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Vagelis Hatzivassiliou | To Vima tis Kyriakis | Sunday 28 April 2013 The journey of a Greek man from Munich to Thessaloniki in the 1960s and the ghosts of the Civil War. Dimitris Nollas’s most extensive novel. When, in May 1963, Grigoris Lambrakis is killed under the wheels of the murderous tricycle driven by Emmanouilidis and Gotzamanis, Greece would already be fifteen years removed from the end of the Civil War. With the difference that, at this stage, the Civil War would be tending to become a spectre of everyday life, a pathology detectable at the most diverse levels of society. It is to such a society that Aristos Karabinis will return shortly after the assassination of Lambrakis; although he works in the Munich vegetable market, having long since abandoned his studies, he refuses to give up his artistic ambitions — to become a poet or a painter. Aristos will bring a woman from Munich to Thessaloniki who began working in German industry during the Nazi era and now suffers from paranoia. The woman will disappear as soon as they arrive in Greece, and the search for her will lead Aristos into the depths of the civil war past: a past that has completely taken over the present and staunchly opposes any different future.  With Journey to Greece, Dimitris Nollas seems to be bringing an end to the respite hinted at in his short story collection from last year, entitled In the Place. Whereas there was a hint of the possibility of a community of basic solidarity in that collection, with his latest novel we return to the fragmented and deeply eroded sense of community found in his previous books. Aristos will encounter a veritable hell in his hometown: his family will attempt to get their hands on his estate in close collaboration with loan shark rings, n the police will threaten to revoke his passport unless he provides information about his left-wing friends in Munich, and n the woman he is searching for will mock all the ambitions he had the folly to harbour for his birthplace. And yet, when Karabinis reaches the heart of the Civil War through following Apostolos’s adventures, reality will not change. People will be slaughtered for an empty shirt, and the only thing that will prevail in the hearts of those who survive will be annihilation: political, social, moral and existential.In writing his most extensive and, consequently, his most accomplished novel, Nollas begins and concludes his story in motion: on the train travelling first from Munich to Thessaloniki and then from Thessaloniki to Munich. The rest of the plot will be confined to the parenthesis of the intervening period: Aristos’s journey to Greece will be nothing more than a temporary interlude, a situation that will intervene between two train journeys, ending with his return to Germany when all hope and resilience for Greece has been lost. With a tapestry of poetic allusions (from biblical and classical passages, folk songs by Seferis and Pentzikis, as well as Vasilis Vasilikos and Giorgos Skambardonis), Nollas sets up an emblematic scene that will shatter the novel’s historical timeline to reveal, through a morbidly seductive atmosphere, the timeless survival of opportunism, compromise and corruption. This is the descent into the sinful ‘Bombay’, a gloomy centre of entertainment, where everything that remains hidden for life in the upper world – the world of costumed dignity – will be revealed. ‘Bombay’ will define the boundaries of the Greek landscape and will be the sole guarantee of its continuity. An exceedingly bitter conclusion, but the purpose of literature is not to help us swallow the camel. All the more so when we are dealing with a writer of Nolla’s calibre.

