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A review by Titika Dimitroulia of Dimitris Nollas’ short stories, “In the Land”.

Three words that we say and hear every now and then. ‘Ochinailegontas’—a neologism in our language and a brilliant title for a new book that I don’t quite know what to call: poetry, theatre, thriller, psychoanalytical essay on Love? I wonder: what would Margarita Karapanou say about this work by Alexandros Adamopoulos, she who twenty years ago described his ‘Simigdaleni’ as a ‘unique phenomenon in Greek theatre’. Let me explain: I am no expert. I love literature, poetry and theatre, and I am an honest reader and a well-meaning spectator. And because I believe that Art is not just for experts, I dare to share my thoughts and feelings with you. On the other hand, I know the author well; we have been friends for many years. It would be a great hypocrisy not to say so – I keep myself in check better this way – especially since I had the good fortune, every day, for four months, to see, to experience verse by verse, the work taking shape, to hear it come to life in the voice of its creator and take on a life of its own, right before my eyes.So what is Alexandros Adamopoulos’s ‘Ochinailegontas’, recently published by Ikaros Publications? It aims to be, above all, a timeless and universal work, which, far from cheap sensationalism, fads and cheap, off-the-cuff remarks, is not here to sell, to flatter, or to garner praise, but to take its place in the long line of Great Greek literature. Through its language. Through its plot. Through its music. With its messages. With its depth. With its striking topicality, which the author, however, does not hesitate to set within medieval palaces, where arrows bearing love notes whistle around us and the Guardians of Love eavesdrop, standing half-naked, in the shadows! Now, yesterday, always; you, me, everyone…And all this through solitary, personal paths, which you might say he chose on purpose to make things difficult for us – or perhaps to make it easier for us to dream? – since everything perhaps vaguely reminds us of something, but ultimately does not let us grasp hold of anything familiar.Because, these days, we aren’t in the habit of reading much poetry. And yet ‘Ochinelegontas’ is entirely poetic! One hundred and twenty pages with every rhythm and metre your mind can conceive. With rhyme, with all the music you can hear within the words and let wash over you. Measured down to the tiniest detail; not even half a syllable is out of place. Yet in a language that is simple, precise, concrete, apt, without pretence or approximation. A language that flows right to the core; if you open the door for it to come in and tell you whatever it has to say. Moreover—and even more so—we are not at all in the habit of reading plays. The very idea is alien to us; we see them on stage once in a while, and that is all. And yet the play is theatrical! With heroes of today, full of life; even if they bear old-fashioned names. For however much they may be lost in the mists of time, amidst castles and the initially naive fantasies of bygone eras, we can easily see them beside us, within us; even on the psychoanalyst’s couch, desperately seeking their tranquilliser. With a plot that is very solid and deeply thought-out, razor-sharp at every moment, with nothing superfluous to fill gaps, it traps us from the very first page in its well-crafted mechanism and does not let us go for a single moment, right until the end. It is astonishing that the play, had it been a simple ‘fairy-tale drama’, as the author jokingly puts it, we would have thought it ended where Act 2 ends; whereas in fact the play is only just beginning and we still know nothing! Even that light-hearted, humorous touch—the parrot, Psouthos, who keeps saying—what else?