The garden in flames

Stories of what is missing and what is lost, of what remains and what is left over, with blood that stops with the smoke, mud that spreads around souls, and money that bears no fruit. In the world of Dimitris Nollas, images sometimes take on clarity to vividly depict his recurring themes: the stranger, loneliness, love, the smoke that can do anything, the turning of the mind, the place, identity as memory, the random and the fateful; and at other times they are duplicated to represent the complex relationship between things and people, as well as all the levels of a world that is irrevocably earthly yet open to a metaphysical breath, which, woven into his texts, seems self-evident. He simply shifts space, time and things slightly, creating an atmosphere which, often, even when it resembles a fairy-tale setting, conceals within it a threat or a sense of guilt. All of this, all of it relevant today more than ever, with an awareness of human frailty and tenderness, with subtle humour, with words that are incisive and full of life precisely because they refuse to be reined in. T.D.

What happens when you start to encounter something you recognise as familiar, only to lose it along the way? And what might happen when, in its place, you find something else – different, yet just as enchanting? Who keeps the place in its place, in the place where it was before, now, and always? More accurately: who perpetuate the unbearable, the mindsets that remain stubbornly entrenched, but also the leaps towards the new and the unknown, all those things that constitute the Greek identity, the one that emerges through the constants, the few but timeless characteristics? The only answer one would dare to venture, taking the premise of the question as given, seems to be: ALL OF THEM. Aristos and Vasiliki, Tryfonas and Chrysanthi, Apostolis and Virgilis and the Captain, and Paschalis. And none of them alone, none, for we all draw from the same well, from that subterranean and inexhaustible mine. A story in memory of restless youth, of those who thirst and seek that which ceaselessly returns, remaining ever the same. For those who come from long ago, for those who were and are all our children.

The story is set in the early 1990s. The changes that have taken place in Greek society, the elements of European influence, and the shifts in the composition and form of the family—partly due to the clash of generations—are brought to the fore through the old and new characters. With his characteristic writing style, the author weaves a fictional mosaic in which the characters from the first book interact with the new ones, reflecting elements of the harsh Greek reality of that era.

This book brings together the award-winning author’s complete short story collection to date. From the early stories of Polyxeni to the latest collection, In the Place, the stories span the modern history of Greece, focusing on the themes that have preoccupied Dimitris Nollas for years: the stranger, the homeland, loneliness, the whirlwind of modern life in the absurdity of everyday existence. At the same time, as the texts are published retaining the character of their first draft, the author’s view of the world at that specific time is revealed, alongside the evolution of his writing style. ‘...A wheel that never stops turning: life and the world. Dimitris Nollas masterfully captures the sparks of its friction in his short stories, along with the scars from the burns they inflict on bodies and souls. A valuable legacy in modern Greek literature.” Titika Dimitroulia

But what sort of monstrous homeopathy would that be? he kept wondering about the ultimately unthinkable possibility of using stolen money to buy off a planned robbery. Could money from a theft bring about the Good? he continued to be bombarded by the consequences of his outrageous and absurd thoughts, essentially pretexts, to justify his act, and when he rose from the bench he felt that the invisible armour that had surrounded him for quite some time had begun to shatter. It was peeling away, leaving him exposed in the midst of that polluted landscape, when he admitted that nothing good could ever come of coercion, even if that coercion were to prevent another horrific act, since it would have violated his companions’ freedom of choice. In this third book, which concludes the Hard Times trilogy, a group of young people bear witness to the crisis of recent years. Like newborns dying in the incubator, indifferent and innocent themselves, they become the cause of lamentations and complaints about the cruelty of the wider world, having spent their whole lives refusing to heed the message that came from long ago, proclaiming that the time had finally come ‘I will set up young men to rule over them, and the simple shall rule over them’._

The incomprehensible and unfathomable. Like a fleeting breeze or a shooting star, so too does the passing of an unassuming teacher through the life of a male-dominated world leave those who knew her both dazzled and unable to comprehend her loss. We have no record of the effect these events had on her, apart from the hints she herself makes in her notebooks, which Antonakis, as her unofficial heir—spiritual at least—still does not know what to do with even today. The truth is, at least as Antonakis conveyed it to me and to anyone who would listen, that everything that followed her return to Greece reveals that her incomprehensible change of heart, as perceived by those who had known her until then, if not entirely, to what she had experienced in Munich during those first months of 1919, which had left their mark on her subsequent life.

‘In recent years, the exclusive electronic, photographic and audio evidence of every event is what has made us forget that distant, according to the Scriptures, which bore witness from antiquity until a few years ago to the deeds and affairs of us all: the recording of the events we have been involved in, the events that define us and shape our character and the course of our lives… And it is always someone else who does this. It is a third party who paints our portrait, narrates our life, speaks of us, writes about us, and gives shape to our face.” Following the success (?) of the cover for The Fairy of Athens, which I designed fifty years ago, I waited in vain for Nolla to ask me to illustrate his next work, or at least the one after that. In vain! ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ I practised the art of cover illustration for other renowned colleagues of the proud-as-punch man; I would sneak a peek at him watching, but nothing (“The next one, Alexis, you’ll do it yourself”). False hopes. ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ Of course, on the other hand, I was his best man at his wedding, I was his best man at his son’s wedding, parties, bars, coffee shops (Dolce), new books, awards, a speech he gave about my art at the Benaki Museum, he bought my works in galleries… A cover, though, no. ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ Until the long-awaited opportunity came. Something, it seems, spoke to him, as he’d grown tired of seeing me like a beaten dog whenever we spoke of publishing, and he suggested I provide a painting for his new book, The Immortals. In any case, the heavens opened. Triumph! ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ And so, our fifty-year-and-counting friendship was sealed – not that we needed it – by my christening his new baby with the image before us. ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ Our dear Mitsos, bon voyage! Alexis Kyritsopoulos September 2023

The first symptom, then, of this disintegration or orphanhood is the need that dominates the faces of Nolla’s fictional characters to go out, to leave, to wander, to search, so that the awareness of the absence of the place to which they feel or imagine they belong (and with it their identity) is more acute. A second symptom is the heart-rending loneliness of those, men and women alike, who have the privilege of feeling this absence, unable to integrate into the countries to which the manifold causes of exile have driven them. […] Certainly, the woman who inhabits Nollas’s universe, in her essential characteristics, is not the one that the activists—who dominate the various public platforms with their denunciations—would wish for. For this reason, and not by chance, I have chosen the following excerpt from the 2000 interview in which Nollas, if nothing else, demonstrates in good time that he has courage to spare, as he directly challenges prevailing views on gender relations: Q: By portraying another woman in your book [‘The Magical Light’], Alkis’s mother, you present the model of the matriarchal family. A: Yes, because the Greek family is not patriarchal. It belongs to the mother, the wife… They are the ones who run the household. And thank goodness, because men are warriors, they’re mad, they get carried away. But women bring them back down to earth and support them. Alexis S. Ziras