A change of course

Elisavet Kotzia, Kathimerini, 3/6/2012The ten short stories in the collection ‘In the Land’ (‘Ikaros’, p. 85) mark a new direction in Dimitris Nollas’s prose. Texts from the last decade highlight an aspect that was faintly visible in his previous collection of short stories, ‘The Old Enemy’ (2004). It is the shift from the realm of the incongruous, the empty and the alien towards a side where a glimmer of warmth, a hint of heat, a small haven of comfort and love is concentrated. For the issue at stake is emotion, the emotional bond, the openness to human connection. In Nolla’s earlier prose, the world appeared immutably bleak, definitively inhospitable, perpetually hostile; a dystopia whose consistently negative character was due to the unfriendly individuals, the passive subjects and the rootless beings who inhabited it. A world fashioned from the aimless trajectories of the fated and the misfits, it comprised people who struggled to fit into the community. The unemployed, the swindlers and the misfits; the dreamers, the wavering and the half-mad; the humiliated, the degenerate and the gravely ill. Absent-minded gazes, people who were forgotten, figures who wandered, figures who were lost; in labyrinths, in wells and in arcades; figures who strayed, went astray, were led astray. A world with no refuge for the lost, no shelter for the destitute, no haven of a warm embrace. Inevitable, Nolla’s merciless, heartless, alien universe was derailing and drowning in blood. Thus, alongside the two-faced and the stripped bare, the wretched and the defeated, within the twilight universe the unthinkable was taking place. Envious, shameless, greedy, filthy and unrestrained figures plunged knives into chests, fired guns and detonated explosive devices. It was a world of enmity and strife with no place for affection, tenderness or love. With ‘The Place’, Dimitris Nollas contrasts the previous poetics of inhuman alienation with a new poetics of friendship. Not, of course, something radically different, but a slightly tweaked version of the older one. For his heroes continue to find themselves on the social and psychological margins (fanatical bachelors, solitary old men, the romantically wounded, isolated outcasts). In his earlier work, the emotional element intruded through emptiness and absence. Here, by contrast, it is presented directly as an expression of responsibility for the other: the pursuit of caring for a defenceless infant and the reciprocal offering of companionship (in ‘Burnt Papers’ and ‘Baby in the Hammock’, two prose pieces which, not coincidentally, are Christmas stories). ‘A Bagel for Two’ and ‘Inevitable Encounters’, which are governed by the Gospel saying ‘it is not good for man to be alone’. Finally, ‘Matzikert’, ‘Still Life on the Water’ and ‘The Price of Dreams’, which legitimise the cultural otherness of the outsider in the embrace of the immigrant community.In the new collection, Nollas walks a tightrope and triumphs. In ‘The Old Enemy’ there were stories involving critical social issues and sensitive matters of political correctness which perhaps exceeded the capacity of their fictional material (‘No One Alone and Sad’, ‘The Mute Other’). In contrast, in ‘In the Place’, the central idea is established, digested and assimilated through a variety of circumstances whose common element is the circumvention of reason – through the sudden revelation that pierces like a ray, through the reckless devotion offered freely, through unwavering obsession, through generous giving, through superstitious faith.