— ‘sagapomorou’—is wisely placed there to play a part and remind us of something. Even an empty cot can captivate our full attention with its silence, because it is exactly where it should be; at precisely the right moment. Theatre in all its glory, then. But also a book, whether you like it or not; as you read it, you enjoy its action and become a unique, privileged spectator-reader. The setting? In other times, ancient, fairy-tale, medieval; Byzantine, let’s say. It is from there that Adamopoulos has borrowed his material – names, buildings, objects, customs, situations – which he has transformed in his own way, so that everything seems familiar and does not feel alien to us at all. That is where his connection to the past begins, and yet, at the same time, that is where it ends. Even with ‘Livistros and Rodamni’, from which he took the general canvas, to embroider upon it and express his entirely own thoughts. For as the heroes’ drama unfolds, the situations bear absolutely no relation to that 14th-century medieval novel, but become entirely contemporary, become our own, familiar. They draw near and touch us; dangerously… And the theme? Love… Well, that’s fine! But here too, things are different… Love here is not what we imagine it to be nowadays: tender, good-natured, sweet, with rosy-cheeked, half-naked, silly little angels flitting here and there, handing out Valentine’s Day flowers! It is Hesiod’s Eros: terrifying, scheming, insatiable. He doesn’t play around; he demands far more than we are willing to give. And if not, he tears us apart, as long as we keep seeking him. He takes us to the very depths of our being. To a place where there is nothing left but a mirror, showing us exactly as we are; without any embellishment, no alibi and absolutely no excuse: ‘Do you think the ways of nature are easy? / Just a gurgle of water in the mouth of a cold tap? / Perhaps dewdrops on the lips of a spring? / And do you avoid the pain of my own wound? / Do you want to drown, alone, in your own being so much? / Come on! Bend your ear and listen to your heart;/ you, who want everyone to slaughter themselves at the hem of your skirt!’…The terrible Eros, then, who· ‘speaking horribly, with boundless ease/ has made us all his slaves in doubt’… Eros; who, at every moment throughout the play, whether he is present himself or is reminded to us by the Chorus of his Guards: ‘Neither mountaineer, nor warrior, nor brave diver/ who plunged wholeheartedly into the mountain of Aphrodite/ you are the eternally living one; the sole catalyst’… Another paradox: dance and choruses in our time? And yet; how naturally everything works, without imitating anything at all; things that, in any case, cannot be imitated without becoming ridiculous. And something else, entirely original: Amidst the constant upheavals of everything, in the unfolding of the myth and the behaviour of the heroes – save for Klitos – even the Chorus transforms and passes from dream to dream and from there, imperceptibly; without our realising it, into reality itself; helping, participating in, and perhaps even provoking the unique, masterful, spine-tingling finale of the work, which, as far as I know, has no equal anywhere else, as within the sound of the drums – which trap us too and dictate even our own breath – Rodi’s monologue merges with Livius’s silent weeping and Klitos’s helpless silence. And our breath and the beating of our hearts resonate with the drums that drive everyone, in Dionysian frenzy, towards their uncertain transcendence, and everything, in a bottomless depth, swirls with boundless intensity, in an endless vortex…And everything ends without anything ending. And everything is said, without anything having been said. Only Eros takes his share. And we, of course. We take that boundless bittersweet pleasure; those rare moments when, with a heavy heart, we close the final page of a book we do not yet want to end; yet we know it will remain deep within our souls forever…  Dinos Pilos, AtticaBank, Head of Investment Programmes (published on 1 November 2012 in AtticaBank’s quarterly publication)

A new series of books for very young children is available from today! Made from sturdy hardboard, and in a small format, Benji Davies’ books featuring the adventures of Little Bear include moving parts that reveal pictures and text for endless exploration! Little Bear goes for a walk in the park, swings and seesaws, plays ball and eats ice cream. At the farm, he counts the ducks, collects the eggs and drives the tractor! In Helen Stephens’ How to Hide a Lion, little Ellie adopts a lion she finds in her garden and tries to hide it from her parents. Will she be able to hide it forever? A fairy tale that will turn everything you thought you knew about lions on its head! Watch the book presentation by the Storyteller.

