Muslim Amir is 11 years old, soldiers storm his family home and wreak
devastation, leaving Amir not only homeless and orphaned but a deaf-mute. He hides in the forest--as the
title suggests, trees will remain a comfort to him--before being rescued by a woman on whose farm he
works, where he's befriended by an older boy named Josif. They make their way to a UN refugee camp, and
Amir soon finds himself in America, first with a foster family and then, as an adopted son, with retired
psychology professor Margaret Morgan. Initially using sign language, Amir eventually learns to speak
again, revealing the full horror of what he has seen. The gift of a camera proves crucial, leading to his
making documentaries as a college student, but returning to his homeland post 9/11 brings not closure but
tragedy.
Verdict Powerful, eye-opening reading for everyone.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hoffert, Barbara. "Madrygin, Robert. The Solace of Trees." Xpress Reviews, 30 June 2017. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500135138/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e6b983d3. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500135138
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521928164643 4/5
"The Solace of Trees" reading
UWIRE Text.
(Sept. 6, 2017): p1.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Uloop Inc.
http://uwire.com/?s=UWIRE+Text&x=26&y=14&=Go
Full Text:
Into the forest of subconscious.
By Joshua Balicki
joshua-balicki@uiowa.edu
The Solace of Trees, by Robert Madrygin, is a novel about Bosnian war orphan Amir, who navigates his
way through the horrors of war, the ever-present effects of PTSD, the loss of his family, post-9/11 America,
and the outlasting force of hope.
Madrygin will read from his novel 7 p.m. [Sept. 6] at Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque St.
The author primarily drew inspiration from the Bosnian and Syrian wars and felt the depth of the suffering.
"One side of me would feel hopeless," Madrygin said. "I think at the heart of the book there is the struggle
between two human conditions: hope and hopelessness."
The story follows Amir after he becomes deaf and mute when his family is killed in the Bosnian war. He
finds his way to a U.N. refugee camp with the help of his deep connection with nature.
Trees, which become are vital tableaux in the novel, originates with Madrygin and his unique childhood.
"I go back to my own childhood," he said. "When I was a boy and we moved back to the States, we did not
have a television, so I would go out and play in the woods. Moving place to place, nature was my stable
friend. Trees are an extraordinary life form, and sometimes we forget that."
Amir is taken to America, where he is cared for by a retired psychology professor. He had lived on a poor
subsidized farm in Bosnia. It is a community tied with common relationships, values, and ideals.
Once in America, Amir takes solace in art, which is a vital tool he uses to cope with his trauma. From arttherapy
exercises, filmmaking, and writing, Amir delves into the land of self-expression.
Madrygin described art as "an extraordinarily healing process."
"Today, often we think of art in terms of its economic value," he said. "Art is a lot like nature. It is available
to everybody. It is a healing force. It is not really about the fame of the person partaking in it."
Arrested for possible terrorist ties with his film professor, Amir must battle a xenophobic, misled, and
marginalizing post-9/11-culture. To prove his innocence, Amir must relive a past so daunting, tragic, and
insurmountable that it empowers him. The most important way the reader relates to Amir is through what
Madrygin calls "the unconscious."
"We are dealing with the unconscious all the time, but the emotion of it is rarely brought up within our
communication with one another. Relationships between the external and the internal becomes a very
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521928164643 5/5
critical element in how we deal with life, how we process the conditions in which we live ... I hope by using
the subconscious we would get a better sense of what it's like to have gone through something like that."
Madrygin makes us view the world from the perspective of Amir. This third person, past tense narrative,
reads like a reflection. Madrygin draws us in with poetic language, haunting descriptions, an enduring plot,
and a triumphant call for hope. His experience and his conversations with war orphans, PTSD victims, and
immigrants over the years have helped shape the novel.
"It did not come in a definitive moment," Madrygin said. "It comes very subtly and almost as a passing
thought. If it returns, then it has actually begun to start itself ... I wanted to talk about our world now in
relation to armed conflict."
Looking back on his life and dA@but novel, Madrygin holds Iowa City close to his heart. In truth, this part
of his life involves a stroke of luck and quite a bit of humor.
While on vacation, Madrygin happened to meet Holly Carver, the former head of the University of Iowa
Press. The two began to talk, and the rest of her Iowa City travel group took him under their wing. Carver
told him one day he could very well end up at Prairie Lights.
Now his book tour starts in Iowa City, and Madrygin has proved that with hope anything is possible.
"The first place I saw on the list was Prairie Lights, and I was absolutely delighted," he said. "Instead of
feeling frightened by this whole process, I feel like I am going home."When: 7 p.m. [Sept. 6]Where: Prairie
Lights, 15 S. DubuqueAdmission: FreeShare this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to
share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)Related
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"'The Solace of Trees' reading." UWIRE Text, 6 Sept. 2017, p. 1. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525451961/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5f895289.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525451961