Five books by Greek authors for reading during the holidays are recommended today by AP-MPA, selecting among the best examples and the most discussed titles of the year.
We cannot but start with the publishing event of 2022, which is none other than Nikos Kazantzakis« unpublished novel »The Ascender«. The book is the first of Kazantzakis» post-war novels to be published by Dioptra. This week also saw the release of «Captain Michael», «The Rock Garden», «The Faggots» and «The Poor Man of God», with the remaining works to follow soon. Written in 1946 (the year in which Alexis Zorbas’ Life and State was published), this previously unpublished novel features a writer, Kosmas (Kazantzakis himself), who arrives in Crete with his Jewish wife shortly after the end of World War II. The Cretan villages destroyed by the German forces and Kosmas« subsequent journey to England sum up the meaning of »Unfeared": on the one hand, the Cretans' struggle for freedom from the conqueror's advances, and on the other, the artist's struggle for a world that bears no resemblance to the inhuman experience of war. Such a struggle, however, is not easy. It is, on the contrary, difficult and arduous, as Nikos Mathioudakis and Paraskevi Vassiliadis aptly observe in their epigraph. And it is precisely this uphill that Kazantzakis tries to climb.
We move on to contemporary prose. The family is the most complex scaffolding of our lives, not in the sense of the sacred and holy things to which we have sworn unswerving allegiance from the outset, but as the vital base from which everything starts and to which everything ends, almost independently of our individual will and against everything that may have marked our young life, when the winds of questioning and rootlessness were blowing. This is the thoughtful conclusion that emerges from Rhea Galanaki's new novel, which is published under the title «Emmanuel and Ekaterini. The fairy tales that are not fairy tales» from Kastaniotis Publications. The novelist speaks about the inextricable links between the past and the present, talking about her parents, Emmanuel and Ekaterini, and their journey through the historical labyrinths of their time: from the National Schism, the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 and World War II to the Civil War and the 1967 junta.
With her novel «If I had a trumpet», published by Pataki, Maro Douka gives her voice to a woman of her age and generation, Kakia. Kakia does not deal with politics, but she refers incessantly to Greek public life (from Athens to Corfu and Crete), subtly including wars, civil conflicts and political upheavals, without ever separating such magnitudes from the passions of individual life. What exactly can it mean, however, that the author offers her voice to a heroine of her own age? Why, that Duka does not want to unravel a purely autobiographical thread even though she draws her fictional material directly from her adolescent and childhood memories. Throughout the narrative, Kakia converses with her three grandmothers: with Erginia, the grandmother on her father's side, with Aphrodite, the grandmother on her mother's side, and with Filareti, her «by marriage» grandmother; in other words, her mother-in-law.
Vangelis Siafakas proves himself to be demystifying and sarcastic but with infinite understanding of the issues of human fate in the posthumous volume of his short stories «Exodocharto - The Monastiraki», Polis Publications. The author's incarceration during a pandemic, his political service in the King's Feraeus and the KKE of the Interior in relation to his stay in Florence, his journalistic experience in the major media in which he worked (newspapers and television; his last job was at the APPE-MPE), the memories of his birthplace, Ioannina and Crete, summers and loves or wandering in social media, are all sources of an inexhaustible humour in «Exodocument». The short stories included in «Monastiraki» are longer and focused on a group of co-habitants who meet in Monastiraki. What predominates here is a restrained sadness at failure, at bad luck, and at the denial or mourning of the loss of people who might have done differently in their lives. And all this, without the slightest expansion of emotion, looked at once in the way Ioannis Kondylakis dealt with death in «When I was a Teacher».
«I am the others» is the title of the new, purely autobiographical novel by Mimi Androulakis, which is published by Pataki Publications. But how does the autobiographical discourse develop in a fictional setting? Well, starting from small, minimal events, the author proceeds to shake up the past, and by shaking up the past he better understands the history of himself. And the epoch that results from the synthesis and reconstruction of the past and the history of the self is, as the author puts it, «portraits, images, scenes, colours, dramas, and oddities». Eminent figures of politics, arts, sciences and economic power become one, without ending up identical, with the «low» stories of everyday life. The publication coincides with the 49th anniversary of the Polytechnic uprising and is a tribute to Greece, the place where Androulakis grew up, made his career and charted his political and literary trajectory until we reach the present day and the time of the accounts. But even now, in the time of accounts, his discourse is never untimely and misguided or bitter and dismissive, but, on the contrary, a discourse that seeks to get to the bottom of things, finding their incongruous internal sequences.
Next week we'll be back with reading suggestions for five foreign novels.
Β. Hadjivassiliou