Interview with Dimitris Nollas by Yannis Baskozos for the newspaper To Vima, 7 April 2013 The novelist talks about his latest book, the terrifying Western modernisation and the ‘trinkets’ proposed by party gangs.A young man, a perpetual student in Germany, visits his hometown, Thessaloniki, shortly after the assassination of Lambrakis, accompanied by a ‘runaway’ girl, Chrysanthi. There he will find his roots but also his worst self, the product of the people who created modern Greece. The Journey to Greece (Ikaros Publications), Dimitris Nollas’s new novel and the second part of a trilogy, is a journey through history and a descent into the Evil that tyrannises us.His hero, Aristos, finds himself in a society full of informers, loan sharks, get-rich-quick types and relationships built on thin air, based on self-interest. He will also realise that his own identity – which he has renounced whilst abroad – consists of ‘money, names, words and phrases’ that bind him to places and people he would rather have forgotten. Rich in meaning, minimalist in expression – as always – Dimitris Nollas’s novel gives us the opportunity to discuss with him some of the issues it raises. Your protagonist’s search for identity raises a question: is there today an identity for the individual defined as a ‘modern Greek’? And what is it? ‘Yes, it exists, for those who claim it and are proud of it. Now, as for what constitutes it, we could start with the basics: faith and language.” In your novel, you return to the darker aspects of our history and, in particular, to the Civil War, which forms a central chapter of the book. You even pose the question: ‘Can anyone remain neutral in a civil conflict?’ What do you think about this? ‘Yes, this question is raised, though it is not the central one. Life’s dilemmas – and a civil conflict is one of the most extreme – can sometimes turn out to be a blessing. Because they remind us how tragically free we are, whilst ‘our fall is certain’. A fever can be cathartic, let alone a serious illness, which comes to reorient us towards values we have neglected, such as tolerance of others and forgiveness. And love, above all, which never fails.” Reading the story you tell, one senses that there is a fate, a destiny, an “evil” from which no one can escape. “Evil never ends and we cannot escape it except by choosing Good. It is an illusion that we can eradicate it, and usually its eradication is used as an excuse for the Ego to swell, suffocating the Universe. ‘Only when man ceaselessly battles Evil does he become human.’ You speak somewhere of the ‘multitude of material things’ that oppress our lives. Does the crisis perhaps offer a way out of this? ‘When we are incapable of building relationships with one another in any other way, the crisis, like war, always offers a way out.’ ‘Truth is what could happen’ or what has happened. Is truth ultimately something elusive? “It is an age-old truth of art: what is true is not only what happened, but also what might have happened. And what could be more captivating than the ceaseless search for truth?” If the hero, Aristos, were to return to the present day rather than 1963, what exactly would he see? “We shall see together, when the third part of this Journey to Greece is published.” You write somewhere that “the right-wingers have always envied the left-wingers”. What is the relationship between the Left and the Right today? Is it true, as they say, that this distinction has now been lost? “It is the envy born of the desire for power that maintains the distinction/identification between the Right and the Left remains so strong, and it is from this that the kinship between the party gangs, with all the salvationist trinkets that surround it, emerges and becomes glaringly obvious. And chilling.” The gamble on modernisation was lost in the 1960s, just as it was in the 1990s. Is it that Greek society is ultimately incapable of (Western) modernisation?Greek society has proven that it has the capacity to modernise; it knows the art of survival. We need only recall that island Greece, with the advent of steam in the 19th century, could have been wiped out. It took it about fifty years, but it weathered the storm. And as you can imagine, in this land, which has learnt to converse with the centuries, fifty years mean nothing. It is the scale and the haste of Western modernisation that terrify Greek society and hold it back.” “Writing and rewriting the same thing,” you write on the blank pages before your narrative begins. How do you situate this book in relation to your earlier works? “If the motto I quote at the beginning holds true – and it does – then all my books form a chain that hauls up and down the bucket of water that quenches my thirst. This particular book is a link in that chain. The last one, the penultimate one, whatever God provides.”

Thanasis Alevras | Eleftherotypia | 22 March 2013 The night-time train journey at the start of Dimitris Nollas’s ‘Journey through Greece’, published by Ikaros, is from the outset the most accurate depiction, the most faithful representation of the journey, or rather the almost motionless journey, through the time of Greece, a journey that compels you constantly to think about it, that is, to think about yourself, in a ceaseless shift through deserted night-time stations and empty platforms, a journey through your own mental landscape, this opening ‘idea’ of Greece, as Elytis might say, which is, however, more historically, emotionally and spiritually charged and in direct contact with the soul of the place, a soul brimming with domestic and foreign migratory currents, the overgrown railway tracks, the carriages with their pale lights, at the hour when ‘the moon, low on the horizon and before it began to set, spread a luminous, fairy-tale veil and cast a silvery glow over creation in its darkest hour’, it is precisely this most intimate, mysterious moment that finds its absolute centre in the present-day psychological landscape of the place, so far removed from the lyrical fishing boats, the olive groves and the Aegean sunsets, which remain, as if misunderstood by such naivety, on glossy postcards and alongside exorbitantly priced, plastic fruit salads5 of a crude commercial exploitation of this ‘idea’, the Acropolis Express, precisely that, set off once more on the same journey, ‘writing and rewriting the same thing’, and the first thing one says, halfway through the journey, and what one has probably never ceased to ask, over and over again, in one’s life, ‘where are we?”, already carries the body of history as luggage and transports it into a contemplative constellation of personal stories, fragments in the vortex of a larger shared history that has seen itself anew in the same light and continues to carry the collective suitcase further, sweeping everyone and everything along in a rather uncertain and astonishing gamble of self-knowledge, in a country endowed with boundless light, light that is probably not that of the sun of justice, but that Cavafian light, that unknown which—who knows what new tyrannies it will reveal—is another zone of twilight into which we have entered to find ourselves and understand what has happened to us, a zone all too lucid, like a radiant Attic morning, where ‘everything around them shone with light, confirming the suspicion that they were heading towards the realm of madness, since darkness cannot transform into light so quickly, so hastily, without this having an effect on people’s souls’.