Vangelis Hatzivassiliou, To Vima, 26 August 2012 Dimitris Nollas depicts, without a trace of melodrama, everyday heroes striving to avoid a violent severance from their surroundings. These paradoxical human figures, who struggle to adapt to their surroundings and find it difficult to define their relationship both with others and with themselves, make their presence felt from the very first moment in prose of Dimitris Nollas. Bound by aimless wandering and chance, as well as resigned to the ambiguity or even the futility of their existence, Nollas’s heroes withdraw from the public sphere very early on. And while self-abandonment and indeterminacy constitute one aspect of their confused individuality, the other reveals the web of fear, betrayal and guilt formed by their contact with political activism and terrorism.But when Nollas moves away from terrorism into the world of xenophobia and alienation, the dislocation or fragmentation of the characters leads to a new form of enslavement capable of reaching total destruction and death. And such a drama can, of course, only evoke the decline of another form of community: bonds of solidarity are rapidly disappearing from most societies that host migrants.Whichever version of Nolla’s prose we examine, the reality remains the same: the author highlights and illustrates an individualism that observes and experiences the world with all its vital forces exhausted.The Balance of Terror I am reading Nolla’s new collection of short stories, entitled In the Place, and I am left with the impression that something has changed, albeit imperceptibly, in his style. The protagonists are once again walking a tightrope, searching in vain for meaning in their spineless lives, yet they do not end up at the precipice. A poor musician who has fallen on hard times in Greece and a Greek homeless man decide, willy-nilly, to take a child under their wing in order to save him from his mother’s icy indifference (‘Baby on the Swing’). A solitary passenger discovers, during a train stop, the comforting power of companionship (‘The Words of the Wind’).A bitter man who has stolen his sister’s jewellery to avenge her refusal to sell their father’s estate comes to his senses thanks to the woman by his side (‘A Bagel for Two’). Two lovers, stoned by everyone, manage to find refuge in a space of unique intimacy (“Still Life of the Waters”). A drifter swept up in the deceptive pursuit of wealth manages to love an angelic little girl from the depths of his heart (“The Price of Dreams”). An old woman, immersed in her loneliness, constantly burns the cards she plays with her plumber so she can continue to listen to his stories (“The Burnt Cards”). No overflowing emotion, not a single melodramatic note. Nollas seeks to find diamonds amidst hot coals. His heroes will never take the great leap and will under no circumstances break out of the confined circle of their lives. They will, however, manage to avoid a violent severance from their surroundings, reaching out to one another, even if only spasmodically.Through this peculiar manoeuvre, they will be able, perhaps for the first time in a book by Nolla, to chart their course and give shape to their fluidity. As for the counterweights, they will always be there: loan sharks eager to trample on their old friendship (‘Inevitable Encounters’), cynics and money-grubbers who will amass fortunes (‘A Paradise of Gold’), Easterners who will not forget their archaic fate in Europe (‘Matzikert’) and the despondent who will not rejoice in their good fortune (‘In the Land’). A balance of terror? Perhaps. On the other hand, however, there is tormented humanity and a great deal of unpretentious grit in a book that immediately stands out for its simplicity and candour.Ghosts, goblins and lizards that paint. Dimitris Nollas’s characters appear on the scene in media res: starting halfway through and with the certainty that it is impossible for them to end up anywhere. Without exactly undermining the logical sequence of the narrative, yet without rejecting the contribution of the irrational, the obscure or the dream, Nollas transcends the self-evident tenets of realism in two fundamental ways: by disrupting the psyche of his characters and by abruptly fracturing the unity of his narrative time.In his new short stories, he frequently resorts to the element of the fantastical, which intrudes without warning into the action, to lend it a momentarily ambiguous dimension and place it in a state of suspension between the real and the transcendent: into something that Tsvetan Todorov has termed the marvellous. Nolla’s marvellous allows the heroes to strike up conversations with their beloved ghosts, unleashes strange shadows mingled with mists of unknown origin, mobilises goblins who descend fully armed down steep slopes, or makes lizards draw incomprehensible pictures on the ceiling.As for the characters’ disorientation, they are all slightly out of step with the universe, without, however, turning into madmen: travellers surrounded by atmospheric elements they are unable to decipher, men who have been cast out involuntarily (or perhaps of their own volition?) by their families, women who honour their bodies despite their widowhood (against the objections of relatives and friends), shepherds who struggle with strange entities, Franco-Levantine people who do not set aside their barbaric origins, dreamers who fall from the heavens into earthly chaos, outcasts who save a piece of bread for their neighbour (even as they kill one another time and again) or people who have escaped the clutches of Death only to welcome him into their homes through the back door.