Alexandra Bakonika | www.diastixo.gr | 9 February 2013 It is the new novel by the distinguished, prolific and groundbreaking author Vangelis Raptopoulos. The book is based on two very substantial and catalytic themes. The first is the intense and passionate love that runs through the novel from beginning to end, and the second is the reference to social unrest and uprisings, such as the Occupation, the December Riots, and the Civil War that followed. But also, as a kind of extension of the December Riots, 67 years on, the Indignant Movement, which we experienced in the summer of 2011 amidst the economic collapse and the well-known hardships our country was plunged into.The novel begins in 1976. The central character is Michalis, who also serves as the first-person, omniscient narrator. He is at the critical age of adolescence and falls passionately in love with his peer, the beautiful, vibrant and outgoing Niki. She urges him to expand his already experiential knowledge of the December Events, so as to impress her left-wing father, Mimi. From then on, Michalis’s unbridled interest in the December Events and the Civil War begins, an interest that continues unabated throughout the novel. However, the two teenagers part ways and meet again at the age of 22, in 1985, at a party – Michalis is now an actor and Niki a journalist – where they have their first sexual encounter. From 1985 to 2011, Niki, with her magical presence, will be the bone of contention between three men – Mimi, Averell and her husband, Aris, from whom she will eventually separate. She has affairs with all three at various times, something they are all aware of, and yet they strive frantically to win her for themselves, sidelining the others. The one who ultimately wins her is Michalis.Alongside the three men’s rivalry for Niki, the novel progresses and intertwines with the more hidden wound, namely the multifaceted deepening of Michalis’s knowledge of the December events and the Civil War. Building on this knowledge, he will proceed with the theatrical adaptation of Aristotelis Nikolaidis’s novel The Disappearance. Essentially, this theatrical adaptation, titled ‘Skeleton’, is embedded within the book and expands the plot. For Michalis, this title has a metaphorical meaning. A skeleton is that which remains deep and imperishable through time; it is our ideals, our unchanging values, both individual and collective. For Michalis, like Niki, has deep working-class roots in the refugee neighbourhood of Peristeri. Deep within Michalis lay the mythology of Peristeri, where honesty shone through, directness, and the inner need to be ‘xigimenos’—which means possessing a deep moral foundation, not in the narrow sense, but with a tendency to care about collective visions and one’s neighbour. The left-wing, working-class Peristeri has permeated the psyche of the two protagonists, which is why Niki writes in a newspaper article: ‘The first decade of the new century arrived somewhat early with the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008. In this new decade, much is changing. For the economic crash brings not only the collapse of consumerism, but also of individualism. It is an earthquake that brings to the fore, instead of the ‘I’, the ‘we’ and, above all, class differences.”With these convictions, the two protagonists will participate actively, with vigour, passion and self-sacrifice, in the Indignant movement, which is described in all its depth and breadth, just as it unfolded in the summer of 2011.For Michalis, the Indignados movement is a kind of continuation of the December Uprising, a period that has haunted him since his adolescence. Although he knows that today’s Western societies are disarmed by globalisation and the rapid development of technology, and although in the back of his mind he harbours the suspicion that popular uprisings resemble hysteria, yet, as an incorrigible romantic, he believes that the oppressed are duty-bound to fight for their rights.Particularly interesting is the section of the book where the author describes Michalis’s critical transition from childhood to adolescence, with all the intensity of its sexual awakening. The descriptions are bold and revealing, alluringly true to their sensuality. Equally bold are the erotic scenes that punctuate the book throughout.The novel captivates with its vivid expression, its lively characters, its intense lust, its plot that twists and turns with surprises and unexpected twists, and its social and existential reflection. Raptopoulos has once again successfully left his distinctive mark on this new novel.